English - Preliminary remarks

This work aims helping people to orientate in the wide Gramscian bibliography, at first it was thought as a part of a wide project for an annotated bibliography on italian studies about Gramsci’s life and work, but maybe it can be useful now telling something more about specific Gramscian studies during the period 1952-1956.

Methodologically I started working on current bibliographies: first of all the one carried out by John Cammett[1], which can now count on updates by the International Gramsci Society[2], and a minor work, yet very well structured, made by Rosangela Zosi and Matteo d’Ambrosio[3] for drawing up an inventory of works about Gramsci collected in the library of Istituto Gramsci, Turin. I had a look at Fondo Fubini, located on Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome, a press cutting archive that Elsa Fubini[4] gathered up during her life, but I could notice that the years at issue are very poor and the 1956 folder couldn’t be found.

As model of reference I took Luigi Firpo’s Bibliografia campanelliana[5], a still remarkable work, and a recent bibliography on Machiavelli[6], unlike Cammett’s work I didn’t only give the list of studies on Gramsci, but my objective was, based on the retrieval of works of different nature and in sundry places, reading and review them. So that for any title examined I gave a concise description trying to give some information about the authors, his or her political leanings and intellectual placing.

I considered just what was published in Italy, so I left out works in other languages or published abroad. The meaning of this choice is to understand which works had been more important for the acquaintance of Gramsci in Italy and what or who, and in which way, generated discussions, approvals, manipulations or critical, philological, hermeneutic researches, a wide enhancement in italian culture opening new trends in history, philosophy, politology, sociology, antropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, literature, linguistics…

Cammett’s bibliography is a very hard to use tool: a sequence of titles in alphabetical order, without any other framework which could help finding what we’re looking for for our researches. The goal of this work would then be to give a map to orientate oneself in what is now a forest of titles. Titles are here first shared-out by year then entered alfabetically (by author’s name) into twenty different sections which returns the formal feature of every work. Inside this sections titles are headed with a code which contains last two numbers of the year of publication and a progressive numbering among it.

The outline for sections is:

    I.  Monograph by single author

  II.  Collective works

III.  Essays, chapters and paragraphs in a single author’s work

IV.  Essays, chapters and paragraphs in collective works

V.  Conference or seminar proceedings

VI.  Introductions, forewords, introductory remarks, afterwords, notes

VII.  Pamphlets (anonymous or signed, collective or by single author)

VIII.  Collections of documents

  IX.  Official records of parliamentary proceedings (et similia)

  X.  Essays on scientific magazines

  XI.  Special issues of magazines

XII.  Reviews

XIII.  Article in newspapers (daily or weekly)

XIV.  Interviews

XV.  Dictionary and encyclopaedic entries (in alphabetical order)

XVI.  Sections or chapters of encyclopaedia (systematic order)

XVII.  Chapters and paragraphs of school handbooks

XVIII.  Artistic works (stories, novels, poetry, theatre…)

XIX.  Chronologies

XX.  Bibliographies

This work consider the period 1952-1956 because of internal reasons in Gramscian historiography and worldwide history. In 1952 the publication of Gramsci’s work, published for the first time by Einaudi is ended[7] and the first important steps on Gramsci acquietance is possible, till that «unforgettable 1956»[8], «a singularly important year in the history of italian intellectuals after fascism»[9] when some sudden earthquakes took place: the XX Congress of PCUS and the spreading of Chruščëv secret report, the rebellion in Hungary, crisis of the polish regime, which stirred also the italian communist realities, and even Gramscian studies were touched.

The whole scenary is considered on the following historical introduction: for the analysis I included an essential survey has been Gramsci conteso[10], where Liguori presents the widest debates spread out in Italy from 1922 to 1996 and I found useful too, in a deepest political sight, an older work by G. C. Jocteau[11].

I would say that Cammett’s bibliography has been my main source for the retrieval of Gramscian studies; examining them, I found very few titles not included in his work.

Many of the texts I analized were essays appeared on scientific journals, rarely I could find complete collections of them in Piedmont, so that for them and for a very large number of rare books it was necessary for me to search in Rome (only a few at the library of Fondazione Isituto Gramsci and at Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, most of all my resarches took place at Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, where, in Falqui Fund[12] I could found lots of studies about Gramsci and literature). I’ve retrieved essays on minor magazines at the library of Istituto Gramsci Emilia-Romagna and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence.

On every report or when I found it useful, I gave internal links through their codes.

For this work I’d like to thank Fondazione Istituto Gramsci piemontese with the former library director Rosangela Zosi and Matteo d’Ambrosio.

Thanks to my colleagues dott. Gesualdo Maffia and dott.ssa Filomena Pompa for their support.