Recent, tiresome efforts to turn Gramsci into a victim (or enemy) of Communism have earned a reply from the famous Communist's grandson ...
My relationship to my grandfather goes beyond my interest in his life and his ideas. As his grandson and in a way his disciple, I feel a duty to defend his memory and also the cause for which he lost his life, from manipulation and all kinds of speculation. Recently, new attempts to place Gramsci in opposition to the communist movement or even make him a victim of communism have intensified. Many Italian writers from Massimo Caprara to Giancarlo Rehner are very partial to this view. [8] So it is said, for example, that Gramsci was abandoned by the Soviet party as well as by his Russian family. According to Lehner, it was the Italian interior ministry that paid for his very expensive medical treatment between 1934 and the time of his death. Now, having recently found Tatiana’s letters to his family, we know for certain that this was not the case. In fact Giulia regularly sent large sums of money to Tatiana for the care of her husband, money certainly granted to them by the Soviet authorities.I won’t go through all the rubbish that has accumulated over the years, starting from the fantasies of Caprara, Togliatti’s former secretary, who insinuated that Giulia Schucht had been sent by the Soviet secret services to seduce Gramsci; that her sister Tatiana had been hired by the same secret services to spy on him; that the Schucht family left Gramsci’s children in ignorance of their father’s ideas . . . This rubbish piles up all the way to the reverend Luigi de Magistri’s claims of a deathbed conversion, and the testimony of an old lady who had also been cared for in the Quisisana clinic to the effect that my grandfather had committed suicide by jumping out of a window—or been murdered.
Would that these were the last myths about my grandfather and our family. But they are not. The mythology on Gramsci (and not only him) continues to proliferate, in conditions of general cultural degradation. That degradation, reinforced by the mass media’s manipulation of consciousness, is characteristic of what Herman Hesse in his novel The Glass Bead Game called ‘the Age of the Feuilleton’, an absurd time when creativity and true research are replaced by reciprocal citations. I believe it is our duty—as activists, as scholars, as intellectuals and also as simple citizens—to fight these malignant tendencies, if we want to survive with dignity in ‘this great and terrible world’."
