Hermit in Paris

by Italo Calvino

  The rumbles of thunder in 1956 swept away all the masks and screens. Many who come to self-awareness in that hour of truth went back to the revolutionary origins of Communism (and almost all of them accepted a new mythical image, one that looked different but was no less prone to mystification: Mao Tse Tung). Others took the more practical road of recognizing what existed to try to reform it, some with rationalist optimism, others with a sense of limits, of avoiding the worst, of the relativity of the results. I followed neither of these paths: I lacked the temperament and conviction to be a revolutionary, and the modesty of the reformist aims (both in the Socialist and capitalist world) seemed incapable of curing me of the vertigo I suffered as a result of the abysses I had hovered over. So although I remained friendly with both groups, I gradually whittled down the room that politics occupied in my interior space. (Meanwhile politics gradually occupied more and more space in the world outside.)

  Perhaps politics remains tied in my experience to that extreme situation: a sense of inflexible necessity and a search for the different and the multiple in a rigid world. So I will conclude by saying: if I have been (though very much in my own way) a Stalinist, this was not by chance. There are elements that characterize that epoch, which are part of me: I don’t believe in anything that is easy, quick, spontaneous, improvised, rough and ready. I believe in the strength of what is slow, calm, obstinate, devoid of fanaticisms and enthusiasms. I do not believe in any liberation either individual or collective that can be obtained without the cost of self-discipline, of self-construction, of effort. If this way of thinking seems to some people Stalinist, well all right, I will have no difficulty in admitting that in this sense I am a bit Stalinist still.

  [La Repubblica, 16 December 1979. Contribution to a supplement dedicated to Stalin, on the centenary of his birth. (Author’s note.)]

  The Summer of ’56

  That summer of ’56 was full of tension and hope. The 20th Soviet Congress had taken place in Moscow, Khrushchev seemed the champion of a new phase in world Communism, and the first signs of thaw were in the air. We militant Communists were convinced that that process would be irreversible and also quite swift. Thinking back on it now, after twenty-four years and after all that has happened, confirms me in my view that history is not an easy work with a happy ending, but a long, tiring and slow process, devoid of any perceptible direction or meaning.

  However, in those days, this was not what I felt. When I found out about the Khrushchev report which denounced Stalin’s crimes, after an initial moment of astonishment I felt as though I had been set free. That was the reaction of all my comrades then. You ask whether there was in us, in the party, a sense of defeat or humiliation: no, as far as I know, there was not. I shall try to describe exactly my reaction, which was very similar to that of others: for me de-Stalinization and the bearing of witness to the truth emanating from Moscow represented the fulfilment of Socialism. For years the country of Socialism, the USSR, had also seemed to us a dark place, governed by iron rules, by an inflexible austerity, by terrible punishments and ruthless logic. We put all this on the side of the ‘siege’, of the revolutionary struggle. But when Khrushchev denounced Stalin before the Central Committee and then to the Party Congress, we thought: right, peace is flourishing, now the fruits of Socialism will be delivered, and that oppression, the secret anguish we felt, will disappear.

  In Poland the Stalinist group had been removed. Gomulka had been released. In Hungary the renewal of the party had been even more comprehensive and radical. In place of the old Stalinists were Communists who had suffered imprisonment and removal from all party office. In all this we saw the confirmation of our hopes, a genuine renewal, a turning-point of historic importance.

  My idea was that after that regeneration and restructuring, the cause of Socialism would be strengthened enormously everywhere. In Italy I believed that many people who had remained distant from the Communist party because of the tragic and ferocious system we were an integral part of, would join us, would fight the same struggles as ourselves, and would share our ideals of humanity and equality.

  I was part of the Federal Committee in Turin, I worked for the Einaudi publishing house, I frequented the intellectual cadres in Turin, Milan and Rome. But in those months of great creative fervour, the ruling group and the intellectuals met with the rank-and-file militants, something that had not happened with that intensity probably since the time of the Resistance and Liberation. Endless discussions, whole nights given over to assemblies, debates, in a word, tremendous political passion.

  That summer Lukács came to Italy.58 In Hungary he was once more a flag to rally round as well as a national hero. I met him with Cesare Cases who was accompanying him on his Italian trip. Lukács brought us confirmation of our hopes for a new kind of Communism. Almost in those very same days we had further confirmation, one that was even more important for those of us in the PCI [Italian Communist Party]: the interview with Togliatti in Nuovi Argomenti.59 I recall very well the effect it had on me when I read it on the front page of l’Unità. He said, with intellectual depth, diplomatic finesse, but also (at last) with sincerity, the things I expected would be said. That morning I was in Rome. I had a rendezvous with Paolo Spriano at Villa Borghese.60 We walked along the paths of the park for a long time until, near the pond beside the Avenue of Magnolias, we met Longo.61 He was holding the string of a wooden model motor-boat belonging to a child who was with him. All three of us spoke with great passion about what was happening. I remember that Longo told us about when he was in Moscow, so many years before, when he was secretary of the Communist Youth. He mentioned the dark air there was everywhere, the lack of freedom not just for the citizens but also for the party militants. In short, it seemed to him as well that a great weight had been lifted from his chest.

  You ask me: if all of you, intellectuals, leaders, militants, had this weight on your chest, why on earth did you never think of removing it before this? Why had we had to wait for the signal from Moscow, from Khrushchev, from the Central Committee? And why then, despite everything, in that very year, 1956, did things end up as they did? Well. This was the reply that was given to you yourself, if I remember correctly, by Giancarlo Pajetta, § in a press conference after the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist party. You asked him more or less the same question that you are now asking me and he told you that when it comes to a choice between the revolution and the truth a revolutionary always chooses revolution. Personally I do not think that things are like that and I do not feel that that answer was acceptable. But at that time, twenty-four years ago, our perspective on things was more or less that. We Italian Communists were schizophrenic. Yes, I really think that that is the correct term. One side of our minds was and wanted to be a witness to the truth, avenging the wrongs suffered by the weak and oppressed, and defending justice against every abuse. The other side justified those wrongs, the abuses, the tyrannies of the party, Stalin, all in the name of the Cause. Schizophrenic. Split. I recall very clearly that whenever I happened to travel to some Socialist country, I felt profoundly uncomfortable, foreign, hostile. But when the train brought me back to Italy, whenever I crossed back over the border, I would ask myself: but here, in Italy, in this Italy, what else could I be but a Communist? That is why the thaw, the end of Stalinism, took a terrible weight from our chest: because our moral standing, our split personality, could finally be put together again, revolution and truth finally went back to being the same thing. This was, in those days, the dream and hope of many of us.

  In those days Vittorini came back to the party. He had left it a long time before and sympathized with radical, liberal-Socialist positions, but in 1956 he returned. He wanted to go to Budapest. He wanted to help with the reform and renewal. In Turin, the reform man, Celeste Negarville, had been sidelined for some time and the Federation was run by an old Stalinist, Antonio Roasio.62 But we thought that the time had come for him too to stand aside. Renewal was in the air. We waited,
day after day, for the hundred flowers of Socialism to bloom.

  In those months I wrote for Città Aperta the story ‘La gran bonaccia delle Antille’ (‘Becalmed in the Antilles’). I reread it just recently. It seems to me that it has not lost any of its meaning, if for no other reason than that it is evidence of a state of mind, and of a great opportunity missed. Those events estranged me from politics, in the sense that politics has since occupied in me a much smaller space than before. I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.

  Our hopes for renewal were concentrated on Giorgio Amendola.63 He had taken the place of Pietro Secchia64 at the head of the party’s organization. He maintained that we had already had our own 20th Congress the day Secchia had been removed from office. Amendola was the image of what I thought a Communist ought to be if he was to further rigorously and humanely Socialist ideals in a country like ours. Instead he was a terrible disappointment Perhaps I had not understood Amendola’s character properly. But whatever the case, he certainly was not the ‘new Communist’ we had in mind then. What was for me and for many of us an inner split that only brought suffering, was a natural state for him. Amendola was extremely rigorous, but at the same time he possessed all the wiles of a political man. And on that occasion it was the latter aspect that prevailed.

  The evening that the news arrived of the invasion of Hungary by the Red Army and of the entry of Russian armoured cars into Budapest, I was at dinner with Amendola in Turin, in Luciano Barca’s house: Barca was the editor of the Turin edition of l’Unità. Amendola has recalled this episode in one of his books. He had come to Turin to meet me and our other friends from Einaudi; to ‘keep us good’, because people realized that difficulties were on the way and we were showing signs of impatience. For me it was a decisive evening. While Amendola was talking, Gianni Rocca, editor-in-chief of l’Unità, phoned Barca. His voice was choked with tears. He told us: ‘The armoured cars are entering Budapest, there is fighting in the streets.’ I looked at Amendola: it was as if all three of us had been hit over the head. Then Amendola murmured: ‘Togliatti says that there are times in history when you have to be on one side or the other. In any case Communism is like the Church, it takes centuries to change its position. And don’t forget that Hungary was developing into a very dangerous situation . . ’ I realized then that the time of the hundred flowers in the PCI was still far away, very far away . . .

  One month later the 8th Congress of the PCI took place. Antonio Giolitti’s speech denounced the closed position of the party on Hungary. He spoke quietly, amid a glacial atmosphere. Togliatti was seated beside the rostrum, ostentatiously dealing with correspondence. Giolitti left the party and along with him several others. I decided not to leave the party then, at that time of particular difficulty, but by then my mind was made up. I went without a fuss in the summer of 1957. Many other comrades did the same: some did not renew their membership, others were expelled from the party. The whole group of Città Aperta, which was edited by Tomaso Chiaretti, was expelled. So was Bruno Corbi, Furio Diaz, Fabrizio Onofri and Natalino Sapegno all left.

  If the PCI had reacted differently in 1956, its ‘legitimization’ would have taken place twenty-four years ago. How much would that have changed the history of our country? Obviously this is a question to which the only answer is: it would have changed it enormously. But none of the leaders felt they could do it. In this sense Togliatti bears a huge responsibility. Togliatti, from the turning-point of Salerno 1944 onwards, 65 when he urged Communists to put national liberation first, always combined two positions: a broadly reformist policy as far as the PCI was concerned and loyalty to the USSR. That loyalty allowed him to be reformist. Had there been a break with the USSR then, PCI policy could have and probably would have had to be more incisive in internal policy. The problems of a left alternative would have arisen. Clearly the PCI leadership did not feel they could go down that road.

  That is what happened then. Twelve years later, when it came to the invasion of Prague, its position was different, the PCI condemned the invasion, but even on that occasion there was no break with Moscow. Today, faced with the risks of the Polish situation, it seems to me that the Communist party has taken another step. And is in the right position. This long march has taken twenty-four years. I can’t honestly say whether the bus we missed in November 1956 can ever be caught again.

  [Interview by Eugenio Scalfari: ‘Calvino e la storia del suo tempo’ (‘Calvino and the History of his Time’), La Repubblica, 13 December 1980.]

  The Duce’s Portraits

  You could say that I spent the first twenty years of my life with Mussolini’s face always in view, in the sense that his portrait was hung in every classroom, as well as in every public building or office. I could, therefore, try to chart a history of the evolution of Mussolini’s image through his official portraits as they have remained in my memory.

  I went into the first year of primary school in 1929 and I have a very clear memory of the Mussolini portraits of that period, still dressed in civilian clothes, with a stiff turned-up collar, as important people commonly wore in those days (but this look was to become old-fashioned in the years immediately following). That is the way I remember him in the coloured lithograph hung up in our classroom (on a side-wall; above the teacher’s desk there still hung the picture of the king) and in a black-and-white photograph at the back of our ancient spelling-book (a picture that looked as if it had been added on to the most recent editions).

  In those years, then, there still persisted the first image Mussolini wanted to give of himself immediately on seizing power, which was meant to emphasize a certain continuity and respectability in the man who had restored order. The portrait did not go down below his tie, but probably the jacket worn by the head of government was a morning-coat (the black jacket with tails known in Italy – and only in Italy – as a ‘tight’) which he habitually wore in those days at official ceremonies.

  In these portraits Mussolini still had black hair on his temples and maybe (I am not sure) in the middle of his balding head. The statesman’s dress accentuated his youthfulness, because that was the real novelty that the images had to convey (though I was not to know that at six years of age), in the sense that no one had ever heard of a prime minister who was only forty. Nor had anyone ever seen in Italy a statesman without a beard or moustache, and this was in itself a sign of modernity. It was common practice to shave, but the most significant politicians at the time of the First World War and after it all still wore a beard or a moustache. This was true throughout the whole world, I would say (I’m writing this without consulting any books or encyclopaedias), with the sole exception of American presidents. Even the quadrumvirate who led the March on Rome had moustaches and two of the four had a beard.

  (I don’t think there are historians who emphasize the facial-hair dimension in various epochs; and yet these are certainly messages that have a meaning, especially in periods of transition.)

  In short, Mussolini’s image in those days was meant to express at the same time modernity, efficiency and a reassuring continuity, and all that with authoritarian severity. This was certainly to counter a previous image, one associated with the period of Fascist lynch-squads. Among my memories there is also a portrait that I would date to that violent period (it does not matter if I saw it a little later), a dramatic black-and-white photograph, with his signature with the strong-willed M which would become famous. His face, angled slightly sideways, jutted out from the black, which could have been his black shirt but also a dark background like that evoked by the words ‘the Piazza Sansepolcro gang’, with which – as we were taught – the new age had begun.

  The climate of violence from the Fascist action squads was also recorded in my very first memories as a child (at least one of its last outbursts, dateable to 1926), but when I started to go to school the world seemed calm and ordered
. Signs of a period of civil war emerged occasionally, endowed with a dark attraction for a child or boy at a time when the official portraits of the Duce were identified with a discipline that brooked no sudden demurral.

  The other salient feature of these first official images of the dictator was the thoughtful pose, his prominent forehead seeming to underline his capacity for thought. Among the affectionate games people used to play at the time with children of one or two years old, was the habit of saying: ‘Do Mussolini’s face’, and the child would adopt a furrowed expression and stick out angry lips. In a word, Italians of my generation began to carry Mussolini’s portrait within themselves even before being of an age to recognize it on the walls, and this reveals that there was (also) something infantile in that image, that look of concentration that small children can have and which does not at all mean that they are thinking intensely about anything.

  The rule I have imposed on myself in writing these pages is to talk only of portraits and photographs I saw during the twenty years of Fascism, leaving aside the enormous amount of documentation I came across subsequently, in the four decades or so of post-Fascism. So I will only talk of official images, since no others circulated then: official images in portraits, statues, films made by his Luce Cinema Institute (the cinema newsreels of the time), illustrated newspapers. The last category basically comprised two: the very popular Domenica del Corriere and L’Illustrazione Italiana, which was a fortnightly magazine for a more upmarket readership.

  I remember having seen at the time the famous photo of Mussolini with his top hat going to sign the Concordat in the Lateran and I recall that I continued to remember it when, shortly afterwards, I heard the grown-ups saying that the Regime had abolished the ‘stove-pipes’ (as the top hat was called), the symbol of bourgeois traditionalism. Unaware of the dialectic of history, this seemed to me an inexplicable contradiction.