Ignazio Silone Research Articles

Rehumanizing the world: Paolo Milano’s transatlantic cultural politics

ABSTRACT This article examines the transatlantic cultural politics of Paolo Milano (1904–1988), an Italian-Jewish exile who acted as an editorial disseminator of both Italian literature in the United States and American Literature in Italy during World War II and through the 1950s. Milano’s efforts to revitalize Italian and American cultural politics include his project for an Italian anthology of classic American writers and book reviews for American magazines and newspapers, especially his contributions to The New York Times Review of Books dedicated to Ignazio Silone and Carlo Levi’s novels. The article concludes that, despite presenting sometimes contradictory stances, such as supporting brotherhood and homophilic initiatives while also turning a blind eye to American imperialism, Milano’s transatlantic cultural politics worked to reorient the discussion on the role of culture and intellectuals in the context of an increasingly technocratic and dehumanizing society both in Italy and in the U.S.

Percorsi di un italiano all'estero: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

<i>Percorsi di un italiano all'estero</i>: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Wierzchołek świata. Aline Valangin i dolina Onsernone

These considerations are devoted to literary pictures of the Onsernone Valley located on the Italian-Swiss border. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the Swiss writer Aline Valangin (1889– 1986) created an extraordinary oasis of freedom and peace in her estate in Comologno. She hosted famous figures such as Kurt Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Ignazio Silone, or Wladimir Vogel, and provided shelter to many politically persecuted artists. The subject of detailed reflection is the question of the perception, experience and acquisition of the Ticino mountains both in works by Valangin and in biographical works about her; with a particular focus on narrative perspective — from the outside and the inside. Eveline Hasler in biographical novel Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (2000) attempts to (re)construct an image of the Onsernone Valley as a specific “valley of poets”, presenting a subtle analysis of the interaction between the conservative inhabitants of the valley, attached to tradition, and the extravagant artists who found asylum and inspiration in the Ticino Alps. This novel is an example of a modern biography, which is characterized by narrative polyphony; the description of space becomes an important carrier of meanings and collective memory in the author’s concept.&#x0D; Aline Valangin sketches in her novels (Die Bargada, 1943 / Dorf an der Grenze, 1982) and short stories (Tessiner Erzählungen, 2018) an image of Onserone indigenous people’s everyday life in the thirties and forties, full of worries. Her stories include outsiders, misfits, social outcasts, guerrillas, smugglers, and exiles — and they all find haven in the Valley. Valangin’s works are also an important voice in the discussion of the essence of Swiss patriotism not only through strong criticism of Swiss immigration policy during World War II, but also by reflecting on the concept of the border as a place that unexpectedly proves to be a challenge and a particular kind of self-experience in the face of events that are tearing up the current existence.

Der Scheitel der Welt. Aline Valangin und das Onsernonetal

These considerations are devoted to literary pictures of the Onsernone Valley located on the Italian-Swiss border. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the Swiss writer Aline Valangin (1889– 1986) created an extraordinary oasis of freedom and peace in her estate in Comologno. She hosted famous figures such as Kurt Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Ignazio Silone, or Wladimir Vogel, and provided shelter to many politically persecuted artists. The subject of detailed reflection is the question of the perception, experience and acquisition of the Ticino mountains both in works by Valangin and in biographical works about her; with a particular focus on narrative perspective — from the outside and the inside. Eveline Hasler in biographical novel Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (2000) attempts to (re)construct an image of the Onsernone Valley as a specific “valley of poets”, presenting a subtle analysis of the interaction between the conservative inhabitants of the valley, attached to tradition, and the extravagant artists who found asylum and inspiration in the Ticino Alps. This novel is an example of a modern biography, which is characterized by narrative polyphony; the description of space becomes an important carrier of meanings and collective memory in the author’s concept.&#x0D; Aline Valangin sketches in her novels (Die Bargada, 1943 / Dorf an der Grenze, 1982) and short stories (Tessiner Erzählungen, 2018) an image of Onserone indigenous people’s everyday life in the thirties and forties, full of worries. Her stories include outsiders, misfits, social outcasts, guerrillas, smugglers, and exiles — and they all find haven in the Valley. Valangin’s works are also an important voice in the discussion of the essence of Swiss patriotism not only through strong criticism of Swiss immigration policy during World War II, but also by reflecting on the concept of the border as a place that unexpectedly proves to be a challenge and a particular kind of self-experience in the face of events that are tearing up the current existence.

Text analysis ed editoria digitale: proposte di integrazione con valutazioni critiche. A proposito del carteggio tra Ignazio Silone e la Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

Text analysis techniques are widely applied in digital humanities, in particular to support literary criticism on large corpora of primary sources. In this paper we retrace, from an editorial perspective, the experimentation of computational text analysis techniques – in this case topic modeling and sentiment analysis – on a corpus of archival documents, the correspondence between Ignazio Silone and Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (396 pieces of correspondence). In light of the results obtained, we hypothesized that these tools, outside the field of literary criticism strictu sensu, could play an important role in the study and, above all, in the edition of the author’s letters, and that their output, integrated with methodologies and techniques of digital scholarly editing, could make the experience more productive for the readers.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński e la letteratura italiana del XX secolo

Magdalena Śniedziewska’s book discusses a theme in Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s works which has not been thoroughly researched, i.e. their relationship with Italian literature. This is how we discover Herling-Grudziński as a writer who is simultaneously a great literary criticwho looks eagerly and with both interest (sometimes) and passion at the work of such authors as Nicola Chiaromonte, Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, Luigi Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia. The opening chapter of the book discusses Herling-Grudziński’s condition as an emigrant and the changes in his attitude to Naples which became his second home after World War II; the final chapter is about the Polish writer’s difficult relationship with Italian book market, reconstructing the story of the reception of Inny świat (A World Apart) in Italy.

Redeeming the Age in Which We Live: Ignazio Silone’s The Story of a Humble Christian

This essay explores Ignazio Silone’s seldom considered book, “The Story of a Humble Christian.” Part memoir, history, and theatre, this book tells the story of Pope Celestine V, the first, and until Benedict XVI, the only pope to resign. The book lends itself to an interpretation that applies a consideration of Silone’s recently revealed and complicated biography with a reflection on the current occupant of the papacy, Pope Francis, as a way to articulate how flawed humans can experience transcendent and transformative possibilities when they lead with humility.

Spatial experiences of the intellectual: Exile, isolation and imprisonment inBread and WineandKarartma Geceleri

This article compares the portrayal of the intellectual in two social realist novels from two different countries: Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine (1936) from Italy and Rıfat Ilgaz’s Karartma Geceleri (1974, Blackout Nights) from Turkey. It focuses on spatial settings as domains of interaction (or lack thereof) and the ways in which they define the identities, realities, and responsibilities of the protagonists, Pietro Spina and Mustafa Ural. The discussion is constructed on the concept of the intellectual and societal engagement as theorised by Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Edward Said along the lines of political involvement and its consequences. It examines actual and metaphorical exile, isolation, and imprisonment in their varying manifestations. How narration, setting, and imagery create an oppressive atmosphere is scrutinised in order to highlight the ways in which literary texts reveal affinities among the intellectuals’ relation to the broader society, despite the differences in their temporal and cultural contexts.

Salvation or Damnation, and where Ethics Fits in to all That

Ignazio Silone’s novel <em>Bread and Wine</em> explores the complex nature of ethical decision-making in the context of Fascist Italy, a world in which lofty concerns of moral conduct seem the fodder of fools and idealists. Silone uses his central character, firebrand and part-time philosopher Pietro Spina, to plunge his readers into one man’s quest for goodness within the debauchery and despair of war-torn Italy. Pietro’s moral development through the context of his adventures illustrates the challenge of crafting any sound ethical code, and the ease with which one might be lost to cynicism or indifference. The road marks of Pietro’s philosophical evolution are explored through comparisons with Iris Murdoch’s work on moral vision, Elizabeth Anderson’s non-ideal theory, and the three crusaders of Samantha Vice, Ryan Preston-Roedder, and Vanessa Carbonell in their campaign for faith in humanity over cynicism.

The misadventures of socialist anticommunism from the end of the war to the collapse of the Berlin Wall

The article aims to highlight the features of socialist anticommunism in Italy from 1945 to 1991, with particular reference to Giuseppe Saragat and Bettino Craxi, and with regard to the intellectual activity of Ignazio Silone. Anticommunist socialists aimed at delegitimizing the communists, but they themselves were also delegitimized by the communist party of Palmiro Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer. Naturally, the form of delegitimation changed over the years, from Saragat’s stance in the 1940s and early 1950s to his position later on. The kind of delegitimation carried on by Bettino Craxi’s socialist party was more successful, however, compared to the one implemented by Saragat’s small party. For this reason, it was fiercely opposed by Berlinguer and the communist party.

The Francescanism of Ignazio Silone/ Il Francescanesimo di Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone, one of the last “maestri” of the Italian literature, the intellectual who never betrayed his conscience, will be analysed in our scientific research concerning his francescanism and how the “Poverello di Assisi” along with Francis’s evangelic faith have influenced the tormented Italian writer. An old friend of the protagonist named Pierto Spina writes at Silone’s novel Vino e pane: “creare un regime all’ immagine dell’ uomo”, isn’t this, what Francis had proclaimed in his entire life, combating the human limits in order to reach his “Precious Goal”? Everyone has a goal in life and Silone achieved his through pure religious and political faith maintaining a high level of dignity throughout.

The Francescanism of Ignazio Silone/ Il Francescanesimo di Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone, one of the last “maestri” of the Italian literature, the intellectual who never betrayed his conscience, will be analysed in our scientific research concerning his francescanism and how the “Poverello di Assisi” along with Francis’s evangelic faith have influenced the tormented Italian writer. An old friend of the protagonist named Pierto Spina writes at Silone’s novel Vino e pane: “creare un regime all’ immagine dell’ uomo”, isn’t this, what Francis had proclaimed in his entire life, combating the human limits in order to reach his “Precious Goal”? Everyone has a goal in life and Silone achieved his through pure religious and political faith maintaining a high level of dignity throughout.

Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War by Andrew N. Rubin (review)

Reviewed by: Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War by Andrew N. Rubin Mark David Kaufman Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War. Andrew N. Rubin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 184. $39.50 (cloth). During a recent panel discussion held at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, Sheldon Pollock advocated a return to philology as a means of checking the reification and instrumentalization of the liberal arts. The goal of the humanities should not be to resolve complexity, Pollock suggested, but to foster it, by restoring contexts and reapplying skills that have lapsed with the advent of new technologies and critical practices.1 In Archives of Authority, Andrew N. Rubin concludes his engaging study of the relations between culture and power with a similar gesture. Combining investigational criticism with cultural historiography, Rubin reveals that state sponsorship of the humanities played a crucial role in the transfer of authority from Britain to the United States in the early years of the Cold War, and he argues that this transfer redefined "the position of the writer in society, the conditions of humanistic practice, the ideology of world literature, and the relationship between writers and the rising dominance of new and efficient modes of mass transmission" (17). Essentially, this shift in power dynamics transformed Weltliteratur into Weltkultur, the former a Goethean concept signifying not so much a global literature as the modalities that cultivate "an enlarged awareness of the shared, but discrepant experiences between nations" (2), and the latter understood as the appropriation of these modalities for ideological ends. In response, the author envisions an alternative humanism founded upon methods of philological inquiry resistant to synthetic conceptions of "world literature." Framing his critique as an appeal for "democratic criticism" (23), Rubin delves into little-known government archives. He particularly examines documents that concern how the Anglo-American intelligence community manipulated humanities discourse through Cold-War fronts like the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its media organs, magazines such as Encounter, Der Monat, and Black Orpheus. In the first chapter, he introduces a valuably reflective and interpretive perspective that is often lacking in otherwise informative accounts of the secret state's forays into the world of arts and letters, among which are Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) and James Smith's more recent British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-1960 (2013). As Rubin highlights the historical and critical implications of state sponsorship, he argues persuasively that the Cold-War transfer of power from Britain to the United States established a form of imperialism in which "the physical occupation of territory was replaced by the occupation of literary and cultural space" (20). Turning to specific instances of so-called "cultural diplomacy," the next two chapters examine how the work of the public intellectual was solicited, translated, and disseminated across the globe. For Rubin, George Orwell serves as a crucial case study for charting the modalities of transmission that worked to subsume anticolonialism under the imperative of anticommunism. Orwell's infamous blacklist, his secret roster of political undesirables compiled at the behest of Britain's Information Research Department, epitomized the larger relationship between his literary works and the IRD, which launched translations of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to perceived "communist" threats. Recontextualized in magazines, comics, and films, these adaptations co-opted and redirected the genuinely emancipatory energies of postcolonial discourse and made them to serve the reductive dichotomy between "totalitarianism" and the "free world." If emergent technologies permitted the deformative "reproduction" of Orwell's works, increasingly faster modes of "literary replication" facilitated the translation, diffusion, and juxtaposition of writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, and Jorge Luis Borges (21). In effect, the CCF commandeered print, film, and [End Page 791] radio culture-inasmuch as these are all venues for literary transmission-in order to stifle or manipulate dissenting voices, thereby reshaping the discipline of comparative literature. Explicitly tracing these Cold-War mechanics of power to the post-9/11 world, Archives of Authority asserts that such "forces" continue to "circumscribe our own procedures...

The Intellectual as Agent: Politics and Independence in the Other ‘Caso Silone’

SummaryInternationally renowned as a novelist, Ignazio Silone also played an important role in the political history of the twentieth century, including the rise and fall of international communism, the struggle against fascism in Europe, the consolidation of the post-World War II order, and the Cold War. Through a series of remarkable biographical twists, Silone became a model for generations of intellectuals—a rare synthesis of engagement and independence, politics and morality. The first Silone ‘case’ followed a series of stunning revelations concerning his services to the fascist police as a leading figure of international communism. This article examines a second Silone ‘case’, dealing with a later period when his international reputation as an intellectual was formed. While cultivating a public image of genuine and hard-won independence after his break with communism, Silone secretly collaborated with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. My examination of this less well-known episode contributes to a more complete understanding of this significant figure, while also addressing a series of broader questions. These include the ethical responsibilities of public intellectuals, the relationship between political principle and action, and the historical record of certain forms of nominally democratic opposition to totalitarianism.

Folly and the Holy Face: The Medievalism of Ignazio Silone

Silone’s strong and highly public commitment to social justice and personal freedom, his direct criticism of the Catholic Church’s politics, and his belief that human energy and action could bring about social change more readily than a passive reliance on Divine Providence alone, make him an unlikely exponent of medieval thought. His writings show otherwise: Silone maintained a consistent, though complex, attachment to the medieval world and found in it powerful political analogues for his own day. In Silone’s works, references to the Middle Ages abound; he describes his native Abruzzo in medieval terms and features radical reformers like Saints Bernard and Francis of Assisi and Joachim of Fiore, men often thought mad or foolish by their contemporaries. His comments on their integral place in his background and thought, and the consistency with which they appear over a lifetime’s work call for a closer look; so too does his mention of his own literary career in terms of medieval monks who spent their lives repainting the Holy Face of Jesus, the literal imago Dei for believers. Silone’s medievalism is not the ornament of nostalgia, nor the vehicle for cynicism or escapism; it is essential to his political orientation, and to seeing in his fictive works that proximate defeat does not mean ultimate despair.

The limits of postfigurative technique in Ignazio Silone’s Pane e Vino

Nella letteratura di '800 e '900 sono state spesso usate figure simboliche di Cristo, ad esempio personaggi la cui vita in vari modi riflette quella di Gesù di Nazaret, pur senza esserne allegorie completamente sviluppate, sono state spesso usate come risorse fittizie, come mezzo di espressione di diverse qualità, lezioni, costumi e valori nel mondo moderno. Uno scrittore che ha usato questa tecnica è Ignazio Silone. Essa forma una parte vitale della struttura del suo romanzo del 1937, Pane e vino. Tuttavia ci sono fondamentali debolezze nell'uso di Silone della figura simbolica di Cristo, il che esemplifica la critica di tale tecnica espressa in generale, fra i tanti, da Liston Pope e Alan Paton. Article text in Italian

Book Review: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone

Book Review: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone

Marxism and the Spirit of Socialism: Cultural Origins of Anti-Capitalism (1982)

Ignazio Silone, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, has written strikingly about the role of moral commitment in radical theory. ‘The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientifi c”’, he suggests, ‘the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not suffi ciently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.’ When Silone gave up his Marxism in the 1930s, he became a devout Christian, but he remained an ardent socialist throughout his life. The juxtaposition of these faiths – Marxism, Christianity, and socialism – is what this essay is all about. That Marxism contains signifi cant value commitments does not in any way differentiate it from other general social scientifi c theories. Every theory has ideological dimensions, certain a priori commitments which allow it to evaluate, in the moral terms of ‘ought’, the empirical facts which record what the world ‘is’. To miss this necessary elision of facts and values, as Raymond Aron does when he condemns Marxism as a ‘fallacious myth’ which – in contrast to sociology – intercedes between the ‘real and ideal’, is to take the easy way out. What is unique about Marx’s theory is not that it contains values but how it does so. Marx raised the art of ideologizing to a level of grandeur and profundity it has never attained since. Marx was not just a scientist but the creator of an enormous social and spiritual force. He founded an intellectual

Da política à literatura: o percurso de Ignazio Silone

A primeira metade do século XX pode ser perfilada por inúmeros acontecimentos histórico-políticos e culturais que influenciaram toda uma geração de escritores, artistas e intelectuais. É nesta complexa trama que se (inter)relacionam os binômios história e literatura e literatura e política, e nela podem ser inseridos a produção intelectual e o percurso de Ignazio Silone. Os escritos literários e não desse autor italiano refletem a sua inserção no mundo e a experiência do vivido, que são também caracterizadas pelos regimes totalitários, pelo fascismo, pelo antifascismo e pelo exílio. Marcas de uma existência que permeiam e nutrem o discurso literário siloniano.