Modern Italy Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 127–145
Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate George Talbot
Alberto Moravia was an ambiguous figure for the Fascists. His first novel, Gli Indifferenti, was an international success, and was praised by Bottai. His second novel, Le ambizioni sbagliate, ran into difficulties with Fascist censorship. His maternal uncle was a member of Mussolini’s government. His paternal first cousins were Carlo and Nello Rosselli. This essay explores Moravia’s relations with the regime in the light of archival evidence, contemporary ‘revisions’ of his reputation and recent controversy over his letters to Ciano and Mussolini.
Introduction My aim in this article is to explore Alberto Moravia’s interaction with Italian Fascism, and the controversy generated by letters he wrote to Galeazzo Ciano and to Mussolini, which have come to light in recent years. Documents released by the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in 2003 include a letter to Mussolini, written in 1938 by Moravia, setting out the reasons why the Leggi razziali should not be applied to him.1 The better to explore these issues, I want to set out two distinct objectives. The first is to enunciate Italian Fascist cultural policy specifically in relation to literary culture, in terms of producers (specifically writers and publishers), mediators (booksellers and public libraries), consumers (buyers of books and readers of texts) and the State, in order to set the scene for a discussion of Moravia’s predicament. The second is to examine Moravia’s second novel, Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935) and its cool official reception in the light of that policy and of other, conflicting, policies, including, crucially, the issue of race. By way of conclusion I discuss the effects which archival revelations and polemic may have on the posthumous reputation of a writer, and this, perforce, takes me into the territory of historiography.2
Correspondence to: George Talbot, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of Hull HU6 7RX, UK. Tel.: 01482 465562; Email:
[email protected] 1353-2944 Print/1469-9877 Online/06/020127–19 ß 2006 Association for the Study of Modern Italy DOI: 10.1080/13532940600709239
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Fascism and Culture A productive branch of recent scholarship has concerned itself with the question of Italian Fascism’s relationship with culture, including literature, writers and readers (Griffin 1998; Adamson 2001; Ben-Ghiat 2001, pp. 46–69). The question is given greater currency by the archival testimony on writers such as Ignazio Silone and Moravia, and it has been seized upon, in particular, by revisionist historians in Italy and the United States.3 Without a doubt the complex relationship between Fascism and writers evolved over the course of the ventennio and this evolution can be charted tellingly in the well-documented case of Alberto Moravia. It is well known that one early strand in Italian Fascism emerged out of iconoclastic literary movements such as Futurism. Another, more aristocratic one can be seen in the demagogic activities of Gabriele D’Annunzio, whether dropping leaflets from an aeroplane over Vienna during the First World War (a form of spectacle which anti-Fascists would later use against the regime) or leading his militia into and occupying Fiume in 1919.4 Mussolini felt this political potential, and, as both Renzo De Felice and Michael Ledeen have argued, he was quick to distance himself from D’Annunzio, seeing clearly a rival for leadership (Bosworth 2002, pp. 135–136). He successfully tamed F. T. Marinetti with the prospect of institutional sinecures. By writing a preface for its second edition, he was able to make politics out of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s war poetry written in the trenches of the Carso.5 Almost from the outset, therefore, the association of politics and literature, and its myths of origin, were part and parcel of Mussolini’s self-promotion. Literary movements, however, were never going to bring Fascists real political power, even if they could provide effective propaganda methods and perhaps some legitimacy in ideological terms. Anti-liberal violence in pursuit of a political end led Fascist cultural values inexorably away from the niche market of avant garde cultural expression to reactionary bombast, opportunist populism and the manufacture of consent. By the mid-1920s Mussolini had gone from writing prefaces for slim volumes of poetry to elaborating a role for creative writers in Fascist Italy: What then is your task, the task of those who are creators? All Italian writers have to be the standard-bearers of the new kind of Italian civilization, at home and especially abroad. It is the job of writers to spread what we might term a ‘spiritual imperialism’ in their plays, in their books, in their public addresses.6 This exhortation comes from Mussolini’s address (1 August 1926) to the Society of Authors and Editors, newly transferred from Milan to Rome. What might it mean to be standard-bearers of Italian civilisation at home and abroad? Mussolini did not elaborate on the criteria, and as Walter L. Adamson has argued, Italian Fascism never developed ‘a monolithic, specifically Fascist aesthetics or seek to enforce coherent Fascist principles as the Reich Chamber of the Arts did in Hitler’s Germany’ (Adamson 2001, p. 234; Pertile 1986, pp. 162–184). Those judged to be successful, apparently, would be admitted, like Marinetti, to the new literary academy, the Accademia d’Italia.7 This was followed by the institution of literary prizes, such as the Premio Mussolini, the Premio Bagutta and a host of others.
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(Other, less elevated writers, were fair game to be recruited into the murky world of police informers, such as the young Silone in Rome, or Pitigrilli, pseudonym of Dino Segre, the novelist–informer who moved in Giustizia e Liberta` circles in Turin and Paris, from where he kept tabs on Moravia, as we will see.) Therefore, successful standard-bearers could be identified, after the fact, by the rewards they received in terms of state patronage and recognition, and this might or might not correspond to the verdict of the market. The likes of Pitigrilli received fewer public rewards and had to live with their consciences. So there was a coherent reward strategy even though there were no obviously coherent Fascist literary principles, the latter being a state of affairs which Roger Griffin has characterised as ‘totalitarian pluralism’ (Griffin 1998, p. 20). However, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, within this totalitarian pluralism it was the novel, rather than free verse a` la Ungaretti, which emerged as the literary form of choice for Fascist intellectuals. ‘Specifically’, she continues ‘the novel’s potential to offer a more integrated portrait of the individual appealed to those who wished to utilise literature to inculcate Fascist values’ (Ben-Ghiat 2001, p. 48). It is in this context that Moravia’s first novel, Gli Indifferenti, burst onto the scene in 1929, presenting what Giuseppe Bottai would later describe as ‘a new ethical attitude’. But Moravia’s artistic and commercial success—always disapproved of by the more conservative elements—was an ambiguous one. The novel was published at Moravia’s own—or more likely his father’s—expense, by Alpes, a publishing house then owned by Arnaldo Mussolini. That did not in itself constitute an endorsement by the regime. Ben-Ghiat has claimed that Gli Indifferenti has ‘affinities with the causes of the fascist avant garde’ (Ben-Ghiat 2001, p. 55). Affinities, however, are nebulous things, and such a statement is sufficiently vague to be true, but of questionable heuristic value, especially when dealing with an adjective as mercurial as ‘fascist’. To support her case she points to Moravia’s association with two youth journals, I Lupi and Interplanetario (for both of which he wrote in 1928), journals in which his novel took shape. These journals, like Marinetti and the Futurists a generation earlier, embraced enthusiastically a clean break with the past and the intensely literary (D’Annunzian) prosa d’arte in favour of a drier, more sparse narrative. Moravia’s lean prose, contemporary themes and realist treatment of character struck a chord with the Italian reading public and audiences abroad. Whether this supports the view that Gli Indifferenti might ‘offer a more integrated portrait of the individual [appealing] to those who wished to utilise literature to inculcate Fascist values’ is another matter. It is difficult to sustain an argument according to which Gli Indifferenti would ever contribute to the inculcation of ‘deep belief’ in Fascism among its readers.8 Its contribution to a ‘new ethical attitude’ is probably no more than as a caustic portrayal of the behaviours of the decadent, rich, liberal Roman society. That much it certainly has in common with the avant garde critique of decadent liberal Italy, but that is not quite the same thing as standard-bearing for the new Fascist Italy, to use Mussolini’s terms. Nevertheless the book’s success was recognised by the hierarchy.9 The Italian public found praise for Moravia and his first novel in the Enciclopedia italiana Treccani.10 The Treccani was to be Fascism’s most lavish cultural enterprise of a literary nature, edited by Giovanni Gentile and enlisting most of the country’s prominent writers and intellectuals, with notable exceptions such as
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Croce and Montale as well as more obviously political opponents of the regime (Turi 1995, pp. 360–367). The Treccani became a good example of Mussolini’s standard-bearing, published with a generous state subvention that kept its price affordable to the reading population at large and effectively distorted the market.
Culture and Censorship Controlling the State’s reference encyclopedia, however, was just the visible part of a programme of establishing control over all that appeared in print within the boundaries of the State (Cannistraro 1975; De Grazia 1981; Turi 1995; Corner 2002). Recent research in Italy indicates that publishing houses came more and more under the financial control of the State, which entered into relationships of patronage as it did with writers through the Accademia d’Italia.11 Publishers as clients of the State therefore became more susceptible to grace and favour, and most crucially to a form of corrupting and creeping de facto censorship whose existence the government continued to deny right up to 1942. The carrot for writers was membership of the Academy or other state sinecures, such as those enjoyed by the likes of Vincenzo Cardarelli and Marinetti, as well as contracts to write entries for the Treccani.12 The principal carrot for publishers was for those active in the school textbook market. The libro di Stato or state textbook series, especially for the scuola elementare or primary-school sector, provided a monopoly with guaranteed sales, and therefore substantial revenue for the publishing houses providing them. The case of children’s literature was slightly less monopolistic, but scarcely less lucrative. Sales in the highculture end of the market, on the other hand, were never spectacularly lucrative, and depended in most cases on subsidy. The State supplied these subsidies through the Ufficio Stampa and later through ‘Minculpop’, the Ministero di Cultura Popolare. Smaller publishing houses, in particular, left themselves open to political influence in this way (Bonsaver 2003). In other words, the carrot shaded into the stick. But the stick proper remained censorship, after the early days of extreme squadrista violence when independent newspaper offices and printing presses were destroyed by direct action. Anti-Fascist publishing outlets were quickly suppressed by more legal means once the Fascists assumed power and began making the laws, rendering the meaning of the stick—the lictor’s rod—symbolic. Mussolini had set out his vision of force and consensus in an infamous 1923 speech: the government shows clearly that it tends to rule not through violence but, where possible and most desirably, through the consensus of its citizens. Naturally the government quarters and has at the ready the requisite forces of the voluntary militia for national security, so as to have recourse to force where consensus proves insufficient. (Turi 2002, p. 54) Unlike the public book-burnings in Nazi Germany, Italian suppression of dissent during Fascism was discreet, corrupting and insidious. Political censorship existed informally, without a juridical basis. Printers were required to apply for a licence (Fabre 1998, p. 19). From at least as early as 1929 Mussolini’s Ministry of the Interior was removing from circulation not just specific literary and cultural works,
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but all work of blacklisted authors, both living and dead. These authors’ works past, present and future were not to be published or otherwise distributed within Italy.13 Their works in print were to be removed from public libraries, schools, universities, bookshops and publishers’ catalogues. This had obvious financial implications for publishers, printers and booksellers. Recent research shows that it is five years later, in 1934, that censorship effectively begins as a plank of Fascist cultural policy and that this change in policy has its origins beyond the fields of literature and aesthetics. On 3 April 1934, Mussolini as Head of Government and Minister of the Interior issued a circular to all publishers and printers requiring three proof copies of all documents and designs intended for publication to be submitted to the local Prefect for approval. Eight months later this provision was centralised (27 December 1934), when the power to check proofs passed from the (autonomous) regional prefectures to the government’s Ufficio Stampa or press office, the bailiwick of Mussolini’s son-in-law Ciano.14 The effect of this centralisation, backed up by far greater State control over the finances of the publishing industry, was to give Mussolini and his officials at the Ministry of the Interior a decisive measure of control over what ordinary Italians could read, and by the same token, what publishers could publish and therefore what writers would choose to write. In other words, the corrupting influence of the State led inevitably to a process of self-censorship. Financial control and this informal but highly effective censorship of publishers and the press went hand in hand. This is not to say that it was always effective. There are various stories of slow-witted censors and their stooges being bounced into publishing material intended to be suppressed. Lorenzo Greco recounts one such case (Greco 1983, pp. 133–142). In early 1937 Silvio Guarnieri submitted two sets of proofs for approval, one a monograph on D’Annunzio and the other a scholarly work called Il costume letterario. The D’Annunzio book was given the nulla osta but Il costume letterario ran into trouble. The censor proposed suppressing one entire chapter. Guarnieri and his publisher Bonsanti objected and a compromise was reached, according to which the title of the suppressed chapter would be published, followed by one blank page. (Guarnieri, probably tongue-in-cheek, had requested that all the pages occupied by the suppressed chapter be left blank.) Having reached this compromise, Guarnieri then wrote to the editor of a regional newspaper in Ancona, the Corriere adriatico, which carried on its masthead ‘Organo del partito nazionale fascista’, announcing more or less truthfully that his book had been passed by the censor and would be published shortly, and offering the newspaper exclusive rights on a section of it. When the editor accepted this offer of a scoop, Guarnieri sent him the clean proofs of the suppressed chapter and bought up a large quantity of the newspaper’s issue which carried his chapter, to distribute with his censored book. This case doubtless would be accorded greater prominence in a study which sought to portray Fascist censorship in Italy as comic and haphazard. Generally speaking it was neither. The story serves as an exception to the rule, which was, on the contrary, effective, cunning and infinitely more subtle than a German Verbrennerung, which might well be used with the intention of encourager les autres domestically and strike terror into hearts, but which could also play into the hands of the foreign press.15
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The foreign press was not quite blind to censorship in Italy. The regime’s relations with the American press, with some notable exceptions, were generally cosy. The exceptions included George Seldes, who, upon his arrival in Rome in 1923 to write for the Chicago Tribune, cancelled the Italian government service, introduced by Mussolini, which gave American newspapers 5,000 words of free cable transmission per month. Seldes regarded this correctly as creeping corruption, but earned a reprimand from his boss, who saw costs increasing (Diggins 1972, p. 43). A further example of this creeping corruption, analogous to the patronage of the Accademia d’Italia for writers, is a decree of 20 February 1928, which extended to foreign journalists the perquisites of the Albo Professionale dei Giornalisti (Professional Association of Journalists), implicitly in return for good behaviour and favourable coverage. Seldes refused to be muzzled and was expelled from Italy, using his experience as the basis for his book about Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar, which was written in 1932 but which American censorship kept out of print until 1936. In 1932, at the depth of the Depression in America, Mussolini was not the bogeyman he would become a decade later, and his corporativist doctrines found favour with many American industrialists, intent on imposing wage restraint and breaking unions. After Seldes’ departure, there was little hostile coverage of Italian affairs in the American press. A sporadic exception is Henry Furst, an Italianresident occasional contributor to the New York Times Book Review, who did draw attention to creeping censorship such as the removal of books from shop displays.16 But his articles were carried in a Sunday supplement of the New York Times and would not have had much influence on policymakers abroad, although, as we shall see, they may have influenced decisions in Italy itself. So, with a foreign and domestic press essentially muzzled, and with a tight control over the publishing industry, what is the evidence for the expression of Fascist cultural values and for the promotion of the ‘spiritual imperialism’ dear to Mussolini’s heart in 1926? In what way did it differ from more traditional values? When Moravia’s second novel appeared, Italy seemed closer to becoming that imperial power. Social policy had become more conservative, following the signing of the Lateran Pacts, with the legal ban on homosexual acts between men in 1931, and increasingly repressive legislation on women (De Grazia 1992). The values trumpeted concerned large families, clear gender divisions between soldiers and nurturers, colonial expansion and patriotism. By 1935 Italy was preparing for the invasion of Ethiopia, backed by a massive propaganda campaign through the Agenzia Stefani, which transmitted ideological assumptions on the roles of women, on ‘race’ and on the figure of the soldier as the yardstick of Italian manhood. These are the shared assumptions of the ruling party in Italy by the mid-1930s, and it is significant that they inform the immediate cause of Mussolini’s memorandum of 3 April 1934, which marks a change in cultural policy and the introduction of the second wave of censorship on the publishing sector. Far from being a response to the Nuremberg book burnings, the catalyst for the change in policy, according to Giorgio Fabre, was a serialised novel which had landed on Mussolini’s desk in Palazzo Venezia.17 Perhaps, to be more precise, the cover illustration of that novel may have been responsible for the circular. The book was a novel called Sambadu`, amore negro by ‘Mura`’ (Maria Volpi). The cover illustration is the photograph of a white woman in a bathrobe that does not cover her right shoulder, with her
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arms around a fully clothed and well-dressed black man who is cradling her in his arms and looking down in profile into her eyes, which display a devotion reminiscent of Renaissance madonnas. The picture leaves the prospective reader in no doubt as to the nature of their relationship. This would have been scandalous in its time in terms of the use of religious iconography, its challenge to the State’s official racism and its depiction of a (presumably) Italian woman ‘betraying’ her race and her historic destiny as a bearer of children to the Italian soldier–hero. Little matter that a cursory reading of the text would show that the story ends in tears, the woman encoded as a victim of black male cruelty. Mussolini knew the value of the front-page headline and the potent image. This piece of pulp fiction therefore represented a challenge to the spiritual imperialism of the regime, in its literary form of choice, the novel. Thus, according to Fabre’s careful reading, literary censorship as cultural policy grew directly out of racism. But in Moravia’s case, this is just part of the story.
Censorship and Moravia’s Reputation Despite the international success of Gli Indifferenti in 1929, its enthusiastic review by Margarita Sarfatti, the Duce’s sometime mistress and intellectual mentor, in Il Popolo d’Italia and a steady stream of stories and articles for Ugo Ojetti’s Pegaso and for La Stampa, Caratteri and Oggi, Moravia was an ambiguous figure, and this is confirmed by his various police files. On the one hand, his maternal uncle Augusto De Marsanich was a high-ranking Fascist, under-secretary in the Department of Communications. Moravia was lauded in the Treccani encyclopedia. Giuseppe Bottai praised him in the pages of Critica fascista (Bottai 1932, 1935; Ben-Ghiat 2001, p. 231, note 47). He was granted a passport to travel all over the world. On the other, his first cousins included Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Moravia’s file at the Divisione generale di pubblica sicurezza contains the following typewritten memorandum, sent by the Polizia politica to the Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati (Rome, 28 March 1934): Of conspicuous notoriety in the literary world, especially in the Capital is the young Pincherle Moravia Alberto, son of Carlo, disciple of the well-known ex-priest Prof. Bonaiuti and author of a book titled ‘gli indifferenti’ whose acid content is in the title itself. The lower-case ‘gli indifferenti’ suggests the state functionary’s distaste for such a man and his literary production. Bottai may have backed him, but more orthodox Fascists were evidently less enthusiastic. The memorandum continues: In respect of Pincherle the Royal Questura of Rome, which since 1931 has been checking his mail, in a letter of 23 February relates the following: ‘[. . .] Moravia Pincherle Alberto is more precisely Pincherle Moravia Alberto son of Carlo and of Marsanich Teresa, born Rome 28.11.1907, writer, single, resident in Via Gaetano Donizzetti [sic], no. 6, cousin of the noted fuoriuscito Rosselli Carlo Alberto.
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Our investigations do not indicate that Pincherle has been involved in antifascist activities in the Capital. On the other hand he is not a member of the Federazione Fascista dell’Urbe and he keeps his distance from the Regime. He lives in some luxury along with his sisters Adriana and Elena, and his brother Gastone as well as his parents. Pincherle Alberto seems to travel abroad often and he bears a passport issued to him by this Questura, renewed 25.7 this year, for France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Austria and Spain, which he claims to visit in order to study and for the purpose of journalism. I take this opportunity to point out that the aforementioned sister Adriana, being the lover of the noted Mario Levi, a recent fuoriuscito who belongs to ‘giustizia e liberta`’, has been the object of investigations carried out by this Division, with a negative outcome.18 Moravia’s father was Jewish, and his full name, Alberto Pincherle Moravia, represented two recognisably Jewish surnames.19 In 1935, three years before the race laws, this was already a cause for concern, especially for a cousin of Carlo Rosselli, in the wake of the OVRA arrests in Turin.20 These arrests followed the interrogation of Sion Segre (Pitigrilli’s cousin), who was captured at Ponte Tresa on the Swiss border by customs police on 11 March 1934. (The customs police were unaware that OVRA agents were watching both Levi and Segre, tipped off by their informer ‘Togo’, Rene´ Odin; Blatt 1995, pp. 30–31.) The man described in Moravia’s police file as Adriana’s amante, Mario Levi, escaped, and it was claimed, taunted the Italian police from the Swiss side of the lake to which he had escaped by swimming for his life.21 The arrest of one and the embarrassing escape of another Italian Jew, both associates of Carlo Rosselli, were seized upon by elements of the Italian press, briefed by the Agenzia Stefani (Canosa 2000, p. 166). Telesio Interlandi, never a typical example of Italian journalism, but nevertheless one well-known to be close to Mussolini, thundered from the pages of Il Tevere on 31 March 1934: What was the point of the polemic which we have mounted over the last few weeks and which was so lazily welcomed by the organs of public opinion? Its point was to establish, with the support of Jewish documents, that the Jew does not assimilate, because in assimilation he sees a diminution of his personality and a betrayal of his race; that the Jew demands a double nationality, even a double country, in order to remain a productive element, that is to say to carry out his business and to have beyond the borders a super-national centre of attraction and propulsion; that not even the war (and Fascism) has assimilated the Jews to the nation for which they bore arms: the Jewish press indeed speaks of Jews who fought among them in the name of foreign countries. All this today has the dramatic seal of OVRA; and let no-one overlook this roll-call of names, at the risk of being ingenuous, let us remember that the best of anti-Fascism, past and present, is of the Jewish race: from Treves to Modigliani, from Rosselli to Morgari, the organizers of subversion were and are of the ‘chosen people’.22
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A couple of years later (May 1937), though still well before the race laws, Bottai had revised his opinion on Moravia and was writing in Regime Fascista that Moravia’s novels had a ‘strangely Jewish feel’ (‘sapore stranamente semita’) (Fabre 1998, pp. 396–397). The ground had shifted. Both of the two most extensive police files on Moravia contain the transcript of an intercepted letter received by him in February 1935, days before Segre’s arrest, and signed ‘hf’, from the freelance Italian cultural correspondent of the New York Times Henry Furst. This transcript is marked with a stamp which reads ‘Visto da S. E. il Capo del Governo’; that is to say, it had been read by Mussolini himself. Before looking at the letter we need to examine another intercepted document which is intimately connected with the regime’s response to the novel. The January 1935 issue of Giustizia e Liberta` carried an anonymous article with the title ‘La proibizione del nuovo romanzo di Alberto Moravia’ (‘The banning of Alberto Moravia’s new novel’).23 The article, written by Carlo Rosselli, asserted that the Prefect of Milan had vetoed publication of the novel, as he had the power to do. In the article Moravia is described as: a young man who has grown up under Fascism, who has nothing in common with ‘past regimes’ and who probably detests them no less, though perhaps with more seriousness, than the Duce’s various ‘favourites’. But he is a young man who has the difficult privilege of having ‘kept his eyes open’, for which reason the problem of falsifying his vision so as to appeal to those in power is simply absurd. It doesn’t even arise because the only problem, for him, is to say things as he sees them. It’s natural that repression should have struck him. With this repression Mussolini makes all the more glaring the incompatibility of Fascism and the true forces in the country. With censorship applied to Moravia we know officially that the regime which has tolerated Benedetto Croce, the liberal philosopher, cannot tolerate a young man except as a corporal or squad-leader. With this act of censorship hostilities have opened officially between the regime and the young generation of Italy.24 The issue of Giustizia e Liberta` was intercepted by the Ministry of the Interior, which was unaware of the alleged decision of the Prefect of Milan. Bocchini sought clarification from Milan on 11 January 1935. Milan replied that the manuscript had been submitted for approval by the publisher Mondadori in December, as was required by the law, and that it had been approved by the Prefect’s reader Mario Pensuti. Therefore the allegation in Giustizia e Liberta` was incorrect. But it had the effect of bringing the novel to the attention of the Ministry of the Interior, and not just to the ministry, but to Mussolini himself. On 12 January 1935, the political police in the Ministry of the Interior wrote to Ciano’s Press Office with instructions from the Duce to prohibit publication of the novel. This, however, was not the end of the matter. A confidential memorandum from Rome to the Prefect of Milan on 13 February 1935, instructed the latter to send to the Ministry of the Interior all three copies of the printed book required by the law, when they were submitted, and not to authorise distribution. In other words, the Interior took the initiative
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and decided to have the final say on whether or not the book, once printed, might be published. A fortnight later Furst’s letter (dated Genoa, 25 February 1935) was intercepted, transcribed and delivered to Mussolini along with an informer’s report from Paris which indicated that intellectual opinion in Paris was against banning the book.25 Furst’s letter reads: Mondadori tells me it is in press, but from another (good) source I have heard that because of censorship you are not going to publish it? Ubi veritas? I need to know soon because I want to write about it in the [New York] Times (my first article on you!) but I can’t do two articles on you in quick succession. So if Le ambizioni sbagliate is about to appear I would prefer to wait; if not, I will write about this volume. I need a subject: there’s so little coming out worth writing about! Let me know something; have you thought about the English translation? You had almost promised it to me. I hope we can do an unexpurgated edition? It is unclear what Furst intends by ‘this volume’ but Mussolini appears to have read it as meaning a pre-publication review of Le ambizioni sbagliate. Allied to that there was a further report from fiduciario 353 (Vincenzo Bellavia, 2 March 1935), which details a conversation with Carlo Rosselli: The discussions moved on to Italian literature. Rosselli mentioned the banning of Moravia’s novel, describing it as a howler (‘grossa corbelleria’) on the part of the regime, because while admittedly the novel runs counter to the directives of the regime it would have had absolutely no political importance. Letting it come out, according to Rosselli would have demonstrated abroad Fascism’s strength and assuredness. But blocking it demonstrates that Fascism is prisoner to the priests because it is they who insist on censorship. According to Rosselli, Fascism has made a martyr of Moravia—an intelligent young man of extraordinary ability—but no danger or exceptional personality—a martyr who becomes a writer–victim of the regime for the rest of Europe, and someone persecuted for non-political reasons. According to Antonini, Rosselli concludes that Fascism could not have done antifascism a greater favour than to ban Moravia’s novel. Fabre cites most of these documents and concludes that they tilted the balance in favour of publication. The evidence is overwhelming. Mussolini feared that a review was about to be published in the New York Times of a book which he wanted to ban. Fascist Italy would be made to look a laughing-stock in foreign public opinion, especially in New York and Paris. The novel was given the nulla osta, with the caveat that it was not to be distributed widely and was not to have coverage in the Italian press; in other words, it was to be published but subject to a conspiracy of silence. On 28 June 1935 Mondadori was given permission to publish the book. Furst’s New York Times review ‘A Novel of Disillusion in a Roman Setting’ followed months later on 16 February 1936. The translation rights, however, went to another occasional New York Times correspondent in Italy, Arthur Livingstone, and the English translation appeared in 1938 as Wheel of Fortune. Before that a negative
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review was published in Giustizia e Liberta` (no. 47, Paris, 22 November 1935). No review of the novel has ever been published in Italy.
Moravia and Fascism Was Carlo Rosselli right? Was it the case that ‘the problem of falsifying his vision so as to appeal to those in power [was] simply absurd’? Was he any less inclined to self-censorship than other novelists? What was Moravia’s attitude to Fascism? What evidence does the novel provide about his attitude? Set in claustrophobic upper middle-class Roman society, just like Gli Indifferenti in 1929, it centres on the figure of Andreina, mistress of Matteo, whose wife Maria Luisa in the first chapter unsuccessfully tries to seduce Pietro Monatti, the fiance´ of her sister-in-law Sofia. Andreina lives alone with a maid, in a house paid for by Matteo out of Maria Luisa’s fortune. It transpires that Andreina had been thrown out of her modest family home by her father, a schoolteacher with a persecution complex, because of her sexual precocity. Therefore, despite Moravia’s protestations to Ciano, Andreina is far from being an examplar of the Fascist values attributed to womanhood. Her room has been rented out to Maria Luisa’s brother, now a cripple, who had been a lodger there some years before, and, as we discover, Andreina’s first seducer. Pietro Monatti, also from humble origins, had known Andreina at school and has befriended Maria Luisa’s brother. Pietro and Andreina begin an affair which both realise will destabilise a whole set of relationships and will destroy their chances of wealth and social advancement. The novel ends in theft and murder. Moravia, after the event, tells us he was trying to write with a tone of existential violence, in the manner of Dostoyevsky.26 His characters are as bored, indifferent and selfdestructive as the borghesi of Gli Indifferenti. Whatever the tone, the attitude and the intention, the plot in outline could sustain either a comedy, a bedroom farce or a tragedy. Its de´nouement, as much as its grey tone, marks out the disillusionment of which Furst writes in his review. What should have alarmed Fascists, and challenged Fascist identity, is the fact that the male characters are not in control of the plot. There are four men (and one boy) in the text, all of them overshadowed by strong women, throwing down a challenge to what Victoria de Grazia has called the Fascist ‘nationalization of women’. She has argued that Fascist policy on women ‘sought to establish more control over female bodies, especially female reproductive functions [. . .] it demanded that women act as careful consumers, efficient household managers’ (De Grazia 1992, p. 9). Just as Fascist masculinity was embodied in the figure of the soldier, womanhood represented domesticity, motherhood and submissiveness. As early as January 1926, newspaper editors had been instructed by the Ministero dell’Interno to avoid stories about suicide and crime, the cronaca nera, on the grounds that such reports offered bad models to the weak (Bosworth 2002, p. 217). The one review which did appear in Italian (in Giustizia e Liberta`) was lukewarm: A glance at the title, Mistaken Ambitions, makes you think involuntarily of the situation in Italy today. You could not find a more apposite title. But there is none of this in the book, not even the faintest echo. [. . .] In Moravia there is
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only indifference and disdain for the environment he depicts and no critic who is honest and not too obtuse can reprove him for sketching a dark picture of Italian society today, simply because he doesn’t speak of Italian society or even Roman society. Instead he limits himself to a few individuals who vegetate on the margins of this as of any society.27 Moravia’s international success with his first novel, one of few such Italian successes in the period, had conferred on him the opportunity of becoming one of Mussolini’s cultural ambassadors, putting into effect the 1926 injunction that Italian writers should spread Italian cultural imperialism far and wide. But the regime’s support, as expressed in the Enciclopedia Treccani, had been eroded by 1935 when Le ambizioni sbagliate appeared. These decadent, neurotic and self-destructive models of behaviour were now of the type which Fascism sought to suppress.28 But the book was published. Furst’s review in the New York Times did draw some limited attention to its cool official reception in Italy: the Italian press has so far not displayed overmuch enthusiasm over Alberto Moravia’s second novel. Considering the wave of praise that greeted his first novel seven years ago, Gli Indifferenti [. . .], and considering that the second book is undoubtedly superior to the first (certainly not inferior!), we can only conclude that this apparent lack of approval must be based on considerations which have nothing to do with art or art criticism. Those from whom one would be least prepared to expect a sermon have not hesitated to express strong moral indignation over the depravity of the young author. The greater part have refused to write about the novel at all. (Furst 1936) Furst reported what was happening, indicating that he was probably a reader of Giustizia e Liberta`, although of course he was not aware of the official policy on the book’s publication or its causes, which grew out of both racism and anti-Semitism. Its subsequent publication history over the following decade is one of the more telling in terms of Fascist cultural policy. Early in 1935 it appeared that the book would not be published in Italy. Moravia wrote to Ciano and sought to convince the Duce’s son-in-law that it was not an antiFascist book at all, and that it was ‘anything but pessimistic and destructive, anything but antithetical and outside of the Fascist Revolution’, as his detractors had always affirmed (Moravia 1993, pp. 144–147; Fabre 1998, p. 37). These are carefully chosen words. Given the book’s content and the Duce’s injunction to writers that they foster ‘spiritual imperialism’ and deep belief, it is quite impossible to see Moravia as an ensign for the regime. His words to Ciano read far more like the behaviour of a subtle ironist who wants to have his novel published. We have seen above that the wave of Fascist censorship which began in 1934 had its origins in racism. The early focus was both black Africa and Jewish ‘traitors’. By 1937, however, we find Bottai, a cabinet minister who previously had praised Moravia in print, writing about the ‘Jewish feel’ of Moravia’s work. The following year, 1938, hot on the heels of Hitler’s May visit, Mussolini’s government published its Manifesto della Razza and followed it up in September with draconian legislation, the first targets of which were Jewish writers and journalists. Technically Moravia
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could (and did) claim that he was not Jewish, despite his Jewish paternity (Fabre 1998, pp. 396–402). Nevertheless in 1938 he was expelled from the Albo Professionale dei Giornalisti and two of his books (Le ambizioni sbagliate and L’Imbroglio) were banned, but Gli Indifferenti, his international success, was not. Again he wrote a letter, this time to Mussolini himself. It is the letter published by Il Corriere della Sera on 6 January 2004 in which he wrote: I am not a Jew [. . .] I have been a Catholic from birth and I have had from my mother a Catholic education at home. It is true that my father is an Israelite; but my mother is of pure blood and of Catholic religion and is the sister of Your undersecretary for communications. The terms of Moravia’s self-defence have led to summary denunciations in parts of the Italian press since the letter’s publication, and charges of vilta`. His description of his mother’s ‘pure blood’ (‘puro sangue’) echoes the rhetoric of the regime and the time. (Mussolini, the previous year, had told Giorgio Pini, editor-in-chief of Il Popolo d’Italia that ‘Jewish blood is always Jewish blood and you can’t change it’.)29 But the echo may well be ironic. His behaviour tells us very little about his attitude to Fascism and racism, but it is quite revealing about the nature of Mussolini’s regime. Moravia made a legal challenge to his categorisation as a Jew, on the grounds that he had been baptised before 1938 and that he had two Italian parents.30 This is consistent with his 1938 letter to Mussolini. His appeal was upheld and in July 1939 he was received back into the Albo Professionale dei Giornalisti, despite his description in Bottai’s Regime Fascista in April 1939 as ‘an out-and-out Jew’ (‘un ebreo di sei cotte’).31 Now officially ‘Aryan’, Moravia attempted to have the ban on his book overturned, or at least to let the existing print runs sell, and to deal with reprintings when the issue arose. He was unsuccessful, and documents in his police files continue to refer to him as a Jew. His new publisher Bompiani (who had bought the rights to Gli Indifferenti in 1934) was permitted to publish a new book, I sogni del pigro, in September 1940, on the grounds that Moravia was not a Jew. Moravia also continued to publish as a journalist, until 13 February 1941, when the Ministry for Popular Culture (Minculpop) instructed all newspaper editors to have nothing further to do with him (Cassero 2004, p. 74; Ottavini 1999). But the story of Le ambizioni sbagliate did not finish there. In March 1941 it came to the attention of Minculpop that the novel was still advertised in Mondadori’s catalogue, and the matter was referred to the Prefect of Milan. After a brief investigation the Prefect reported that Mondadori had no copies of the book remaining and that its inclusion in the catalogue was a clerical error. Fabre has demonstrated that this was no error, that Mondadori did intend to republish the book, which had sold well, and indeed that Mondadori did reprint it in July 1941, on the grounds that Moravia was not a banned author. Bompiani published another new Moravia novel, La Mascherata, in May 1941, once one offending sentence had been removed. This was a piece of ‘political’ rather than ‘racial’ censorship. The publication of this novel, a parody of a South American dictatorship very obviously based on the real Italian model, must be one of the most bizarre decisions made by the State bureaucracy of censorship in the Fascist period, and it suggests that things were running out of control. The first print run sold out over the summer of 1941 and
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an application for permission to reprint in September 1941 was turned down.32 The name ‘Moravia’ does not appear on the list of unapproved writers (‘scrittori non graditi’) distributed to publishers and newspaper editors in March 1942, but the name ‘Alberto Pincherle’ does, and it refers to the same person.
Conclusion Moravia straddled a fault line in Fascist cultural policy. He was the one truly successful young novelist to emerge during the Fascist period, winning an international reputation for his first novel, written while still a teenager. The regime wanted standard-bearers but not ones writing about crime, violence and systematic betrayal, as in Le ambizioni sbagliate. Moravia’s emplotment of women, especially the destructive figure of Andreina, was outside the regime’s horizon of expectation. This is to leave aside two other contributing factors: first, his cousin Carlo Rosselli was a dissident with an international profile, and secondly, a racist policy was becoming a core value of Mussolini’s Fascism, inspired by a growing Nazi influence on the Italian domestic political agenda. We might be tempted to read the novel as Moravia’s depiction of the reality of Fascism’s moral bankruptcy (Peterson 1996, pp. 26–33). But while clearly it is not a Fascist novel, it is not really an anti-Fascist novel either. ‘Vittorio’ writing in Giustizia e Liberta` (November 1935) dismisses it as apolitical. The significance of the novel is bound up less with authorial intention and more with the historical circumstances of its early reception, and relationship of the State to the individual in Fascist Italy. It is a documented fact that Moravia was watched closely, his mail was monitored from 1931 and the family telephone was tapped for most of the war, until 25 July 1943. The race laws were applied to him, albeit not consistently, and he was included on the list of banned authors in 1942. On the other hand, although he did once smuggle a letter from Rosselli into Italy (in his overcoat pocket; the police checked his suitcase), he had no heroic commitment to anti-Fascism either, and was known to be ambivalent about his cousins’ politics. Even before the January 2004 publication of his letter to Mussolini, Moravia’s posthumous reputation had been challenged, most recently in a book by the ex-mayor of Milan, Paolo Pillitteri (Pillitteri 2003). Pillitteri’s book is a 300-page rant that manages to caricature, unintentionally, the revisionist school of historians, inspired by Renzo De Felice. Moravia is at times almost incidental to Pillitteri’s argument. He is taken to task for his presentation of the Professor and his wife in Il Conformista as a slur on the memory of his cousin Carlo Rosselli and his English wife Marion Cave. Pillitteri’s charge, without a shred of documentary evidence, is that Moravia was a Fascist fellow-traveller when the Fascists were in power, who transformed himself into a communist fellow-traveller after the war. Pillitteri accepts the documented fact that the Rosselli brothers were killed by an ultra-Fascist French group, but puts forward the red-conspiracy theory that the order for their execution came not from Rome but from Moscow, through double agents, as part of Stalin’s purge of heretics on the Left. Moravia’s unflattering portrayal of the Professor in Il Conformista thus plays to a communist conspiracy to blacken the name and
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reputation of Carlo Rosselli and to bolster post-war hegemony of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in Italian cultural life. Pillitteri’s book is an unsubtle attempt to muddy waters, to put anti-Fascism on a par with Fascism, and by extension to present the Resistance as a conflict between two equal evils. More subtle variants of this ‘objective’ school of history have won favour with parts of the Italian political establishment, and are to be seen in scholarly publications and on television screens in recent accounts of the foibe.33 But the views of Pillitteri and others of his ilk draw succour from interpretations such as those of Ben-Ghiat as well as from the revisionist camp clustered around the journal Nuova storia contemporanea. It is important to go back to the sources and not to use them selectively. The evidence, archival and literary, does not support the revisionist view of Moravia’s fellow-travelling with Fascism. The literary evidence does not suggest much self-censorship. His letters to Ciano and Mussolini are pragmatic but also subtly ironic pieces of self-preservation in response to the threatened non-publication of his second novel and the end of his livelihood as a writer. The threats were far from idle ones. In 1935 Jews and those regarded as Jews in Italy were being treated with suspicion. By 1938, they were at risk, even if the risk was less than that of being a Jew in the greater German Reich. Read naively, out of context, the letters may be misleading as to his attitude to Fascism. Most of Moravia’s reported comments on the politics of the time are couched in irony. Although ‘Fascist’ is an adjective which may be conjoined to any number of different nouns, the concept of ‘ironia fascista’ is surely an oxymoron. Pitigrilli reported a pertinent example of Moravia’s political banter to his handlers in the Polizia politica: What France needs now, Moravia said, is an Italian to take her in hand and govern her. From Cardinal Mazarin to Napoleon, France has shown herself amenable to having Italians in charge.34 What better sentiment for the ensign of ‘a new kind of Italian civilization’?
Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Brian Moloney for his comments and advice on this article while it was a work in progress.
Notes [1]
The ‘new’ document is to be found in Archivo Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Minculpop, Gabinetto, II versamento, busta 8, fascicolo ‘Moravia, Alberto’. The ‘secondo versamento’ of the Minculpop archive was released into the public domain in July 2003.The letter to Mussolini was published in Il Corriere della Sera 6 January 2004. This file is distinct from the one kept on Moravia by the political police (Divisione Polizia Politica, DPP), ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali, ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana (1934–1939)’ and the one kept by the regular Ministry of the Interior (MI) police (Divisione Affari Riservati e Generali, DARG), ACS, MI, DARG, Cat. A1, 1940, busta 66 (Pincherle Moravia, Alberto di Carlo). His earlier letter to Ciano was published in Moravia (1993).
142 [2]
[3] [4]
[5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
G. Talbot The essential prolegomenon to any discussion of the historiography of Fascist Italy, up to the late 1990s, is Bosworth (1998), The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism. Most of the secondary sources I draw on have been published since this book appeared. On the ‘caso Silone’ see Biocca (1998); Canali (1999); Biocca & Canali (2000); Canali (2000); and Ben-Ghiat (2001, pp. 55–69). On D’Annunzio as a prototype for Mussolini see Ledeen (1977); Woodhouse (1998); and more recently Salaris (2002). On Marinetti as a forerunner of Fascist style see Nicholls (1995, pp. 84–111), and Spackman (1996, pp. 49–76). Ungaretti was a Paris correspondent for Mussolini’s daily newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia for part of 1919. Mussolini wrote a preface for the 1923 edition of his Il Porto sepolto. See Mussolini (1934, pp. 374–375). The English translation is that of Doug Thompson, in Thompson (1991). On the history of the Accademia, see Ferrarotto (1977). On the concept of ‘deep belief’ in an Italian Fascist context, see Bosworth (2004). Mussolini’s ambiguous judgement on the novel confided to Yvon De Begnac was the following: Young Moravia, nephew of syndacalist De Marsanich and son of Pincherle, a Jewish engineer [sic], is becoming the object of reflections on a mute and invisible anti-Fascism which is terribly sordid. Gli Indifferenti is written in mediocre Italian and presents an obscene picture of the middle class ‘strong in describing a Roman environment which I wouldn’t have suspected could still survive’. (De Begnac 1990, pp. 483–484)
[10] [11] [12]
[13]
[14]
For the record, Moravia’s father was an architect, not an engineer. See ‘Italia’, Enciclopedia italiana, 29, 958. A similar point is made by Marla Stone concerning architects and figurative artists (Stone 1998, p. 4). See also Fabre (1998, pp. 11–17) and the entry ‘Censura’ in De Grazia & Luzzatto (2002). Cardarelli, in particular, was a long-term parasite on the Fascist state. See ACS, Minculpop, Gab., II versamento, busta 3, fascicolo ‘Cardarelli, Vincenzo’. Between 1932 and 1934 he received 9,000 lire and by September 1936 he was receiving 1,000 lire per month through Minculpop. See Fabre (1998, p. 20), and ACS, MI, DGPS, DARG, F4, b. 108, f. F4/AG, ‘Sturzo Luigi (Pubblicazioni di)’ as well as ACS, MI, DGPS, DARG, F4, b. 117, ‘Elenco generale delle stampe estere sequestrate’ (413 pages), distributed Jan.–Mar. 1931, with supplements for 1932, 1934 and 1936. See Fabre (1998, p. 22). For a profile of Prefects during the Fascist period see Morgan (1998). Morgan argues that although the Fascist regime claimed to be installing a new social and political order in and through the ‘totalitarian’ state [. . .] up to two-thirds of the agents of state authority in the provinces were non-Fascist career officials. (p. 258)
[15] [16]
This statistic may explain why Ciano found it necessary to centralize decisions on censorship after just eight months. For the most recent work on Mussolini’s relations with the foreign press, see Canosa (2002). Furst had also acted as foreign whistle-blower in relation to the setting up of the Accademia. He wrote: When Mussolini created the Italian Academy he may have hit upon a shrewd political move, but he was not furthering the cause of Italian letters, for by holding up before the eyes of the more important literati the mirage of membership in the new body which sits in the Farnesina, with its appanage of 30.000 lire a year and, not least, the title of ‘Eccellenza’, he was dragging literature into politics. One by one, like flowers before the storm, head after head has bowed itself before the power that holds the key to glory. Last year Adriano Tilgher, who had been the leader of the literary opposition to Fascism and, with the surcharged venom of his pen, had written in the famous Becco Giallo, quips which have not yet been forgotten, crept into the fold; this year Vincenzo Cardarelli, who, in all justice be it said, was never in any way, far from it, an opponent of the regime. See Furst (1931). For more information on Furst’s cultural activities in Italy see Talbot (2002, 2004).
Modern Italy [17] [18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22] [23] [24] [25]
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Fabre (1998, p. 437) reproduces the image in black and white. See ACS, MI, DGPS, Cat. A1, b. 66 (Pincherle Moravia, Alberto di Carlo). The report which is quoted (dated 23 February 1934) is to be found in the file kept on him by the Divizione Polizia Politica: ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali, ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana’. He had been referred to dismissively in the pages of Il Tevere by Interlandi, more than once, as a ‘half-Jew’; see Michaelis (1998, p. 218). Moravia, however, was also an occasional contributor to Il Tevere. Enzo Collotti argues that the Lateran Pacts had played an important role in the promotion of antiSemitism in Italy, but that flames had been fanned by the Giustizia e Liberta` arrests in Turin in 1935. See Collotti (2003, pp. 19–21); also Blatt (1995). The police report states that Levi shouted at them ‘cani di italiani vigliacchi’, in order to blacken his name and represent Italian Jews as anti-Italian. The accusation is rejected by Blatt, and by Michele Sarfatti in his book Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista (Sarfatti 2000, pp. 90–91). Cited in De Felice (1977, p. 179; my translation). See Rosselli (1935). An annotated copy is to be found in ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali, ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana’. See ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali, ‘Pincherle Moravia Alberto e sorella Adriana’. Part of the report from informer no. 353 (Vincenzo Bellavia), dated ‘Parigi, 9 febbraio 1935’: Nobody here has accused him of being immoral. Indeed some of the most respected critics say that like all true novelists he is essentially a moralist and that the sometimes excessive realism which he uses to describe certain parts of society is not at all gleeful, but instead tends to criticize vices and shameful acts whose existence cannot truthfully be denied.
[26] [27] [28]
[29] [30] [31] [32]
Bellavia organised a network of spies and informers for the Polizia Politica in Paris in the 1930s. See Franzinelli (1999, especially pp. 132–133), and Canali (2004), which gives an exhaustive account of Bellavia’s activities. See Arnaldo Colasanti’s introduction to Moravia (2002, p. ii), and Moravia & Elkann (2000, p. 41). The review is signed ‘Vittorio’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 47, 22 November 1935. In a 1993 interview Neos Dinale, chief censor in the Ufficio Stampa when the novel was submitted, described it as ‘too negative [. . .] too much at odds with our outlook on life’. See Fabre (1993, p. 149). See Pini (1950), cited in Michaelis (1998, p. 232). On Fascist legal definitions of Jewishness in Italy, see Sarfatti (2000, pp. 154–164). Biondolillo (1939), cited in Fabre (1998, p. 397). The reason for that decision is probably to be found in an anonymous memorandum in the file of the political police, dated Firenze, 31 Agosto 1941, ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personal, ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana’: A few months ago Bompiani published a novel called La Mascherata by a certain Moravia (a discriminated Jew?), already known for having written other novels. It is a novel which should be brought to your attention because like all such things which come from Jewish blood, it contains a grave danger for anyone coming into contact with it. That is to say it exudes moral depravation and incitement, creating imaginary situations which lend themselves to interpretations which are very, very subtle and dangerous. It is about a general who is put into power by the people of a small imaginary state. These people have tired of nearly 10 years spent in a state of civil war, so finally they have turned to a single leader. (Allusion to authoritarian, so-called dictatorial states). The leader soon becomes aware of large-scale swindling carried out to the detriment of his people by government ministers, his own collaborators. But he cannot act because his hands are tied by family bonds and erotic liaisons which bring to light an obscene side of this great man. That is the gist of it. There are many other imaginary creations which undermine social cohesion such as the unmasking of a system adopted to put down non-existent plots which he deliberately pretends to have toiled to frustrate, and all with the aim of tricking the workers. Anyone who reads it will find lots more than has been set out here very succinctly. It seems that other books by this Moravia have left much to be desired, especially in terms of obscenity and morals. But this time he seems to have gone too far, overstepping the line of political tendentiousness.
144 [33]
[34]
G. Talbot On the scholarly front concerning the foibe, see the special issue of Storia e memoria (2004), vol. 13, no. 1, ‘Foibe. Oltre i silenzi, le rimozioni, le strumentalizzazioni’, Istituto ligure per la storia della Resistenza e dell’eta` contemporanea, Genoa. On the historiography more generally, see Bosworth (1998). See ACS, MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana’.
References Manuscripts ACS, ACS, ACS, ACS, ACS, ACS,
Minculpop, Gab., II versamento, busta 3, fascicolo ‘Cardarelli, Vincenzo’. Minculpop, Gabinetto, II versamento, busta 8, fascicolo ‘Moravia, Alberto’. MI, DGPS, DPP, fascicoli personali, ‘Pincherle Moravia, Alberto e sorella Adriana (1934–1939)’. MI, DARG, Cat. A1, 1940, busta 66 (Pincherle Moravia, Alberto di Carlo). MI, DGPS, DARG, F4, busta 108, fascicolo F4/AG, ‘Sturzo Luigi (Pubblicazioni di)’. MI, DGPS, DARG, F4, busta 117, ‘Elenco generale delle stampe estere sequestrate’.
Books and Articles Adamson, W. L. (2001) ‘Avant garde modernism and Italian modernism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 230–248. Ben-Ghiat, R. (2001) Fascist Modernities, University of California Press, Berkeley. Biocca, D. (1998) ‘Ignazio Silone e la polizia politica’, Nuova storia contemporanea, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 67–90. Biocca, D. & Canali, M. (2000) L’informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia politica, Luni, Milan. Biondolillo, F. (1939) ‘Giudaismo letterario’, Regime Fascista, 8 April. Blatt, J. (1995) ‘The battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Liberta`, OVRA and the origins of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 22–57. Bonsaver, G. (2003) ‘Fascist censorship on literature and the case of Elio Vittorini’, Modern Italy, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 165–186. Bosworth, R. J. B. (1998) The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, Arnold, London. Bosworth, R. J. B. (2002) Mussolini, Arnold, London. Bosworth, R. J. B. (2004) ‘War, totalitarianism and ‘‘Deep Belief’’ in Fascist Italy, 1935–43’, European History Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 475–505. Bottai, G. (1932) ‘Italianita` e modernita`’, Critica fascista, 15 October. Bottai, G. (1935) ‘La tessera e l’ingegno’, Critica fascista, 15 April. Canali, M. (1999) ‘Il fiduciario ‘‘Silvestri’’: Ignazio Silone, i comunisti e la polizia politica fascista’, Nuova storia contemporanea, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 61–80. Canali, M. (2000) ‘Ignazio Silone and the Fascist political police’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 36–60. Canali, M. (2004) Le spie del regime, Il Mulino, Bologna. Cannistraro, P. V. (1975) La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media, Laterza, Rome–Bari. Canosa, R. (2000) I servizi segreti del duce: I persecutori e le vittime, Mondadori, Milan. Canosa, R. (2002) La voce del Duce. L’agenzia Stefani: l’arma segreta di Mussolini, Mondadori, Milan. Cassero, R. (2004) Le veline del Duce, Sperling & Kupfer, Milan. Collotti, E. (2003) Il fascismo e gli ebrei: Le leggi razziali in Italia, Laterza, Bari–Rome. Corner, P. (2002) ‘Fascismo e controllo sociale’, Italia contemporanea, vol. 228, pp. 381–405. De Begnac, Y. (1990) Taccuini mussoliniani, ed. F. Perfetti, Il Mulino, Bologna. De Felice, R. (1977) Storia degli ebrei sotto il fascismo, Mondadori, Milan. De Grazia, V. (1981) The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. De Grazia, V. (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women, University of California Press, Berkeley. De Grazia, V. & Luzzatto, S. (eds) (2002) Dizionario del fascismo, 2 vols, Einaudi, Turin. Diggins, J. P. (1972) Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Fabre, G. (1993) ‘Giu` la maschera’, Panorama, 28 November, pp. 147–150. Fabre, G. (1998) L’Elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei, Silvio Zamorani editore, Turin.
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