LETTERS 9 FROM PRISON BY -===- ANTONIO-===- GRAMSCI INTRODUC�D BY LYNNE LAWNER 'Imprisonment is a terrible thing, but for me dis­ honour on account of moral weakness or cowardice would be even worse' 'I've always refused to compromise my ideas and am ready to die for them, not just to be put in prison' (Gramsci in letters to his mother) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was one of the founders of the Italian Communist party and a great Marxist thinker. Framed by Mussolini's Fascist courts after his activities in the workers' movements in Turin, he was kept mostly in solitary confinement and died in prison. His letters are among the most important works of twentieth­ century Italian literature; on first publication in 1947 they were awarded the Viareggio prize. ISBN. Unite Lynne Lawner: has written a detailed biographical and analytical intro­ duction, which discusses Gramsci's political philosophy in his other writings as well as in the Letters from Prison. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, has published two volumes of poetry, and has written essays on Provensal and Italiap literature for scholarly journals. Dr Lawner lives in Rome and has had the close collaboration of the Gramsci Institute in the preparation of this volume. Antonio Gramsci LETTERS FROM PRISON Selected, translatedfrom the Italian and Introduced by LYNNE LA WNER Q QUARTET BOOKS LONDON MELBOURNE NEW YORK Books Published by Quartet Limited 1979 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A member of the NamaraGroup 27 Goodge Street, London WrP tFD Firstpublished in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited, London, 1975 Copyright© 1973 by Lynne Lawner ISBN o 7043 3256 6 I would like to thank the director and staff of the Gramsci Institute Primed and bound in Great Britain by Billings and Sons Ltd, Guildford and Worcester in Rome, above all Elsa Fubini, for helping me to prepare this first Leuere dal carcere I This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall noc, by edition of Gramsci's in English. am grateful for way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated the permission to publish the leuers as well as to reproduce manu­ without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than script pages and photographs. that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject w the Publishers Association Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trades Practices Act, 19s6. CONTENTS I. Introduction II. The Letters s7 APPENDIX: LETTER FROM TATIANA SCHUCHT 277 BIBLIOGRAPHY 28 3 INDEX 285 LETTERS FROM PRISON 1 Introduction IN 1946, when a first edition of the Lmm of Antonio Gramsci was issued by the Torinese firm Einaudi on cheap paper and in the form of a pamphlet, Italy was just emerging from the physical and moral devastation of the war. After having lain for twenty years under the weight of dictatorship and official rhetoric, the nation was suddenly inundated with newspaper articles, books, and other publications describing every kind of martyrdom under Fascism and Nazism. But Italy was used to prison literature. Many of irs greatest intellectuals had been prisoners and exiles (Dante, Campanella, Pellico, in a special sense Leopardi). Yet Gramsci's Lmers at once commanded the attention of the foremost members of the Italian intelligentsia. Benedetto Croce stayed awake a whole night to finish the book and knew that he had made a major literary discovery. In the following year, the Letters won the important Viareggio Prize. Until then, however, Gramsci's name had beenalmost unknown in Italy; people still found it awkward to pronounce. Some recalled that he had been a political figure who was thrown into prison by Mussolini twenty years earlier and who died a miserable death after years of hardship and illness. Others recalled that he had been a Communist, indeed one of the founders of the party in I 92 I. Yet Gramsci was an entirely new fact on the cultural scene: his Letters and what followed them had the effect of an electric shock, waking Italy out of the trauma of the war and setting its brain in motion. It was as if this prose were a sudden stretch of land emerging from the sea, the remains of a sunken island, a self-contained region forming a little, lively world of its own. The subject matter was 3 original-a curious patchwork of discussions of Hegel, Salvemini, fighting from the beginning against an avalanche of devastating Croce, as well as historicism; ironic, irritated descriptions of ill­ illnesses-vomiting, insomnia, arteriosclerosis, tuberculosis, Pott's nesses; lists of books and magazines; requests for articles like woolen disease, and numerous other ailments. Gramsci literally rotted away socks; and anecdotal memories of childhood in Sardinia. But what in prison, writing while his teeth fell out, his stomach was destroyed, most struck the readers of that time was the style. Gramsci's lan­ and his nerves collapsed. But the most important fact was what guage was as remote as possible from the usual baroque rhetoric, the Gramsci signified in the perspective of revolutionary action and prolix, emotionally emphatic style of the official Italian literature of thought in the twentieth century. Certainly, of all the members of the day. The writing was meticulous, dry, tight, often twisted in on the old revolutionary guard-the political personnel heading the itself and obscure, but always stubbornly clamped to the argument proletarian struggle from World War I and the Russian Revolution at hand, indeed relentlessly turned to ideas and objects, with no to the Fascist reaction in Europe--Gramsci was the most coherent, space left for sentimentality, self-pity, or the like. Again and again which may explain why the reputations of so many other revolution­ Gramsci would reduce the tale of his personal trials to a minimum aries have been re-evaluated or destroyed while Gramsci's has re­ in order to go on co general problems of hiscory, economics, and art. mained intact, inspiring esteem among supporters and opponents The nervous energy and intense concentration of will and mind that alike. Of course, circumstances played an important part in this. marked these discussions were to provide a new example of intellec­ The decade 1927-1937, spanning Gramsci's sojourn in Mus­ tual rigor for Ital ian socialists. solini's prisons, offered painfuland crucial choices to revolutionaries Prison Notebooks When the began to appear in the bookshops in jn every part of the world. Essentially, intellectuals were asked to 1947, again under the Einaudi imprint, people realized that the choose between unconditional approval of the Soviet Union's first Letters represented only a fraction 0f a whole continent of thought, five-year plans and the theory of socialism in a single country (with that part of experience that can be communicated in casual conversa­ its frequently tragic results), and outright criticism of the fact that Notebooks tions. The soon revealed their twofold nature as a monu­ the first socialis< nation was undergoing a process of moving tow.ard ment of resistance to Fascism and, at the same time, a major contribu­ party dictatorship, increased bureaucratization, and the predomi­ Notebooks tion to post-Leninist Marxist philosophy. The (thirty in nance of raison d'etat in international affairs. During all of this time, number, containing nearly three thousand pages) had a disorderly Gramsci was cut off (rom the immediate political battle and had to to and unsystematic appearance; in addition, they were difficult un­ turn his attention to general questions of revolutionary theory and derstand. But the theoretical material that they contained (on histori­ strategy in the modern world. Yet this detachment from political cal materialism, Croce, the Risorgimento, the history of Italian intel­ contingencies was only apparent. It could be argued that by the time lectuals, the political party, national culture-to name some of the of Gramsci's arrest in 1926, the basic decisions facing revolutionary principal themes) was to constitute the great heritage of Italian socialists in Italy and elsewhere in Europe had already been made, Marxism in the first half of this century. From 1947 on, in fact, in a sense had been made for them. An analysis of the reasons for Gramsci's importance was to grow progressively inside and outside the victory of reactionary forces in Europe and the temporary defeat Italy. of the proletariat (which both set back the proletarian garrisons The first thing to strike the public was the dramatic background outside of Russia and conditioned the Russian Revolution itself) led against which these writings were produced; for it soon emerged to recognition of what the great new problem of world socialism that these small squares of paper, every inch of which was crowded would be and the delineation of the long-term political struggle. with a minute, perfect calligraphy, represented the efforts of a man More clearly than other intellectuals of the time, Gramsci realized 4 5 that the chief issue of future decades would be rttJolution in countrits is to say, an experience lived in an original way, where all of the of advanced capitalism: he saw at once the complexity and urgency of elements constituting a particular experience were drawn upon and the problem. It is this remarkable foresight and vision of Gram sci's, "syntheses" reached only occasionally and hesitantly. Gramsci's con­ even more than his supreme example as opponent of, and martyr tribution to culture lies in this very theorization of experience, by under, Fascism, which explains the prestige that Gramsci enjoys which fmean above all historical experience, a direct participation today in so many partS of the world.