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Letters from Prison

Name: Letters from Prison
Author: Antonio Gramsci
ISBN: 9780060904524

by Antonio Gramsci

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Overview

This second volume of Antonio Gramsci's Letters from Prison covers the years 1931 to 1937. Beginning with a letter to Tania Schucht, his sister-in-law, that expresses troubled concern about his wife's family, and ending with a series of notes to his two sons, Delio and Giuliano, these letters chronicle Gramsci's rapidly declining health, his numerous efforts, assisted by Tania and Piero Sraffa, his friend and mentor, to obtain relief from the physical and administrative oppression of imprisonment at Turi, and his transfers from Turi to Civitavecchia, to Formia, and finally to Rome, where he died on April 27, 1937. What gives the letters in Volume Two their distinctive character is the lucidity with which Gramsci confronts a variety of difficult problems of modern civilization. His exchange of letters with Tania on anti-Semitism are remarkable for their range of historical, political, and psychological considerations. His letters to his ailing wife, Giulia, on Freudianism and psychoanalysis, although brief and fragmentary, reveal fruitful perspectives on the relationship between the individual and society in periods of social and political turmoil. Gramsci's exchange of ideas with Piero Sraffa, mediated by Tania, on the philosophy of Benedetto Croce are indispensable supplements to his ideas on philosophical idealism expressed in the Prison Notebooks. Also of great interest are the letters in which Gramsci confronts his feelings of estrangement from his wife and children. These emotions prompted him to probe his own psyche with exceptional candor. Gramsci's letters to Giulia are an especially poignant aspect of his attempt to transcend the real and metaphorical walls that prevented full communication with his loved ones. Another series of letters discusses his philosophy of education, as applied to his nieces and nephews in Sardinia, as well as his two sons in Moscow. Volume Two of Letters from Prison contains explanatory notes, a chronology of Gramsci's life, a

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Editorials

Radical Philosophy

Gramsci sought to turn involuntary abstention from activism to innovative political account, embarking in February 1929 on what were to become the . . . extraordinary Prison Notebooks. Finally, in these Letters from Prison he bequeathed a desolate record of what he diagnosed as 'prisonitis, ' or the vitiations induced by the rigors of resistance to the prison regime. . . . The finished product is a credit to publisher, translator and editor.

Booknews

Arguably the most famous collection of letters in this century, the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) wrote these letters while imprisoned by the Italian Fascists from 1926 until six days before his death in 1937. Personal and moving, they explore all manner of questions in history, sociology, philosophy, folklore, and literature--always within the overriding context of the isolation and harshness of prison life. The most complete and authoritative English edition, these two volumes contain 484 letters--including 28 that have never before been published in any collection--based on the Italian editions of 1965 and 1988. Available individually, Volume 1 (07552-9) covers the years from 1926 to 1930, and Volume 2 (07554-5) the years from 1931 to 1937. Essential for all academic and public libraries. (RC) Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)