2024-04-05 19:34:53
by ERNESTO GALLI DELLA LOGGIA
The edition (Aragno) of the correspondence between the two intellectuals. The Laterza initiative which asked writers to immerse themselves in a museum site. The aftermath of the First World War as told by Jay Winter (il Mulino)
It is difficult for important books to become bestsellers, and therefore this certainly won’t be either (Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Carteggio 1915-1924, Aragno, 2 volumes, 966 pages, 60 euros: very carefully edited by Cinzia Cassani and Cecilia Castellani ). But this is not a good reason not to report it. Not to mention the publication of the last phase of the long epistolary relationship between the two most important intellectual figures (not taking Gramsci into account) of the first half of the Italian twentieth century. Where it is therefore possible to read the recording, so to speak, day by day of their very close working relationship – here represented for example by Croce’s total sharing of Gentile’s school reform (other than a fascist reform as the imbeciles continue to say) – until until at the end of 1924, after the Matteotti crime, as Croce writes, the mental disagreement that had long existed between them was converted into another of a practical and political nature which was destined to last forever.
a good idea they had from Laterza to ask some writers to spend a night in a museum and tell what it was like. The first to try was Paolo Nori and this was born A night at the Russian Museum (128 pages, 15 euros) that is, the Petersburg museum of nineteenth-twentieth century Russian art. Nori naturally takes the assignment as a pretext for a roundup that could be called memories and thoughts on Russia. And since he knows how to hold the pen in his hand and knows what he is talking about, the book he presents to us is full of interesting things, curious notes, faces and memories, reconnaissances of famous and non-famous places; crossed on almost every page by the events of the relationship between political power and writers, a topic that is almost obligatory given the context. Hovering over everything is the war in Ukraine and the obvious difficulty today in talking about certain things with the Russians. It is no coincidence that at a certain point Nori writes: it was the first time in Russia that I felt like a Westerner. Not even an Italian, a Westerner.
Evil rarely has anything original: almost always every atrocity can exhibit a past. In the aftermath of the First World War, when the defeated Ottoman Empire dissolved, Turkey itself was in danger of dismembering. Only Mustafa Kemal’s decisive political-military reaction against the jugulatory peace imposed by the Western powers and the expansionist aims of Greece saved it. But at the price of a new peace signed in Lausanne and made possible by a gigantic forced movement of the population: one million Turks resident in Greece and three hundred thousand Greeks resident in Turkey – both for centuries – were forced to leave everything by a day to day and on the exclusive basis of one’s religious affiliation. Jay Winter’s beautiful book tells the whole story (The day in which the Great War ended, translated by Karel Plessini, il Mulino, 343 pages, 28 euros) which underlines how it was precisely in this way that he was established (moreover, let’s say , for a good purpose: to avoid certain massacres) an atrocious precedent destined to have far more tragic repercussions in the future.
April 5, 2024 (modified April 5, 2024 | 9:17 pm)
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