Subtitle: Gramsci e le sorelle
Schucht. Turin, CET, 2002.
With reference to Gramsci’s private life, he maintained relations from
prison with his original family in Sardinia as well as with his Russian wife
Giulia (Julka) Schucht, who had lived in Italy in her early youth, and after
they married she went to Italy briefly with him and left for Russia again the
same year when Gramsci was arrested. The couple had two children. Giulia, due
to weak health and the difficult political situation in Italy, rarely wrote to
Gramsci. His sister in law Tatiana, who was living in Italy, kept contact with Gramsci
regularly during the prison period, and she is the person who was entrusted
with his Prison Notebooks.
Useful and first-hand information on this is found in particular in
Gramsci’s Letters from Prison. Among
his biographers, Fiori appears still reliable to the present writer [1].
Some suggestion have been made in historical and biographical accounts that
Gramsci’s detention drove Giulia (his wife) sick, and Tatiana might be more
than just loyal to him as brother in law, and probably also in ways
sentimentally concerned [2]. According to Gramsci’s grandson, Tatiana was simply the best choice,
due to her personality and education, as mediator between Gramsci and his
family, and Gramsci and the PCI [3].
Brown would appear to base some of her information on Fiori as well as
on primary sources, but she also considers a private correspondence between
Nilde Perilli and Tatiana as well as her elder sister Eugenia (Ghenja).
In L’amore assente, the main
point made is that all three sister fell in love with Gramsci, Eugenia followed
by Giulia and finally by Tatiana.
Paradoxically perhaps the least certain about her sentiments for Gramsci
was Giulia, and we find a dialogue in the novel to the effect of “Lo ami
ancora?”, “Non lo so” – she replies that she does not know whether she is still
in love with him. In a previous passage, she is depicted as writing to him
rather for “senso del dovere” (or a sense of duty) than for deep sentimental
reasons. In fact, in his letters, Gramsci seems rather sad about Giulia’s sporadic
communications from Russia.
Eugenia and Gramsci, in Brown’s reconstruction, actually had a love
story.
Brown’s Tatiana is definitely in love with Gramsci who is described as “l’amore
della sua vita” (the real love of her life).
According to this novel, Tatiana was not a communist, and this would
have been the reason for her to remain in Italy whereas her family had gone
back to Russia to participate in the revolution.
The novel seems founded upon the permanent curiosity about the three
sisters Schucht in relation to Gramsci.
The hypotheses made by Brown are just as valid as any hypothesis that
cannot be substantiated but it legitimately exists in a narrative plot as we find
in this book.
What we find somehow not very satisfactory, though, is the dialogues
made more contemporary than the time when they were written, and strangely
lacking in the perhaps even surprising warmth that Gramsci put in his letters
to Giulia and Tatiana and to his original family by contrast with his lucid and
rational approach to essay-writing.
[1] G. Fiori, Vita di Gramsci,
Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1966.
[2] See C. Comencini, L’Unità 1-10-2012.
[3] F. Goria, Il Gramsci segreto visto dal nipote.
[Roberto Bertoni]
[1] G. Fiori, Vita di Gramsci,
Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1966.
[2] See C. Comencini, L’Unità1-10-2012.
[3] F. Goria, Il Gramsci segretovisto dal nipote.
