Eighty
years ago, on April 27, 1937, Antonio Gramsci died
after spending his last decade in fascist prison. Recognized later for the
theoretical work in his prison notebooks, Gramsci’s political contributions
started during the Great War when he was a young linguistic student at the
University of Turin. Even then, his articles in the socialist press challenged
not only the war, but Italian liberal, nationalist, and Catholic culture.
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Português |
At
the beginning of 1917 Gramsci was working as a journalist in a local Turin
socialist newspaper, Il Grido del Popolo (The
Cry of the People) and collaborating with the Piedmont edition of Avanti!, (Forward!). In the first
months after Russia’s February Revolution,
news about it was still scarce in Italy. They were largely limited to the
reproduction of articles from news agencies of London and Paris. In Avanti! some Russia coverage used
to come out in the articles signed by “Junior” a pseudonym of Vasilij Vasilevich
Suchomlin, a Socialist Revolutionary Russian exile.
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Italiano |
To
supply the Italian Socialists with reliable information, the leadership of the
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) sent a telegram to Deputy Oddino Morgari, who was
in Hague, asking him to go to Petrograd and get in touch with the
revolutionaries. The trip failed and Morgari returned to Italy in July.