La caccia ai manoscritti dopo la morte di Gramsci

«Gramsci dies April 27, 1937. On May 25, the sister in law Tania writes to his family: "The Antonio's Notebooks are all over XXX pieces...". If you add four exercises of translation, at the time of Gramsci's death, there were then thirty-four notebooks. The Gramsci Institute Foundation today it holds thirty-three, of which twenty-nine of theoretical-historical and political content. What happened to the absent book?»

When Gramsci died (27 April 1937), the sister in law Tania Schucht had the exclusive control of the Notebooks. No one knows what they actually contain. These are the dramatic years of the easy processes, with related shootings, to the communists who disagree with Stalin. Togliatti (the head of the Italian Communists in exile) and Piero Sraffa (covered communist, esteemed professor of economics at Cambridge, agent of the Comintern) have good reason to fear that the manuscripts contain politically dangerous reflections. They'd like to protect them from indiscreet eyes and read them before anyone else, in order to decide what to do. After the success of "I due carceri di Gramsci" (published in 2012 and winner of Viareggio Prize), which reopened the terms of the discussion around the events of Gramsci's imprisonment, the new book by Franco Lo Piparo focuses on crucial questions : who received the notebooks from Tania? How and when they went from Italy to the USSR and, later, from the USSR to Italy? Why the testimonials on their number does not ever agree? Someone left traces of a hidden notebook? Carried out with extreme philological care, and with the rhythm of an exciting rebuilding of clues and evidences, the investigation of Lo Piparo brings, at the end, even to find the number of pages of the absent notebook.