Composed in a late phase of Pessoa’s work, in the same year when Bernardo Soares appears and in which the “Bibliographic Table” (1928) was written, the unfinished text The Education of the Stoic, combining the topics of the extreme authorial failure and suicide, works as an already exhausted appropriation of the rhetoric defining other parts of Pessoa’s writing. A romantic and idealistic ground emerges in a conception of authorship understood as the full possession of a “work” or a book, also implicated in the invention of heteronymy. Teive is the kitsch version of that invention, much more than any convincing reincarnation of a modern Seneca. The study suggests, for a better understanding of the case, a comparison with Lord Chandos, a character of the literary dropout, created in 1902 by Hugo von Hoffmansthal.
