My Grandfather

Gramsci, Jnr, Antonio

doi:10.64590/yeg

INTRODUCTION TO GRAMSCI JNR

That Gramsci had a family in Russia is well known. But for many decades after his death, little reliable was known of what became of it, nor of his relations with it before or during his imprisonment. With the fall of the ussr, partial opening of official archives has allowed new light to be thrown on this side of Gramsci’s life. The richest source of information has been his grandson Antonio, born in 1965, who in the talk we publish here describes how he became fascinated by the figure of his grandfather during a visit to Italy in the early 1990s, and how, on returning home to Moscow, he set about collecting all the documentation he could find. This lay principally in the extensive correspondence of the Schucht family, in which Giulia (1896–1980), a Bolshevik and the mother of Gramsci’s two children, was one of five daughters, her sister Eugenia (1889–1972), also a Communist, preceding her briefly in Gramsci’s affections in Russia, and Tania (1887–1940), another sister, becoming Gramsci’s devoted support in Italy during his imprisonment. In his book La Storia di una famiglia rivoluzionaria (2014), Antonio Gramsci Jnr reconstructs the remarkable history of the Schucht family from the late Tsarist period—when Lenin, a family friend, was godfather to another of the sisters—to post-Stalinist times—when Giulia had to appeal to Khrushchev for the re-admission of Eugenia, who had once served as secretary to Krupskaya, to the party. The family escaped the worst of the darkest years between. Giuliano (1926–2007), the younger son, recorded that even in the years of ‘tragic persecution and generalized suspicion’ the family lived untroubled by the authorities, and for this mercy was inclined to credit the Italian party leader, Togliatti—the same Togliatti who, as Giulia complained, regarded her husband’s notebooks as party property, and who nursed thoughts of getting one of the sons back to Italy—either one—as a living token of the continuity between his party and their father’s. The grandson touches on the contrasting characters and careers of his father and his uncle, Giuliano and Delio (1924–1982); describes a hitherto unreported encounter between Gramsci and Lenin; and rebuts some of the legends that have sprung up about Gramsci’s last years. He does so, as he makes clear, not simply out of family loyalty, but political awakening—the disgust aroused in someone hitherto little concerned with politics by the corruption of the Russian intelligentsia and degradation of public life in the post-Soviet regimes of Yeltsin and Putin. Against these, and all their consequences, the work of his grandfather is a living inspiration.

My Grandfather

Before the fall of the Soviet Union my grandfather was a blur to me, a figure enveloped in legend.footnote¹ This was due to my father, Giuliano, who was a great romantic—a talented musician and composer, and a student of art history, especially that of the Italian Renaissance, of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Leopardi. It was as if my father chose to hide among the classics not only because of his natural leanings but also because the twentieth century, to whose terrors he had been a direct witness, was the site of such painful memories, of which the worst was undoubtedly the loss of the father he had never known but missed so much. For all his education and filial regard, he was someone entirely lacking in political feeling, who would often say: ‘Damned politics, why did he have to get caught up in politics? Why couldn’t he take the advice of his professor, Bartoli, and become a linguist, when he showed such promise in the field?’footnote² ‘But Daddy’, I’d reply, as a joke, ‘you wouldn’t be here if he’d done that!’

Delio, his elder brother, was very different. A colonel in the navy, a ballistics instructor and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he had great political ambitions. It emerges clearly from his family correspondence that during the war Delio seriously considered moving to Italy to become a leader in the Resistance. He wanted to participate in the creation of the future Italian navy, believing as he did that Italy after the fall of Fascism would be socialist. In other words, Delio wanted to further the cause for which his father had given his life. It may be that these ambitions were encouraged by Togliatti, who, as well as organizing a steady flow of assistance for the family, kept up a regular correspondence with Gramsci’s elder son at this time.footnote³ Many years later, when our uncle came to visit, I became an involuntary witness to the sometimes heated disputes between the Gramsci brothers, two men so different from each another. I have to say I got almost nothing out of those discussions. At the time I was very young (when Delio died, in 1982, I was only 17), and had no interest in politics.

I often went with my parents to visit my grandmother Giulia Schucht, who until 1980 lived in a sanatorium for Old Bolsheviks in Peredelkino, outside Moscow. Although bed-bound, she retained her mental faculties to the end and was deeply interested in the lives of her loved ones and in everything that was happening in the world. That said, I don’t ever remember her spontaneously bringing up memories of my grandfather. She talked about him rarely, in letters to Italian relatives and during interviews. While she lived at our house she put together, along with her sister Eugenia, a kind of museum of Gramsci’s personal effects. In a large glass cabinet with four shelves were displayed a traditional Sardinian woven doily and wooden cutlery he had made himself, a cigarette-holder and other objects. I remember those old things, to me so mysterious, as an inexhaustible source for my games of make-believe. Most of them were donated by my family to the Casa Gramsci in Ghilarza in the late seventies and early eighties, but we kept a few things at home as family relics—the ashtray that my chain-smoking grandfather had with him until the end, or his copy of Machiavelli’s Prince, an inspirational presence in the Prison Notebooks.

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INTRODUCTION TO GRAMSCI JNR

My Grandfather

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