While the PCI and Communist intellectuals in other countries tried to ignore the work, the critical reception around the world was intense. Typical was Angela Balabanoff, who wrote to Silone: “Dear comrade, I don’t know if I’ve read a book filled with such anguish and anxiety as yours since my adolescence.” Rudolf Jakob Humm compared it favorably to Gogol’s Dead Souls; Thomas Mann wrote that the book was the greatest expression of a consciousness—full of love—of the Italian people and an impassioned love of liberty. Stefan Zweig and Arturo Toscanini wrote to Silone of their immense regard for the book. Alfred Kazin called it “a compassionate parable.”
On the back of an August 25, 1937, letter from Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, inviting Silone to contribute to the magazine (Rahv notes his review of the recently published Bread and Wine in The Nation), Silone sketched a brief reply to those who had commented on the novel.
Just another word to refute a rapprochement of Bread and Wine with the Russian literature that flowered during the czarist repression of 1906–07, commonly known as the literature of the “God-seekers” [cercatori di Dio; bogoiskateli in Russian]. Whoever reflects a bit will be persuaded that Spina is not, from any point of view, similar to those “seekers of God.” Spina was moved to distance himself from religion by the prodding of purely ethical motives. The contrast between society—sustained and recognized by the church—and his sentiment of justice, of liberty, of human dignity was too great. The same spiritual forces that led him to communism distanced him from it when communism revealed itself to him, in its real politics, in an unacceptable form. Spina is never occupied by the metaphysical problem of the existence of God, and he has no nostalgia for Catholic dogma. The only impetus that torments him and goads him is an intuition of life in which the manner of conducting himself is completely at one with his moral sentiment.
Bread and Wine proved that Fontamara was not a one-book phenomenon; Silone could now consider himself a “writer.” Yet just as Bread and Wine was being published to almost universal critical acclaim, he refused the mantle of professional writer. “I force myself not to be a professional writer . . . I wish to be faithful to the first impulse that compelled me to write and to safeguard my work from the degradation that professionalism always brings. I wish to stand guard and save myself from ‘Literature.’ ” With characteristic irony and satire, he claimed to have no personal theory of art but admired those who did. He found them all valid, even when they contradicted each other. Nor should he be charged with negligence for failing to armor himself with a literary theory or ally himself with a literary school: “If, as a youth, I knew that I would become an author, then I certainly would have armed myself with a theory, but I became a writer by chance.” In an essay published in English during the war in New York and London, he refused to give an explanation of his work because “a novel cannot be explained without being demolished.”
In 1936, a group of exiled Italian intellectuals came together in Geneva for a new cultural initiative: the creation of a publishing house that would disseminate their work. Nuove Edizioni di Capolago took its name (suggested by Egidio Reale) from a similar publishing venture in the nineteenth century inspired by the exiled Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Its mission was to defend freedom of thought and to prepare for a post-Fascist Italy. Contributors were Socialists, Communists, anarchists, and republicans in the Mazzini tradition. Joining Silone and Reale were Gina Lombroso (daughter of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso), who published a memoir; Guglielmo Ferrero, whose novel Gli ultimi barbari: Liberazione was the inaugural volume of the house; Count Carlo Sforza, postwar ambassador to the United States; Gaetano Salvemini; and many others. Silone’s own Bread and Wine and The Seed Beneath the Snow were first published in Italian by Nuove Edizioni di Capolago in 1937 and 1942, respectively. Securing funds proved discouraging. Silone recalled having “forgotten that in the best cases, the Italians would more easily offer their lives than their wallets.” In 1943, along with Guglielmo Canevascini, Silone helped to establish the Ghilda del Libro, which published, among others, the works of Elio Vittorini and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Like a seedling breaking through the snow, Silone, even from his Swiss exile, could discern the first stirring of a post-Fascist reality. If victory in Ethiopia and the acquisition of an “African Empire” in 1936 had been the apogee of Fascist popularity, Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War began the long process of disengagement and eventual resistance to the regime. In the church, in factories and schools, in offices and on the farms, the Italians—through their “intrinsic spontaneity”—were beginning to take advantage of the chaos of war and the manifest abject moral and political failure of fascism to delineate a new vision for Italy. Fascism was falling into the very abyss it had created for itself: a now unbridgeable chasm between the state and civil society. Italy, which had been the first to spawn fascism, was likely to be the first country to create a post-Fascist society. The situation would be unprecedented, for Italy had “never really known a true democracy.”
The Seed Beneath the Snow
While Bread and Wine came to be seen as Silone’s “mature” work (he was in his midthirties at the time of its publication), The Seed Beneath the Snow was not accorded the same critical reception. Silone, though, felt it was his best novel.
Written in Zurich between 1939 and 1940, and published—again first in German—in 1941, it contradicted the pessimistic and tragic state of European affairs at the time. In fact, it might be read as Silone’s most hopeful work.
Pietro Spina, broken, disillusioned, on the verge of death, has returned after fleeing at the end of Bread and Wine to the countryside. Still hunted by the Fascist police, hiding in a stable with the company of only a donkey, he is discovered by the peasant owner and “sold” to his maternal grandmother, who nurses him back to physical and emotional health. He soon forges friendships with two odd characters, Simone the Weasel and Infante, a deaf-mute. In the stable, Spina undergoes a painful transformation, which leaves him spiritually stripped bare. He recounts to his grandmother how, one day, he noticed a seed germinating just outside the door of the stable.
At first I was afraid it was dead, but I gingerly used a bit of straw to move the earth around it and discovered a minute white shoot sprouting from it, a tender, living shoot of the shape and size of a tiny blade of grass. The whole of my being, the whole of my soul, Grandmother, concentrated around that small seedling. It worried me to death that I didn’t know exactly what to do to give it the best chance of survival. I still don’t know whether what I did was right or not, and I still worry about it. As a substitute for the protection provided by the stone that I had moved and to shelter it from the frost, I put a little earth on it, and every morning I melted some snow to water it; and I often breathed on it to give it some warmth. That clod of earth, with that small, weak treasure hidden inside it, alive though threatened by so many dangers, ended up acquiring in my sight the mystery, the familiarity, the sanctity of a maternal bosom. And since, for lack of anything else to drink, I too had to use the small amount of snow that I could gather through that opening, I tried to make sure it was as clean as possible, though there was always a slight flavor of wood and dung, a flavor of liquid earth, about it; and the result was that in a way that small seed and I lived on the same food; in a way we became real companions. I felt my life to be as fragile, as helplessly exposed, and as endangered as that of that small, abandoned seed beneath the snow.
Spina explains to his grandmother why he will refuse the pardon from the government that she so desperately tries to obtain for him. In the end, Spina—in the name of friendship that has now replaced ideology in his mind and heart—offers himself up as a sacrifice to the powers seeking his destruction.
World War II
Although Carlo Rosselli could not secure Silone’s collaboration in the anti-Fascist cause before his assassination in 1937, Silone did return to active (or at least underground) political acti
vity during World War II. After his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1931, Silone swore that he would not return to the world of politics. His status as a refugee in Switzerland and his registration with the Swiss Police for Foreigners expressly forbade any political activity. (The Swiss had instituted these antiliberal measures in order to avoid the wrath of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in a desperate attempt to maintain Switzerland’s neutral status and prevent an invasion of the country.) But World War II changed Silone’s mind and he slowly reentered the political struggle against fascism and Nazism by working with the PSI. He and a few others established the Centro Estero (Foreign Office) of the PSI in Zurich in 1940. From there, Silone worked with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) in coordinating assistance to the anti-Fascist Resistance working within Italy (hence the later charges of “spying” for the CIA).
Even in “safe” Zurich, the war could touch Silone in odd ways. A Luftwaffe raid in London on September 15, 1940, hit a warehouse near Sir Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral miraculously survived, but the entire first print run of the English translation of Silone’s Bread and Wine was destroyed.
In the midst of the war, he penned an eloquent manifesto titled “The Third Front.” The document was both the first issue of what was to be the organ of the Italian Socialist Party in exile and a call to civil disobedience against the Fascist regime. While Stalin was imploring his allied counterparts Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front in the West, Silone insisted on combating fascism on the third or domestic front. While the two military fronts might attack fascism and Nazism, it was this third, domestic front, according to Silone, that would be decisive in defeating the social and political conditions that had given rise to fascism. The military defeat of the Fascist powers was to be considered only as a prelude to the decisive struggles that would unfold on the third front.
On December 1, 1942, Il Terzo Fronte was published. It was a trenchant critique of the Fascist regime and a call to civil disobedience on the part of Italians still living in Italy. “Italians!” it begins. “Our nation is on the eve of grave and decisive events. Military defeat is on the horizon, and with it, also the end of the hated, corrupt, and oppressive Fascist regime, so ardently hoped for by millions of Italians. The Fascist dictatorship already totters on its base of mud tainted with blood. Its twenty-year reign is a fraudulent bankruptcy, a summary of failures: a failure of foreign policy; a failure of economic autarchy; a failure of the corporate state; a failure in educating the youth; and a failure in the formation of a new ruling class.”
Silone reminded Italians that fascism had promised them an empire and instead had made Italy a colony of Germany; it had promised prosperity and had reduced Italians to beggars; it had promised social peace and fraternity between workers and owners through its sham ideology of the corporate state but had instead turned a blind eye to rampant corruption, cronyism, and the sacking of the public sphere in favor of a few wealthy “sharks.” The Fascist regime had promised the restoration of the traditional values of Italian society but had dragged the people into the “barbarous cult of the swastika.” Mussolini had thundered from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia in Rome that when taking to the skies, the Italian air force “would darken the sun” and that Italian tanks “would make the earth tremble.” But when war finally came—war that the Fascist regime had glorified for twenty years—fascism sent soldiers to the front who, while brave and full of valor, were ill equipped, poorly dressed, malnourished, and under the command of the criminally incompetent. By now, with the military failures in Greece, Albania, and the Russian front (where Italian losses were frighteningly high and from where there were reports of cannibalism), all segments of the Italian population were conscious of the universal failures of the regime. It was time for the Italian people to reestablish those spontaneous ties of spiritual affinity that the totalitarian regime had attempted to smother. It was time for the Italian people to reclaim their human dignity, their honor as free citizens rather than degraded subjects, and to reassert their own natural rights.
Silone made it clear that the PSI insisted that freedom could not be granted from above by the Allies: “Our liberation can be accomplished only by ourselves.” A democracy brought about by a coup d’état led by an elite “is not a real democracy.” The democratic and liberal character of the future Italian state would depend on the extent of popular participation in the struggle against fascism. While not everyone could carry arms, everyone could participate in acts of civil disobedience. Silone was quick to point out that civil disobedience was not necessarily armed insurrection or the general strike; it was rather “a fact of individual conscience.” Every honest citizen must feel a repugnance in collaborating with a hateful regime and its infamous war. Civil disobedience is, above all, “a transformation of the spirit, a refusal to acquiesce to a regime that is contrary to reason and conscience.” It is accessible to all and, if practiced by a great number of people, a political weapon of immense potential, a weapon capable of paralyzing the repressive apparatus of the regime and hastening its collapse.
Civil disobedience meant ignoring laws, decrees, regulations; or, when this was not possible, applying the letter of the law if, in doing so, one produced a result contrary to that demanded by the regime. Civil disobedience meant not paying taxes, or paying late; it meant sabotaging munitions work, refusing to turn over crops to the state, running the trains late, resigning from the civil service or obstructing the oppressive functioning of the state from within, students and teachers refusing to participate in the numerous ceremonies that marked the academic calendar. In short, each category of citizen should find its own manner of expressing civil disobedience.
By bringing together the political problem of the country with a moral task, civil disobedience would synthesize the exigencies of thought with the responsibility for action. It would transform antifascism —which until that point had been mostly intellectual—into an enthusiastic spirit of sacrifice, an audacious conquering of freedom. Antifascism would then become conscious of its own power.
Silone was not without some sense of the difficulties involved. He knew that in a country dominated for two decades by dictatorship and a long history of conformism, civil disobedience “was a new fact in the history of our nation.” The PSI was demanding of Italians something that was “unusual but not impossible.” Ideally, it would “reveal the Italians to themselves.” Individuals could find through civil disobedience an escape from the “fearful atomism” through which the dictatorship had enslaved the population; one would no longer feel alone; ties of friendship, solidarity, and fraternity, all smoldering just beneath the ashes, would create a free society. And recalling the sacrifice and assassination of Giacomo Matteotti and the Rosselli brothers, Silone cautioned that “there will be victims,” but paraphrased one of Mussolini’s more ridiculous aphorisms: It was “better to live one day as a man than a hundred years as a slave.”
Not coincidentally, the same day that the manifesto appeared, a broadcast from Radio Moscow went out over the airwaves of Europe, revealing the existence of a small cell of Socialists working in Switzerland. This was a base betrayal by Stalin since the Soviets knew the Swiss police would now be forced to arrest Silone and his colleagues. Two weeks later, Silone and the entire staff of the Foreign Office of the PSI—consisting of a total of three others—were indeed arrested.
The first interrogation took place on December 15, 1942. Immediately afterward, Silone was concerned that since the questions (and his answers) had been in German, he may have been misunderstood. Perhaps this was merely an expedient to have him write a more persuasive defense of his position in Italian; for by 1944, Silone had spent almost fourteen years in Switzerland and his voluminous correspondence was sometimes written in German.
His first concern was to clarify his political ideology. Arrested under laws directed against anarchists and Communists, Silone protested. As he poi
nts out in his letter to the Swiss federal attorney general’s office, “between us and the Communists there has been—and continues to be—a struggle with daggers drawn. The Communists consider us to be, with good cause, the major obstacle and danger for their movement to come to power in Italy.” In fact, Silone had worked for some time to prevent the fusionist wing of the PSI, led by Pietro Nenni, to consummate a merger with the PCI. He pointed out, not without some bitterness, that the catalyst for his arrest and that of his three colleagues had been the broadcast from Radio Moscow. In this way, the Swiss Federal Police had rendered Stalin a very welcome service.
More important, Silone was eager to clarify his own brand of socialism. During the interrogations, his political philosophy had been described by the Swiss police as “social democratic.” But this was equivocal. In the lexicon of the time, “social democratic,” at least for Silone, meant a Marxist, centralized, statist socialism. In philosophy, his socialism sought to counter economic determinism with an ethical foundation; in place of centralization, federalism; in economics, replacing bureaucratic statism with a pluralistic system permitting freedom of initiative and the self-governing of the producers.
Silone took upon himself the burden of the accusations against the Foreign Office of the PSI. “I declare complete political and moral responsibility for the political direction and ideological turn carried out in the name of the Foreign Office.” In particular, Silone confessed to having written the call for civil disobedience and the initiative to publish a newspaper with the title The Third Front. In order to protect other anti-Fascist Italian exiles then living in Switzerland, Silone claimed that this had been done only through his collaboration with members of the PSI in Italy.
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