Antonio Gramsci

A Biography

Andrew Pearmain

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755600083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

A historical biography of the Italian philosopher/politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1973), considered one of the most important Marxist philosophers of the twentieth-century. As part of the Communist Lives series, Andrew Pearmain explores the life of Gramsci from his childhood, to his role in the newly formed Communist Party of Italy, and to his imprisonment and death in Turi di Bari, using recent archival research including material released by the Gramsci and Schucht family.

Chapter 1

THE END

On 21 April 1937 Antonio Gramsci’s prison sentence formally expired, but he was not well enough to leave the Quisisana Clinic in Rome, where he had been confined since August 1935, nine difficult years after his arrest on Mussolini’s orders in 1926. ‘Nino’, as he was known to his close friends and relatives, had planned to return to Sardinia on release to live near his birth-family. A room had been rented for him in Santu Lussurgiu, where he had attended secondary school, near the family home in Ghilarza. But his very final wish, stated to his closest friend the economist Piero Sraffa on a visit from England, was to join his wife Julia and their sons Delio and Giuliano in Soviet Russia. Before any of these plans could be finalized or implemented, Gramsci suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on the evening of 25 April, lay unconscious throughout the next day and died early the next morning, on 27 April 1937, aged 46 and 4 months. The only relatives in attendance were Gramsci’s sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, more usually called Tanya, and his brother Carlo, who arrived at the clinic after Antonio had died. Together they oversaw funeral arrangements.

On 12 May, Tanya wrote from Rome to Sraffa at King’s College, Cambridge, with a detailed account of Nino’s final hours, and a request for advice on what to do with his effects, in particular the treasured notebooks he had kept during his imprisonment.¹ She had smuggled them out of the clinic, hidden among Nino’s clothes and other personal possessions, with the help of a sympathetic nursing assistant who distracted the guards. They were then stored in the vaults of the Banca Commerciale, whose Director Raffaele Mattioli remembered Nino fondly from his time as a journalist and MP. Gramsci had asked that everything be sent to his wife Julia in Moscow, but Tanya clearly thought this might prove politically and practically complicated, and asked Sraffa what he thought she should do. Depositing them in the bank vaults was most probably his idea.

The cremation had already taken place, and she went on after a difficult journey across Rome in a sudden thunderstorm. It was difficult to get permission to proceed with the funeral from the police, who put all kinds of legalistic and bureaucratic obstacles in the way, but they finally relented. Before they left Quisisana, Tanya arranged for a photograph of the corpse and for a death mask, intending to have it cast in bronze, along with the right hand.² She also had some photos that had been taken when Nino received his conditional liberty at his previous clinic in 1935. They were, she wrote to Sraffa, ‘quite precious, not least for the look of satisfaction – even the hint of a smile – on his face.’ In the days before he died, she added, Nino hadn’t felt any worse than usual, but rather seemed a lot more serene than he had been. She arrived at the clinic as usual at around 5.30 pm on 25 April. As they always did, they talked about that day’s news. When she took out her books for a French literature lesson she had later that evening, Nino objected and insisted that they carry on talking. In any case, he scolded her with a laugh, ‘You shouldn’t have taken a job that demanded specialised knowledge and would exhaust you! How would you be able to continue looking after me?’

Even so, they looked up some words together in the Larousse. Then they talked until dinner time, when he ate the usual minestrone, fruit compote and a piece of sponge cake. He left the room to go to the toilet but was brought back on a chair carried by several orderlies. He had collapsed there, lost control of his whole left side but managed to crawl to the door and cry for help. When he was back in bed, Nino asked for a tonic to drink, but the doctor refused until it was clear what was wrong. They brought him a hot water bottle for his feet; he said it was too hot, but that the left foot didn’t feel very much at all. At about 9 pm the Clinic Director Professor Puccinelli finally arrived and conducted an examination. He ordered that the patient be bled, and be kept absolutely still. Nino struggled to get comfortable, grasping the bars of the bed with his right hand, and almost toppling out. Over the next hour he vomited several times. He tried to blow his nose, which was blocked up with food, and continued breathing with some difficulty. Another doctor examined him and advised that his condition was extremely serious. At this point, the nursing sisters brought in a priest. Tanya objected strongly and insisted that they leave. After some argument, during which the priest questioned her authority, they left. Throughout the next day, 26 April, Nino lay still and barely conscious. Very early the next morning, the vomiting began again, and Nino’s breathing became terribly laboured. Tanya kept watch over him, wetting his lips, reminding him to breathe when he seemed to have stopped. Then he took a last deep breath and fell back into silence. She called the doctor, who confirmed that it was all over. It was 4.10 am on 27 April. At 5.15 am the nurses carried the body to the mortuary. Later that morning Carlo came. Together he and Tanya arranged for the photographer and the man who would make the death mask to come and do their work. It wasn’t easy; they had to make all kinds of written declarations about who they were and what they were doing. Later in the afternoon Carlo asked to see his brother one more time, but was refused, supposedly on orders from the government.

Carlo and Tanya were the only people present at the cremation, apart from a large escort of police guards. The ashes were deposited in a zinc box laid inside a wooden one, and stored at the Verano Cemetery, where they could stay for up to ten years without payment. The news of Gramsci’s death was broadcast by the Italian state radio and published in the newspapers, in a tone Tanya found deeply upsetting: ‘It’s obscene; I don’t know how to go about protesting,’ she wrote to Sraffa. Most of the newspapers published a curt statement supplied to them by the Fascist wire service: ‘The former deputy Gramsci died at the Quisisana clinic in Rome where he had been a patient for a long time.’³ But some of the coverage portrayed Gramsci as a political criminal and communist subversive, with one article calling him ‘the maddest, most fanatical of all’.

*

At the time of his death in 1937, Antonio Gramsci had effectively been abandoned by everybody he knew, apart from Tanya Schucht, Carlo Gramsci and Piero Sraffa. He had not seen his parents since before his arrest in 1926, and was only informed of his mother’s death several years after she died in 1932. The only other siblings to visit him in prison were his brothers Gennaro and Mario; each visited him just once in eleven years, for separate purposes of their own. They were now both in military service but for opposing sides on different continents: Gennaro with the Republicans in Spain, and Mario in the Italian army in Africa. Antonio had seen neither of his two surviving sisters, whom he had been close to in childhood, since October 1924. He had not seen his wife Julia and older son Delio since August 1926, when they returned to Moscow after spending six largely unhappy months with him in Rome. When they left Italy, Julia was pregnant with Giuliano, whom Gramsci never met. His relationships with his in-laws, the large and dispersed Schucht family, had always been complicated and often strained. When he was arrested, Gramsci had been the secretary of the tiny, embattled Partito Communista d’Italia (PCd’I) for little more than two years, its effective leader after the arrest or exile of almost all its other higher officials following the Fascist takeover of Italy in 1922. Through the later 1920s and 1930s, as the party adjusted to the changing circumstances of Fascist hegemony in Italy and its own illegality, and just as important, Stalinist hegemony in the Communist International, Gramsci was by turns lionized, ostracized and finally largely forgotten by the outside world. He died in almost total personal and political obscurity, just as he had been born and brought up, on the periphery of life and history.

Chapter 2

THE BEGINNING

Antonio Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in the town of Ales, near the Sardinian capital Cagliari. He was the fourth of seven children: Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Antonio, Mario, Teresina and Carlo, all named by their devout parents after the most prominent local saints. At six days old, Antonio was baptized at Ales Cathedral by the Vicar General, attended by his father Francesco and a representative of his godfather, a local worthy called Francesco Puxeddu who would play no further part in his life. Antonio was given the baptismal names Francesco after his father and godfather and Sebastiano after the Vicar General. Antonio’s mother, née Giuseppina Marcias and generally known as Peppina, couldn’t suckle him at first because of a bout of mastitis, so for the first couple of weeks he was nursed by a neighbouring family friend Signora Melis alongside her own newborn son.

Antonio’s father Francesco had been born in 1860 in Gaeta on the Italian coast halfway between Rome and Naples. His family were of Greek-Albanian origins, which is where the unusual surname came from. Throughout his life and to his considerable annoyance, Antonio would have to pronounce and spell it out to people, and contend with multiple variations. His paternal grandfather Gennaro had been a police colonel in the ill-fated Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, an odd collection of territories which was widely considered at the time the most reactionary, inefficient, inegalitarian state system in Europe. The kingdom was violently overthrown and absorbed into the newly unified Italian state by the Risorgimento of 1861, the year after Francesco was born. Colonel Gennaro Gramsci survived the siege of Gaeta by General Caldini’s army, having sent his wife and infant son to safety through enemy lines, as family legend would have it. He quickly transferred his allegiances to the triumphant Piedmontese, and retained his rank of colonel in the new state’s carabinieri. His older children did well. Three sons became high-ranking civil servants and an artillery officer, and his daughter married into wealth and nobility.

The youngest of Gennaro’s five children, Francesco had been studying to be a lawyer when his father died unexpectedly in 1881. The sudden change in family circumstances required Francesco to find immediate, less prestigious work in the civil service. He was sent to run the Land Registry in the Sardinian town of Ghilarza, serving his time on the far-flung margins of the new country, with the reasonable expectation that he would soon return to the mainland. Sardinia was widely regarded as an absolute hole by outsiders, while most of the indigenous population hated these arrogant stranieri sent to rule over them and extract their labour, produce and taxes on behalf of the far-away ‘continentals’.¹ In a semi-feudal agricultural economy where common lands had only recently been enclosed, and foreign, generally absentee landlords still owned vast estates, disputes over land were an obvious focus for these social tensions. The ‘blow-in’ bureaucrat Francesco, tasked with adjudicating and recording these bitter but often petty territorial quarrels, was generally in favour of the most powerful party (usually fellow mainlanders), and surely resentful of this posting he’d been forced to take; it would have been doubly resented by the islanders.

Within a year of his arrival in Ghilarza, Francesco fell in with the dissolute local gentry ‘and (according to Davidson) became part of the joking, card-playing petty bourgeois circolo of the village … doing favours for favours in an elaborate clientele system’.² These signori considered themselves a definite cut above the labouring and smallholding masses. Francesco’s son Antonio would later characterize the social stratum from which his father’s companions were drawn as ‘pensioners of economic history’ or more harshly ‘the scum of society … monkey people’, subsisting on dwindling legacies and sinecures and making no productive contribution of their own to economy and society, ‘Italians who now live only for their petty personal interests, men born only to enjoy drinking’.³ Antonio’s early intellectual hero Gaetano Salvemini offered a similarly damning verdict of ‘these country idlers … flaccid, inert and good-for-nothing’; this social group would go on to provide the bulk of the burgeoning officer class of the Italian army and subsequently of the Fascist state bureaucracy.⁴

Francesco Gramsci certainly looked and played the part, ‘corpulent, given to grandiose schemes of little practicality, to vanity and boasting … a typical authoritarian type (whose) values Antonio rejected completely.’⁵ Antonio’s father, who outlived him by just two weeks, would – within the constraints of discretion and taboo which characterized the Gramsci family atmosphere – serve in his son’s notes and letters and recollections as the personification of profound weaknesses in Italian society. Once established in Ghilarza, Francesco looked around for romantic attachment. He married Giuseppina ‘Peppina’ Marcias in 1883, against strong disapproval from his family of her island background and, as the daughter of a local tax collector, ostensibly of lower social standing than theirs. Like her husband-to-be, Peppina bore a double stigma within Sardinia’s highly stratified class hierarchy. Her tax collector father might have been one of ‘that most hated of all officials’ for the locals, but ‘for a mainlander (like Francesco), marrying a Sard bordered on miscegenation’.⁶ This sense of social indeterminacy, of being between castes and classes and territories and never quite belonging in any, would haunt the Sardinian Gramscis. On top of a family atmosphere ‘lacking in compassion, (where) affection was undemonstrative, dry and formal’, the Gramscis’ separateness superimposed an air of subterfuge and reserve bordering on shame with which they would respond to adversity, and leave a residue of closely recalled slights and grievances.⁷ Antonio would carry plenty of these resentments into his adult life, alongside a persistent sense of social vertigo. He was himself not always clear on his precariously middle-class background. Well into adulthood, his comrade and fellow Sardinian Palmiro Togliatti was telling people that Gramsci came from peasant stock.

Perhaps Francesco understood better than his family on the mainland that Peppina was actually something of a catch and would prove, within the restrictive gender roles of a time when the father ruled with a clenched fist and a harsh word or glance, to be an exceptional woman, wife and mother. Not only did she bring with her a substantial dowry of inherited land and rental income and an extensive, supportive and comparatively prosperous local family, which helped to mask her socially superior husband’s indolence, she also had the benefit of three years’ elementary schooling and advanced literacy skills. In a village where only an estimated 200 out of a population of over 2200 could read and write, it was even more unusual for a girl. She read voraciously from the Italian classics, and could recite from memory whole passages of Dante and the rather racier Boccaccio. She also dressed in ‘European’ rather than traditional clothes and, despite never travelling further than forty kilometres from Ghilarza in her whole life, had considerable knowledge and understanding of the outside world. Antonio gained much of his extensive early grasp of geography, which he would later compare favourably with his own city-dwelling sons, from maps and atlases under his mother’s tutelage.

Unusually for a straniero, Francesco settled in rural Sardinia for the rest of his life. His choice not to move on to a more promising post elsewhere, or even to be nearer his own mainland family, may be further tribute to ‘Signora’ (as she was known respectfully among her neighbours) Peppina’s strength and dependability, as much as inertia and lack of ambition on his part. Their first child Gennaro was born in Ghilarza in 1884, and named after his paternal grandfather the carabiniero colonel. The family then moved to the larger cathedral town of Ales where their next three children were born in quick succession, including Antonio. At this stage the family was relatively well-off, with Francesco in secure, prestigious state employment and Giuseppina set to inherit considerable holdings of land back in Ghilarza. Their friends and acquaintances in Ales included the court bailiff, notaries and other administrative notables. By 1892, there was a female domestic, and Antonio also had a nursemaid. He was born into a privileged social group by Sardinian standards.

The Gramsci children were healthy and robust, including baby Antonio, fine and fair, with curly blonde hair and light-coloured eyes, according to a family friend. For his first three or four years, he was happy and thriving. There then occurred a period of illness and debility which he himself would struggle to make sense of for the rest of his life, and which left him with a hunchback, stunted growth and always fragile health. The family story was that he fell or, in a rather darker version, was dropped by his nursemaid down a steep flight of stairs. Her alleged motivation was similarly convoluted. She had become pregnant by the local doctor, who then fled the village in fear of a vendetta. Antonio’s ‘accident’ and the subsequent swelling on his chest and back offered her the opportunity, with the family’s blessing, to go and see the doctor a long, bumpy ox-cart ride away. On the way back, Antonio began to haemorrhage from his mouth and anus. The bleeding went on for three days, and he was seriously ill for three months. At one point, he recalled in a letter years later, his condition was severe enough for him to be given up for dead by the doctors, and to warrant the construction of a little coffin and a shroud.⁸ His maternal aunt Grazia Delogu insisted that he was only saved by her anointing his feet with holy oil and praying to the Virgin. She would also pray, Antonio would later recall, to ‘a very pious lady called Donna Bisodia, so pious that a place had been found for her in the Lords Prayer, when it was actually the Latin phrase dona nobis hodie (“give us this day”)’.⁹ His mother kept the coffin and the shroud until he was well into adulthood and settled on the mainland.

Again, Francesco Gramsci did not emerge favourably from the episode. The local family doctor had advised taking Antonio to the mainland for more specialized (and costly) treatment, but his father resisted. When it was clear that the illness had left Antonio with signs of stunted growth, a hunchback and a smalle...