by Primo Levi
For these reasons I didn’t read much; through Men and Not Men I had come to know the forceful personality of Elio Vittorini, but I did not yet know his other books. I had known Cesare Pavese both through reading him and in person, but we remained apart because we are both shy, though with different motivations.
I realize that I had at that point read a greater number of foreign books than Italian ones, and more willingly. It was probably a reaction to the regimen of isolation or at least of censorship that fascism and the war had imposed on Italy.
Thinking back on those times, I think I can claim that not only my attention but that of the entire country was far from the “pure” literary event. Fundamental, urgent, and even exciting problems were hanging in the air: the constitution, the institutional referendum, the acceptance or rejection of political blocs. Many years had to go by before all these developments could become the subject of literature, perhaps through transfigurations or symbolic representations.
Tuttolibri 2, no. 24 (June 19, 1976)
Primo Levi to the Author
Dear Roberto,
When, in the summer of ’74, you mentioned to me that you intended to write a “thriller,” I was perplexed. You probably noticed—although I tried to hide it, because I am well aware that the things one ends up writing generally go beyond the writer’s intentions. You noticed because I’m not a good actor. Now that Greggio e pericoloso (Crude and Dangerous) has been written, I’ll make amends: you did well to write it, as in general you do well to do the things you do or intend to do.
I was afraid that your idea (your plot, to stay with the terminology), which you had explained to me, would produce a Pitigrilli-like book, updated and modernized, with jets in place of trains and techies in place of indolent viveurs, but, in short, with the same backdrop of anarchic and accommodating skepticism. Instead, I found much more. It’s true that your characters, even the supermen and superwomen, have something Pitigrillian: their insistent snobbery, their convoluted talk, their drinks, the landscapes that surround them—in fact, something (if we want to go back to the roots) D’Annunzian, not in the sense of D’Annunzio’s characters but with traces of D’Annunzio himself. Nevertheless, and, unlike what was notable in your novel The Robot and the Minotaur, the histrionics and the exhibitionism of the characters here have a light but perceptible ironic detachment that lifts the whole book far above the 007 level, and makes it rather a parody than an emulation of its vulgar and violent commercial prototypes.
That said, and these objections dismissed, I would like to add that this book of yours brought to mind some basic considerations about the job of writing: that is, about how one writes, why one writes, and what one writes about. In the case of Crude and Dangerous, I found myself allied with you in a common tendency we have, which could be defined as respect and courtesy for the reader. I think that one has to write for the reader, to provide him with joy or even just pleasure, and to make him a better person—not for oneself, not to shock or show off, not to make money.
Well, I don’t know what your motivations are, but, judging from the results, I think that, in writing this book, and the previous ones, you started from the assumption that the reader needs to be respected and not cheated, in terms of either quality or quantity, which is a good standard for any kind of supply operation or commercial or industrial transaction. Now, no reader could complain about your book: it is among the most generous that I have ever read, the mechanism is well lubricated and never slows down, and it guides you through twists and turns with coherence and courtesy, and with an acceptable balance of the plausible and the implausible, until the final somersault.
I have only one modest reservation, regarding the Heusler alloys, on page 327: obtaining them like that (aside from the fact that there is copper in chalcopyrite but not in pyrite) can’t be proposed even as a “slightly fantastic scientific idea”; energy is needed to reduce oxides and sulfides! But that’s the only reservation. The care in all the other details abundantly reveals a writer who has lived, not for long (lucky for him) but not in vain, and who has accumulated on the way such a wealth of colorful experiences, technological and linguistic, geographical and petrographical, sentimental and airportual, to be able “in jedem Wasser zu schwimmen,” to swim in every water (the translation is not for you, it’s for the less polyglot reader).
This very sum of experiences has equipped you with—and given you the ability to transmit to the reader—an energetic morality that is not popular today (and that, in my view, is necessary but not sufficient), the same that in another form you advocated in the Manual for an Improbable Salvation: that it is the duty of each of us, since it’s for the common good, to improve and correct ourself; that the defense of inefficiency is stupid; that it is better to know than to have. It’s true that your Philip Quartara proves to be rather hungry for dollars, but, precisely, he acquires them “knowingly,” and then puts them to good use.
As for your eclecticism, which allows you to jump from texts on electronics to thrillers and sci-fi, I find that there is nothing to criticize. Rather, I envy you: I think it’s good to have many talents, and I have never believed in literary genres.
Letter to Roberto Vacca, in Tuttolibri 2, no. 27 (July 10, 1976)
From Stalin’s Lagers1
One can’t but harbor respect for someone who has served, whatever the reason, seventeen years of deportation: even greater respect is due if, as is the case with Shalamov, the deportation was altogether gratuitous, or at least insanely disproportionate to the “crime” committed. Seventeen years of hunger, humiliation, illness, frost, close living, exhausting exertion, solitude: but, dominant over all other suffering, as the author himself asserts, anger. The anger of an innocent man who feels he has been trapped, for almost a lifetime, in a system at once barbaric and absurd. The limitless trap is Kolyma, a mining district in northeastern Siberia, four times as big as France, from which the book takes its title.
Thirty stories, organized in approximately chronological order (from 1937 to 1954), and not all centered on the person of the author: some, and perhaps they are the best ones, deliver in a few intense pages a tale worthy of Pirandello (excellent among them is the story entitled “Alias Berdy”) or the daily tragedy of work in the mines, or, again, a depiction of the harsh nature of the extreme north, crushed between a merciless sky and earth saturated with fossilized ice, and yet alive with a tragic beauty of its own.
Clinging to this hostile land are the deported, classified almost zoologically in a complex hierarchy with a meticulous and eloquent terminology. Terms that define the many categories of prisoners, or semi-prisoners, seem to be part of a spoken language, of a dark living language, because the prisoners constitute a true nation within the nation, with its own administration, economy, customs, laws, traditions. It is a nation whose history goes far back in Russian history, much further than Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, the memory of which is constant in Shalamov: a nation of convicts, founded on fierce exploitation and on an atavistic indifference toward time and suffering.
It is evident on every page how forced labor, arbitrary sentencing to decades of exile, the tearing apart of families are not marginal events, not a numerically small fringe in Stalin’s Russia. They can’t be disregarded, they defined an era and disabled a generation, they have been a model (perfectible like all models) for all subsequent concentration-camp regimes, and cast their shadow, unfortunately, on all the deficiencies, uncertainties, inertia, and silence of today’s Soviet Union.
It is painful to say, and it is not news: Stalinist terror and isolationism also transmit their paralyzing infection to their witnesses and their opponents. As I mentioned, men like Shalamov merit our respect anyway, but their stature is inferior to that of their peers who battled Hitler’s terror, or who today denounce the crimes committed by Western civilization in Asia and Africa. Their political development appears limited and crude: the label of “political prisoners” is affixed to them more or less at ran
dom, with the dual purpose of disseminating terror and recruiting free labor, and they bear it with Russian resignation (Tyutchev’s “infinite patience”) but without pride.
Shalamov’s pages rouse emotion and sympathy for the things they say, not for the manner in which they are said, and even less for the author’s posturing. In some way, Shalamov testifies to more than he would like, more than he knows, precisely because of his inadequacies and frustrations, the fact that he is a victim gratuitously. He hopes for nothing more than the end of his suffering; he has no star to aspire to. His despair, otherwise dignified and contained, does not end with liberation; it is the mute despair of someone who feels annihilated and no longer believes in anything, of someone who during decades of useless suffering has exhausted every political reason, indeed, every reason, to live. Paradoxically, the weakness of these stories (their confusion, stylistic uncertainty, imprecision, the deliberate omissions and those due to negligence) strengthens their documentary value. They seem to say: “Here, read and see what the Lager reduced me to.” Beyond the author’s intentions, this weakness (and the parallel weakness of certain assertions of a courageous man like Sakharov2) proves how half a century of forced disinformation can wear down the opposition more effectively than the much fiercer and more efficient Hitlerian terror, which did not have the time or the means to sever the age-old cultural bonds that tied Germany to the rest of Europe. The same political asphyxiation that debased socialism in the Soviet Union has debased its very opponents.
A further degradation can be perceived in the translation of these “Kolyma Tales,” which often adds obscurity to the (perhaps intentional) obscurities already present in the text. What does “a large circular petal similar to fingerprints” mean? Why is “a bucket of water equivalent to 100 grams of fat”? What is “the vaporization of lice in small pots”? And what to say of the “resin noose” and of the “poisonous bacilli”?
Tuttolibri 2, no. 37 (September 25, 1976)
1. Review of the Italian edition of Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov, published in English in 1980.
2. Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), a Russian physicist, was a dissident and a human-rights activist.
The Non-Writer Writer
I don’t mean to say that to write a book one must be a “non-writer,” but simply that I ended up with this designation without choosing it. I am a chemist. I arrived at the designation of writer because, captured as a partisan, I ended up in the Lager as a Jew.
My first book is the story of my year in Auschwitz, and the story of the book is long and strange. I had tried to write, despite the fear, from the time of my imprisonment: a few lines, annotations, notes for my relatives scribbled with a pencil stub and immediately destroyed, because there was no way to preserve them, except in my memory—to be found with them on your person was equal to an “act of espionage” and could therefore mean death. But such was the need to transmit my experience, to make others share it, in short to narrate, that I had already begun to do it there. I hoped, we all hoped, to live “in order to” tell what we had seen. This desire was not only mine; it belonged to all of us, and it appeared in the form of a dream, the same for many—I also happened to read it recently in the book of a Frenchwoman who was deported. It was a two-part dream. In the first part, one dreamed of rich, succulent, fragrant food, but the moment you brought it to your mouth something always happened: it disappeared, or it was taken away by someone, or between the starving person and the food a kind of barrier descended that made the act of eating impossible. The other dream was that of narrating, usually to a dear one; but here, too, the act was not completed. The interlocutor was indifferent, didn’t listen, and at a certain point would turn his back, walk away, disappear.
The symbolism of the double dream was very simple. I say this to emphasize that the need to eat and the need to tell were on the same level of primordial necessity. The food that vanishes and the story that can’t be finished conceal the same anguish of the unfulfilled need.
I brought with me this primordial and violent impulse to narrate when I returned, and I wrote right away, constructing the story around those lost notes, for two reasons. First, because what I had seen and experienced weighed inside me and I felt an urgency to free myself. Second, to satisfy a moral, civic, and political duty to bear witness. We Italian Jews who ended up in the Lager along with millions of other Jews, from all over Europe, for the sole crime of having been born, but, by luck, survived were a few dozen out of eight thousand deported: of my convoy, fifteen out of six hundred and fifty. People knew little, or knew dimly. I myself at the time didn’t know the full scale of the extermination being carried out on the basis of an insane ideology that was determined to kill those who were different simply because they were different.
But, in writing If This Is a Man, I had no literary ambitions; I did not plan to write a book, even less to become a writer. Indeed, I wrote the chapters not in chronological order but in order of urgency, beginning with the last, and I didn’t even bother to structure the book or to fix its fragmented nature. Once this was done, I began, or rather began again, to work as a chemist. For ten years. Only in 1958, when If This Is a Man was reissued, did the desire to write return. As for the book, 2500 copies were printed at the end of 1947 by a small publishing house, after others had rejected it. It was very well received by the critics, but, within a year or so, it was forgotten—even though, especially here in Turin, it was still talked about in some small circles, in particular among people affected by the facts narrated in the book. It’s understandable, if one thinks about it, that it was not found to be readable and that it got little attention. Times were hard. It was difficult to make a living, the wounds of war were vast and deep, people were preoccupied only with rebuilding on the ruins, they wanted nothing more than to forget and move on. But already by 1955–56 the climate had changed: people had read Vercors, Lord Russell of Liverpool, Poliakov, and many others, and had seen the documentaries filmed at the liberation of the camps; the Lager phenomenon was beginning to rouse a broader interest.
A prestigious publisher agreed to reprint If This Is a Man in ’58. It was immediately translated; young people read it, and they were interested. They invited me to talk about it, to explain, they asked questions. My third profession was beginning. Had I accepted all the requests that came to me from schools, all other activity would have become impossible. This fact put me in contact with a new reality, with the generation that is starting out in life. In the end, I collected these questions from young people, at least the ones with answers, in another school edition of If This Is a Man, which will be published soon.
Faced with a book that was moving along its own path, I realized that I had a new instrument in my hands, intended to weigh, to divide, to verify—like the ones in my laboratory, but flexible, quick, gratifying. I had told a story, why not do it again? The seed of writing had entered my blood. Thus The Truce was born, in which I narrated my return from Auschwitz. In the first book I had paid attention to “things”; I wrote the second with the awareness that I was capable of transmitting experiences, but with a purpose—to write clearly in order to find a connection with the public. It’s not very productive, or very useful, to write and not communicate. This was the gift that I received from my first book, with its limited audience: the realization that while speaking obscurely can mean speaking for posterity, what’s important in order to be understood by one’s intended audience is to be clear. Writing can communicate, can transmit information or even feelings. If it’s not comprehensible, it’s useless, it’s a cry in the wilderness, and the cry can be useful for the writer, but not for the reader. So maximum clarity and, the second rule, minimum clutter: that is, be compact, concentrated. The superfluous is damaging to communication as well, because it tires and bores the reader.
Contact with readers has enriched my life and brings me joy. But readers are an extremely blurred and vague phantom. I have created for myself a “perfect” reader, who is t
o the real reader as the “perfect gas” defined by physicists—that is, guided by simple laws—is to real gas. I write for him and to him, not for the critics, who are forced to be readers, or for myself. I can feel him next to me as I write, this model reader; he meets me willingly, he follows me, and I follow him. I want him to receive what I transmit without its fading or getting lost along the way. While I was writing The Truce, and much earlier as well, I was also writing short stories, each one based on a technical idea originating in the laboratory or in the factory. The world that surrounds us is extraordinarily fruitful, and because of this I decided to create a “crossing,”* a sort of intersection between writing and my experience as a chemist. With regard to the stories, many have asked if in giving narrative form to the flaws, small or large, of our world and of our civilization I intended to allude again to the Lager. I can answer: certainly not deliberately, in the sense that writing deliberately about reality in symbolic terms is not part of my intention. Then, whether or not there is a connection between the Lager and these intuitions—maybe, it’s possible, but I don’t know for sure. It doesn’t depend on me. “I,” as Palazzeschi1 used to say, “am only the author.”
Writing stories was also a writing about “things.” But I felt indebted to my daily job; I felt I had wasted an opportunity by not talking about an experience and a profession that many think of as arid, mysterious, and suspicious. I felt I had detected a certain partiality in the books I read. It was an impression that I’d had in the pit of my stomach for a long time and that was always finding new confirmation. Everyone knows how a pirate, an adventurer, a doctor, a prostitute lives. Of us chemists, transformers of matter, members of a profession with an illustrious ancestry, there isn’t much trace, and I thought it right to “fill the gap.” Thus The Periodic Table had its origin. Undoubtedly, the title was a provocation, as was giving each chapter, as a title, the name of an element. But it seemed to me opportune to make use of the chemist’s relationship with matter, with the elements, just as the Romantics of the nineteenth century used the “landscape”: chemical element = mood, as landscape = mood. Because for those who work with matter it is alive: mother and enemy, slothful and allied, stupid, inert, dangerous at times, but alive, as the founders well knew, working alone, unrecognized, unsupported, with mind and imagination. We are no longer alchemists, but anyone who has had anything to do with matter knows these things. Why not then create a drama where the characters are the elements that make up matter? Young people write to me: “If chemistry were the way you describe it, I would become a chemist.” It’s one of the compliments I’m fondest of. Entering the literary field as a chemist, I even fulfilled a vow. I owe my life to my profession. I would not have survived Auschwitz, had I not, after ten months of hard manual labor, entered a laboratory—where I continued to work as a manual laborer, but indoors. The designation of chemist, the fact that I was inserted—with my name at the time, that is, with my number—into the staff of the Buna factory, which belonged to I.G. Farbenindustrie, also may have protected me from the “selections,” because, as chemists, we were considered “formally useful.” And chemistry has provided me with the subject for a book and two short stories. I can feel it in my hand like a repository of metaphors: the more distant the other field, the further the metaphor is stretched. Yet this isn’t just me. Huxley and Proust did it. Anyone who knows what it means to reduce, concentrate, distill, crystallize also knows that laboratory operations have a long symbolic shadow.