Households of Patience
John Foot, 9 June 1994
Antonio Gramsci: Letters from Prison
edited by Frank Rosengarten, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
Columbia, 374 pp., £27.50, March 1994,0 231 07558 8 Show More
edited by Frank Rosengarten, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
Columbia, 374 pp., £27.50, March 1994,
Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings
edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Virginia Cox.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £40, January 1994,0 521 41143 2 Show More
edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Virginia Cox.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £40, January 1994,
“... In 1927, Antonio Gramsci was in chains, about to begin a nightmarish 19-day journey from Sicily to Milan’s San Vittore prison, when he met two ‘common criminals’ in a Palermo waiting-room. One of them refused to accept that he was indeed Gramsci ‘because Antonio Gramsci must be a giant and not such a tiny man.’ Disappointed, the man, Gramsci reported, ‘said nothing more, withdrew to a corner, sat down on an unmentionable contraption and stayed there, like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, meditating on his lost illusions ... ”
