In Rome, Silone found some refuge with political friends. In August 1919, he was elected to the youth organization of the USR and quickly assumed the role of secretary-general, joining his colleagues in a critique of both reformist and democratic socialism. He was intransigent in his “maximalist” position within the PSI. The Russian Revolution had electrified Italy as it had the rest of Europe, and Silone too felt the immense hope that had been ignited with the events in St. Petersburg. Silone gravitated to the wing dominated by Amadeo Bordiga, editor of the official newspaper L’Avanguardia. Bordiga advocated expelling the more moderate members of the party, as demanded by Lenin. In this he was opposed by Antonio Gramsci and his Ordine Nuovo group from Turin. Gramsci, from a poor Sardinian family, had earned a scholarship to study at the University of Turin, where he met Palmiro Togliatti, who, unlike the other two, had been born into a middle-class family in Genoa. Gramsci and Togliatti, along with Silone, would be among the founders of the Italian Communist Party in January 1921. Silone, although the junior colleague, was not intimidated by his more learned comrades. While his later polemic with Togliatti became well known, his relationship with Gramsci was more complicated.
On January 10, 1920, Silone was named editor of L’Avanguardia and promulgated the more radical, “maximalist” position of the youth federation while establishing close contacts with the international cell in Zurich directed by Willi Münzenberg, considered Lenin’s spokesperson. Silone would remain in contact with Münzenberg even after the Italian writer’s divorce from politics, until Münzenberg’s 1940 death by hanging in Marseilles. Silone was not alone in thinking that Stalin had a hand in Münzenberg’s demise.
Silone continued his editorial work for the party with the weekly L’Avanguardia and as editor of Avanti! International developments were to have an inordinate impact on the evolution of socialism in Italy. The second congress of the Communist (Third) International met in Moscow in July and August 1920, closing with a list of twenty-one points that were required for admission to the Third International. Three points in particular had dire implications for Italian socialism. Point 7 declared that “notorious opportunists” such as Filippo Turati (the grand old man of Italian socialism who rejected the violent overthrow of society and advocated a peaceful and legal transition to socialism) and Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani (brother of the painter Amedeo) could “not be tolerated.” Point 17 insisted that any party that wished to belong to the Third International had to be named Communist Party of . . . (that is, “Communist Party of Italy,” rather than “Italian Communist Party”; hence the official abbreviation of PCd’I rather than the more common PCI adopted later). The twenty-one points ended with an admonition: Those members who disagreed with the conditions and theses formulated by the Communist International were to be expelled from the party. The PSI in theory agreed to these conditions but in typically Italian fashion “reserved the right to apply the conditions in its own way.” What the PSI revealed instead was a failure to understand how and why the Moscow International was created in the first place. The solution was put off to the next annual meeting of the PSI, scheduled for January 1921 in the resort city of Livorno.
With its severe neoclassical façade of stone and honey-colored stucco, the Teatro Goldoni was chosen as the site of the XVII Congress of the PSI attended by three thousand delegates on January 15, 1921. Beneath architect Giuseppe Cappellini’s crystal dome, the delegates had arranged themselves from the left (Antonio Gramsci, Amadeo Bordiga, Umberto Terracini) to a center occupied by Giacinto Menotti Serrati; to the right were Turati and the reformists. Garlands (left over from the Christmas holidays) festively decorated the boxes while a large photograph of an imposing Marx hung over the stage. In the halls, Vincenzo Vacirca accused Nicola Bombacci of being an impotent revolutionary. Bombacci responded by drawing his pistol. Only the timely interventions of Bordiga and Terracini avoided the shedding of blood. (Revealingly, Bombacci went on to become a notorious Fascist, the so-called “Communist in a blackshirt”; fittingly, he ended his days alongside the executed Mussolini, hanged upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.) Even an innocuous motion to send a message of protest to the current prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, deploring Fascist street violence, was drowned out.
In this atmosphere, Silone took the podium. He was confident, almost to the point of arrogance. Not yet twenty-one but speaking on behalf of the Socialist Youth Federation and recalling the German Communist Karl Liebknecht (assassinated along with Rosa Luxemburg in 1919), Silone resolutely declared their adherence to the Third International, the expulsion of the reformists and moderates, and the creation of a new Communist Party of Italy. Bordiga and Terracini rose to second Silone. The latter appeared on stage in his hat and with briefcase in hand, melodramatically emphasizing that for the left wing of the PSI, “it was time to go.” Antonio Gramsci did not have a speaking role as there was a worry that his support of Mussolini’s 1914 thesis (from absolute neutrality in the Great War to “relative” neutrality and eventually intervention) would harm the cause. But Gramsci’s newspaper in Turin, L’Ordine Nuovo, sported the headline “May Turati Take the Cadaver of the Late Socialist Party and Make It the Footstool for His Senile Ambition. Communists, Forward!” By the last day of the conference, January 20, a split was inevitable. The Bulgarian Hristos Kabakchiev and the Hungarian Matyas Rakosi, representing Lenin in place of Zinoviev and Bukharin (who were not permitted entry into Italy), were adamant: There could be no compromise. The twenty-one points were to be accepted in their entirety and without any reservation. Serrati realized the center could not hold. Bordiga then convened the Communists at the Teatro San Marco in Livorno to declare the birth of the Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I, Communist Party of Italy, until May 24, 1943, and the end of the Comintern, when it became the PCI or the Italian Communist Party). In the waning days of January 1921, Silone’s group, now the Communist Youth Federation, met in Florence. For Silone, the stress of the past few weeks was overwhelming and he collapsed, coughing up blood. A period of rest was ordered.
So began his clandestine career in the PCI, with the resulting toll on his psyche and body. For years, he adapted himself to “living like a foreigner in my own country,” relinquishing his name, his family, his hometown. “The party became family, school, church and barracks,” he wrote in 1949. “Outside of it the rest of the world was to be entirely destroyed.” A half century after the event, Silone recalled that the atmosphere in Livorno was “certainly not euphoric.” There was a seriousness and consciousness of the gravity of the occasion, and even a painful awareness perhaps that—with Fascists controlling the streets of Italy—the revolutionary moment had already passed.
Notwithstanding his precarious health, Silone was named to the central committee of the youth federation. In addition, he was named to a delegation that would meet with Lenin at the International scheduled for June 1921. Years later in a radio interview, Silone recalled that “there were no hotels in Moscow and the food was scarce. But what did it matter? Every day I left the house and found the streets filled with people cleaning up, repairing a roof, deciding things. The Futurists were painting on walls, the poets recited verse to passersby, everyone was contributing to remaking society.”
That first encounter with Lenin was still a vivid memory almost fifty years later: “The first time I saw him, in Moscow in 1921, the apotheosis had already begun. Lenin now lived between myth and reality.” When Lenin entered a room, the result was a physical, palpable charge of electricity, a contagious enthusiasm, not unlike the presence of the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Russian exerted a religious fascination among the revolutionaries, based on what Silone called “the charisma of the victor.” Surely Silone was conscious of the Greek and religious etymology of “charisma” as a gift, favor, or grace from the gods. And yet, even this very first meeting was tainted with the seed of doubt. Silone’s comparison of Lenin to the pope was tinged with irony. Upon speaking with Lenin, Silone noted that the m
ystical façade soon faded and one was struck by the Russian’s capacities (a skill for rapid synthesis) and defects (contemptuous judgments, peremptory decisions). Noting that Lenin read the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera with the help of his knowledge of French, Silone remarked that he read with blinders on, refusing to recognize that the Italian situation was far different from the Russian. Lenin considered Bordiga closest to the Bolshevik position but criticized him for “anarchist” tendencies. The Russian also failed to discern the revolutionary potential of Gramsci’s factory councils in Turin, likening them to traditional trade unions. Even Lenin’s criticism of the PSI was unfair in that its leaders (Turati, Claudio Treves, and Modigliani) had always espoused positions different from traditional European democratic socialism first broached by Eduard Bernstein in 1899. And although Lenin had the good fortune of dying before the “bureaucratic involution” that had defused the revolutionary aspects of the revolution, he was still responsible for the repression that had followed from “democratic centralism.”
Silone refused to be cowed by the prestige of the Russians. When Lenin took to the podium to criticize the Italians, Silone—responding in French and defending his colleagues—was called to task by Trotsky. At issue were the ramifications of the split with the PSI and the emerging dependence of the PCd’I on the Russians. So began a conflicted and discordant relationship with the Russians that was never to end, even with Silone’s expulsion from the party a decade later. Even before his ejection, Silone was a difficult case for the Communists; in the “family album,” his faded photograph is one that the party sought to purge since 1931, a page to be turned over quickly. He was to be banished from collective memory and, if possible, from history.
Silone always claimed to have viewed the Russians with a skeptical eye. What struck him most about the Russians was that “even in truly exceptional personalities like Lenin and Trotsky was an absolute incapacity to discuss with fairness any opinions contrary to their own.” The dissident, by definition, was a traitor. The irony, which Silone did not fail to point out, was that self-proclaimed materialists and rationalists affirmed “the primacy of morality over intelligence.” It reminded Silone of the heresy trials of the past.
In an interview after Silone’s death, Camilla Ravera, another important party leader, recalled that in those early years of clandestine activity (1923–24) Silone was impetuous and quickly came to the notice of the Fascist police. He avoided all forms of rhetoric or demagoguery and was “ironic to the core.” Without considering either his temperament or his precarious health, party leaders sent him on missions abroad. When the political waters had calmed down a bit, he was permitted to return to Italy; it was then that Ravera met Silone. She was struck by his seriousness. One day he appeared at party headquarters with the latest issue of the youth newspaper. Its headline read: “Shitty Work for a Shitty Salary” (Al salario di merda, lavoro di merda). Silone was incensed. “It’s true that we must be severe with fascism,” Silone said on that occasion, “but to be severe we must be serious and to be serious we need a serious language and not words thrown about like this.” Ravera confirmed that Antonio Gramsci had been among the first to notice Silone’s literary talents. “We must always remember,” Gramsci admonished his colleagues, “that Pasquini [Silone’s party name at the time] is not a politician but a writer. We must make sure that he does not lose the possibility to develop as a writer and not give him too many difficult tasks as a politician.” Years later, Ravera reflected that Gramsci had been right all along and that perhaps the party had placed too much of a burden on the young writer. Ravera found Silone to be emotional, sensitive, but also affectionate, fraternal, and very cordial. She detected a thin skin on the young man from the provinces, perhaps intimidated by his urban and urbane intellectual colleagues: “Every little thing that was pointed out to him, every criticism, even if very benevolent, would immediately put him in crisis.”
Originally allied with Bordiga, by 1925 Silone supported Gramsci as leader of the party. But a year later, Gramsci, notwithstanding his parliamentary immunity, was arrested by the Fascist police. (The public prosecutor at trial had demanded, “We must keep this mind from working for the next twenty years!” Instead, Gramsci spent the next decade in prison at work on his prison notebooks, published posthumously, and fundamentally changing the course of Western Marxism.) Years later, in an interview with the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, Silone sketched a psychological profile of Gramsci that revealed their sometimes contradictory, and often ambiguous, relationship:
I knew him well, but I haven’t yet written or said anything about him. He cannot be defined in two sentences. He had a very intense inner life; at times he could even seem distracted or lazy. But all of a sudden, without any warning, while we would be discussing mundane subjects, he would begin to speak without telling us that he was about to say something of fundamental importance, which would force us to change our actions, revealing a new perspective on a problem. At first, he was a libertarian Socialist, not completely an anarchist, but almost; his enthusiasm for the Soviets and the motives he ascribed to them represented the freest form of liberty . . . His character? He could be cheerful or downright ferocious . . . but this often occurs in timid people. His infirmities [Gramsci was a hunch-back and often ill] kept him from participating in meetings or large conferences; he therefore was not comfortable in public debate with his opponents. Behind the protection of the page, attack is easier. It goes without saying: He was very intelligent.
For Silone, there was a “fundamental ambiguity” in Gramsci, “two contradictory aspects of his thought” that bequeathed to the Italian left a contested legacy: the question of power, which vacillates between the libertarian and the tyrannical. Even his most ardent followers, Silone suggested, would recognize the necessity of “stripping Gramsci of an artificial gramscismo, to de-mystify him.” To so nakedly criticize a figure who, by 1958, through the publications of his Prison Notebooks and his martyrdom in a Fascist prison had become the patron saint of Italian Marxists, was to court ostracism by the cultural hegemony of the political left.
On December 22, 1921, at the direction of the PCd’I, Silone took up a new position as editor of the party paper, Il Lavoratore, in Trieste. It was in that northeastern town that Silone first met Gabriella Seidenfeld. Since Camilla Ravera had “baptized” Silone as “Sereno,” Seidenfeld adopted the name “Serena.” Together, “Sereno” and “Serena” took up party tasks in the border city. Ravera noted that Gabriella Seidenfeld was one of the few who “understood him very well even during these strange emotional episodes.”
Gabriella Seidenfeld, one of three sisters, had been born in 1897 in Fiume into an observant Jewish family of modest means, originally from Slovakia. “Pious people, timid before God, rigorously observant, believing in the coming of the Messiah.” One day Gabriella’s sister “the librarian” returned home with a biography of the Russian revolutionaries: Sofia Perovskaya, Vera Figner, and others. Finishing the book, the three sisters each burst out with the same declaration: “I want to be a revolutionary!” and soon after marched off to the local office of the Communist Party, declaring their intention to enroll. After listening politely—albeit with some amusement—to their confused speeches, an old comrade looked at them and asked with more than a touch of condescension, “Do you know what socialism really is?” “But of course,” they responded in unison and were duly enrolled.
Notwithstanding her membership in the PCI, Gabriella managed to find work in a bank. With her two sisters in Rome and her mother’s death, Gabriella found herself alone in Trieste with her aging father. On meeting her, Silone asked if she knew German. The Communist Youth International, which had its seat in Berlin, was looking for someone who was bilingual German-Italian and Silone thought Gabriella would be the right person for the job. In Fiume, Gabriella’s situation was deteriorating rapidly. Twice the police searched her home and she was under surveillance at all times. So when Silone wrote to her from
Rome, suggesting that she move to Berlin, she decided to accept. Seidenfeld’s father died several years later, never seeing his daughter again. All her other relatives were eventually deported to concentration camps by the Germans in 1943.
After having worked a few weeks with Silone, Seidenfeld was able to offer a subtle portrait of the man:
He was a solitary type, sickly, with sad eyes. Very intelligent. He told me of his life after the death of his mother in the earthquake, a mother whom he adored. He fled the seminary and wandered the streets of Rome, penniless, spending many a night at the Coliseum. He also had a long stay in the Santo Spirito Hospital. He had been a revolutionary since the age of fifteen, when he led a peasant uprising.
In a letter from Marseilles, Silone wrote to Seidenfeld on the occasion of her birthday in 1924, addressing her as mia adorata vecchierella (my adored little old lady):
I wish I could be with you today to ask forgiveness for the way I have treated you, little martyr of my nerves, or at least I would like to write you beautiful things. But you know that I’m not expansive with words, not even with Romoletto, not even with grandmother. I have never written letters of compliments, nor love letters and not even letters of friendship, and I don’t know which phrases to use. That’s why I would have wished very much to be with you and I would have told you all the tender things I feel for you.
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