Renato Guttuso's painting: "Togliatti's Funeral," showing the illustrious personalities of Italy's Left mythically disposed at the 1964 funeral of the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party.

Studied law in Turin. Member of the Italian Socialist party from 1914. Served in World War I. Like Gramsci combined political and journalistic work, writing for "Il Grido del Popolo" and "Ordine Nuovo." Joined the Italian Communist Party (1921). Following arrest of the then Party leader, Bordiga, moved away from the maximalist line and defended Gramsci's theses on the need for a united anti-fascist front at the Lyons Party Conference (1926). The thirties were spent in exile (Paris, Switzerland). Elected joint secretary-general of the Communist International (1935). Active in Spain during the Civil War. Returned to Italy in 1944. Assumed effective leadership of the Party until his death. Togliatti was a member of the Constituent Assembly, and held ministerial positions in three ministries until 1948. He guided the party along an "Italian way to socialism," and as editor of "Rinascita" was an active participant in the major cultural debates of the period.

Main works:
Gramsci (1954)
Il Partitio Communista Italiano (1958)
Opere (a cura di E. Ragionieri) (2 vols., 1967)

Togliatti to Vittorini:

When "Politecnico" first came out we all greeted it with joy. Its program seemed to satisfy that need for renewal in Italian culture which we all feel so vividly. Naturally we don't think it is our job, as a political party, to intervene directly in the renewal of Italian culture. We think that is the job of men of culture themselves: writers, artists and historians. Thus we applauded the enterprise embarked on by "Il Politecnico," to which you invited, along lines which seemed correct to us, a good part of the Italian intellectual community.

But at a certain point it seemed to us that the promises were not being kept. The announced guidelines were not being consistently followed, rather something quite different began to take their place, a tendency towards an encyclopedic "culture," where an abstract search for the new, the different, the surprising, took the place of consistent enquiries with a particular end in view, and news and information (you might almost say, to use an ugly journalistic term, "variety") began to overwhelm thought. And it is this alone that we have said, referring as always to your originally stated program. If "Politecnico" continued down the path it seemed to be following, it seemed to us that it might end up in superficiality, that it might also guarantee basic ideological errors, and that your initiative risked foundering, like so many others, on fruitless effort, and producing the opposite of your original intentions.

Do you remember the various cultural movements of the first decade of the century? How many promises, how many hopes tied to each of them. But if you look closely, you can see how, at a certain point, they all exhaust themselves, and meet more or less the same fate. There is a lack of stamina in the pursuit of the original intent: an ingrained anxiety surfaces, reflected in a superficial search for the new; the strength of attraction is lost. At most some strong personality remains, managing a certain visibility out of his own personal qualities, and all ends there. Meanwhile fascist illiteracy gains ground, ends up in victory without anyone barring the way, and Italian culture suffers a devastating blow.

In the last years of fascism there were a few attempts to counteract official idiocy. But even these were hardly effective, lacking unity and seriousness, eventually exhausting themselves in intermittent activity, reminding one of the fleeting exhalations of phosphorescence from a decaying corpse. There were little groups separate from one another, with their little programs, their little reviews, their little books, leaving no permanent trace.

We would be very sorry to see "Il Politecnico," or if not it some other cultural review, fail to break this tradition once and for all, and finally to accomplish a serious, deep and lasting work of cultural revival. All we really intended to do, there- fore, was to recall to all men of culture the task that faces us all, and to appeal to them to work along the lines that you have traced, in a manner appropriate to the seriousness of the task. And apart from the fact that individuals among us may, as men of culture, be interested in the matter, you surely will not deny that, as political beings, it is a matter of continuous concern and interest to us.

(Politecnico: Sept.-Dec., 1946)

Vittorini's Reply:

Playing the Pipes for the Revolution:

What does it mean for a writer to be "revolutionary?" In my experience with several political comrades, I have noted that they, too, tend to judge the "revolutionary" quality of a writer's work to the degree to which we "play the pipes" to the tune of those revolutionary problems posed by politics; in other words, to the extent to which we take a problem and transform it into a "pretty tune" (bel canto) with words, images and figures. But this, in my opinion, is anything but revolutionary. To the contrary, it is an arcadian way of writing.

That the pipes are played to the themes of science or social ideology rather than on the theme of love does not change the arcadian character of such music. A good part of the poetic compositions written by the Italian arcadians of the 18th century are on social themes... The civic poets of our Risorgimento and those patriotic poets preferred by Mazzini (1) over Leopardi (2) were also arcadian in taste and preference. Nor is the writer who plays his pipes for a revolutionary cause any less an arcadian shepherd than the songmaster of reaction. (Witness the American poets of the Revolution, such as John Trumbull, Philip Frenau, alongside the English poets who longed for the reconquest of the colonies.)

There is a clear distinction between a writer who plays the pipes for the revolution and the truly revolutionary writer. The truly revolutionary writer is he who manages to express through his work revolutionary needs separate from those posed by poli- tics. These are the internal, secret, recondite demands of man, which he alone knows how to perceive in men, which it is his duty as a writer to perceive, and as a revolutionary writer to express, and to place alongside the other requirements posed by politics. When I speak of the efforts of a revolutionary nature which we as writers must make, I am speaking of efforts aimed at expressing these sorts of inner priorities. And if I express the fear that our efforts in a revolutionary sense are not recognized by our political comrades, it is because I see in these same comrades the tendency to accept as revolutionary only the arcadian literature of the pipe players of revolution, rather than the literature in which the above mentioned priorities are dealt with in detail: i.e. in that literature which today is called the literature of crisis.

The Literature of Crisis:

To reject and ignore the best writers of crisis of our time is to reject all the "problem literature" that has emerged from contemporary western society...

Much literature of crisis is undoubtedly of bourgeois origin. It comes from romanticism; it is mixed up with individualism and decadentism. But it is also filled with the need to escape from it, it is a search for an escape from it...It can be called a literature of the bourgeoisie only in the sense that it is a self-criticism of the bourgeoisie. Its bourgeois motifs express the shame of being bourgeois, the desperation of being bourgeois. Thus it is revolutionary in spite of its bourgeois vices, just as so much of French and English literature of the 18th century was revolutionary despite its aristocratic vices. Indeed, it is the only revolutionary literature in Western Europe and in America. The militant writers in our party also reflect the shame of being bourgeois, just as writers outside the party reflect the same bourgeois crisis.

Soviet literature itself--as far as we can judge through translations--tends toward arcadianism and lyricism. The weakest examples are arcadian, the strongest lyrical. This indicates that the crisis of culture is world wide. Under capitalism culture suffers from what we might call an "insufficiency of political awareness," and in socialist countries from what we might call "political saturation." The former exposes culture's flank to the danger of political reaction, the latter exposes it to the by no means lesser danger of automatism (or stock responses). The revolutionary writer of those countries which are still capitalist must stand guard against both dangers. And the militant writer in the ranks of our own party much reject the aesthetic tendencies of the U.S.S.R. not only because they are the product of a country still in the stage of socialist construction; not only because they are the product of uniquely Russian conditions not applicable to the conditions of French or Italian socialism; he ought to reject them simply because they contain the dangers that they do.

Certainly we writers in the party are prepared for the eventuality of having to limit our work, whenever that becomes indispensable for the construction of a classless society. I would say we are actually prepared to have to give it up. Here alone is the difference between us party writers and those outside. We know what has happened, in every major revolution, between politics and culture. We know that every time poetry has become arcadian. We know that every time culture has become the handmaiden of politics. And we accept in anticipation that the same thing may happen in our revolution. But marxism contains words which make us think that our revolution can be different, even extraordinary. It may come to pass that poetry does not degenerate into arcadia and culture does not come to a halt, and we must make sure by our efforts that this does not happen.

(Il Politecnico: Jan.-March, 1947)

Notes on Vittorini's "Reply to Togliatti":

(1) Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872). Italian patriot and revolutionary, and the major exponent of a Republican Italy during the Risorgimento. Spent much of his career in exile in London. Supported Garibaldi's landing in Sicily (1860) and returned to Italy in 1861.

(2) Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Italy's greatest romantic poet. Author of I Canti and the philosophical Little Moral Works. A translation into English of his prose and verse, by Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs (1967).