When reference is made to Antonio Gramsci’s letters, what comes to mind are his letters from prison, which introduced Gramsci into the European culture and the history of Italian politics.
Gramsci’s correspondence – soon to be published in the National Edition of his complete works – is a far richer and complex body of texts than the sole letters from prison.
It consists of three groups of letters: those written by him, those written to him, and the so-called related letters, associated with the first two groups.
the research conducted in recent years for the National Edition has brought to light a large amount of letters and writings, thanks mostly to the cooperation of the Gramsci family. Through the analysis of Gramci’s letters, the correspondence of members of the Italian Communist Party, and documents from the Comintern and the Russian Government, the essay reconstructs, to the extent possible, the facts of Gramsci’s incarceration, and the intricate mesh of relationships and conflicts around the prisoner from 1926 to 1937.

As compared with Gramsci’s prison writings, his pre-prison output has had a different reception. Gramsci never wrote a book as such and, despite pressure from different sources, never wanted his newspaper articles published in book form, even withdrawing permission for such a volume at the proof stage. From his first newspaper article in 1910 to the essay on the southern question, written just before his arrest, editors are presented with problems. His articles in the communist and socialist press are normally unsigned, thus causing serious and still open problems of attribution. This essay begins by reconstructing how Gramsci’s pre-prison political and journalistic writings were published, from the first two Einaudi editions onwards, concluding with a presentation of the criteria on which the National Edition is based.

This contribution shows the results obtained by a heterogeneous group of scientists (one linguist and four physician/mathematicians) who were asked to try to discover the Gramscian writings hidden in the huge corpus of unsigned articles published by the newspapers where Gramsci usually wrote. The study adopts quantitative authorship attribution methods, which were extensively tested for this specific study on these texts, yielding very interesting results.
A very brief history of quantitative methods for authorship attribution is drawn, with a focus on those used for this study: both based on a mathematical model of texts and the author/text relationship, and both using similarity distances (the first compares the statistics for sequences of n characters – n-grams – in the texts, while the second is based on the concept of entropy of a symbolic sequence).
These methods have until now usually been in the toolbox of textual scholars and historians who could fear being dispossessed of their role and interpretative authority, but things are far more complex.

Felice Platone provided a first still incomplete and thematic edition of the manuscripts written by Gramsci during his years of imprisonment. A few years later, Valentino Gerratana published a complete edition of these manuscripts in chronological order, although he did not include Gramsci’s translations from German, Russian and English.
From L’officina gramsciana on, Gianni Francioni took charge of such philological restoration, continuing and amending Gerratana’s work. Francioni established new criteria on which the complete critical edition of Prison Notebooks was then based as part of the National Edition of Gramsci’s works. The first volume was published in 2007 and included Notebooks of translations, a pivotal text when considered in its intertwining with Gramsci’s theoretical notebooks. The second and third volumes, currently in progress, are devoted respectively to miscellaneous and monographic notebooks, ordered following a new chronology of composition established by Francioni and added to this article as an appendix.

This paper aims at outlining the main framework for a new reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In particular, 1) it focuses not merely on the external, but also on the internal relationship between Gramsci’s own experience as a prisoner, and the «material form» that his thought takes in the Notebooks; and 2) it places emphasis on the intrinsic relation between the theoretical approach in Gramsci’s Notebooks, and the political developments both in the USSR, and in the Italian Communist Party’s strategy in view of the political struggle in Italy. Against this background, a new interpretation of the notes on Italian intellectuals is proposed, arguing that this piece was a strategic intervention addressed to the Italian Communist Party within the political context of the Comintern’s strategy around 1929-1930.

This article investigates Antonio Gramsci’s commitment to linguistic studies between 1911 and 1915, in the context of the scientific debate of that time. After an introduction (section 1), where the letter from prison of 19 March 1927 is analyzed, section 2 is dedicated to discovering Gramsci’s scientific past through the contributions of Luigi Russo, Vittorio Santoli, Giuseppe Vidossi, Benvenuto Terracini, Benedetto Croce and Palmiro Togliatti, in 1947-1949. The relationships between the young Gramsci and the linguists Francesco Ribezzo and Matteo Bartoli are illustrated in sections 3 and 4, where the lecture notes from academic year 1912-1913 (Matteo Bartoli, Course of Historical Linguistics, University of Turin), taken down by Gramsci, are examined.
Then, section 5 illustrates Gramsci’s Sardinian studies, and his likely contribution to Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, with the task of checking its Sardinian lexical material. Gramsci’s studies in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit comparative grammar, and his interest in the methodological writings of Antoine Meillet (particularly in the topics of the social conception of language, the regularity of linguistic change and the descriptive value of sound laws, language contact and the relationships among European linguistic traditions), are illustrated in section 6.
Section 7 underlines the unique nature of the Italian school of dialectology, in which Gramsci was educated, and the scientific debate on Romance and Indo-European etymology at the beginning of 20th century, and illustrates the specific positions of Meyer-Lübke and Meillet, along with their differences from those of Jules Gilliéron and Hugo Schuchardt (as well as Croce’s). Possible theoretical analogies between such a debate and Antonio Labriola’s reflections on linguistic methodology, on the «genetic» conception of history, and on Marxism are suggested.

Gramsci’s intellectual and political formation in the 1910s – a period long deemed of limited relevance in his biography ? has recently received renewed critical and scholarly attention. The essay maps out young Gramsci’s critical fortunes and misfortunes. It opens with the earliest interpretations, whose main aim was to establish the level of Leninism characterizing the initial expressions of Gramsci’s thought, and then moves on to the subsequent divergence between those critics who deemed Gramsci’s early work irrelevant to the overall understanding of his thought, and those who, conversely, considered it the precocious expression of a distinctive political and intellectual identity.
The current resurgence of Gramscian studies has lately made it possible to reconstruct the path leading Gramsci into the theoretical range of communism, thereby establishing continuities and discontinuities with his original concept of socialism.

Referring to Gramsci’s biography, the article discusses the new scientific trends that may result from the publication of the critic edition of the Epistolario (1906-1922).
Of special interest for scholars are the letters of Gramsci’s fellow students at the University of Turin. The relationship with Angelo Tasca rises in full relief in the formation process of the young Sardinian socialist. A second question regards Gramsci’s increasing immersion in the politics of Bordiga in 1921-1922, and the dissent with the Comintern. During this period, Gramsci’s political thought was to be centred upon the absolute primacy of building the Communist Party, and the most radical break with the traditions of Italian Socialism, rather than the struggle against fascism and the differentiated analysis of Italian society.

As a delegate of the Communist Party of Italy (Pcd’I) to the Comintern Executive, Gramsci lived in Moscow from June 1922 to the end of November 1923. He was admitted to the Serebranij Bor sanatorium in the summer of 1922 and there met Eugenia (Evgenija) Schucht, and in September of that year her sister Julia (Jul’ka). It has always been thought that the letters from this period beginning «Dear comrade» and «My dearest» were addressed to the sister who became his wife. However, through a more attentive examination of the texts and of how the documents have come down to us, there is good reason to think that the love letters of the early months of 1923 were in fact sent to Eugenia, and that Gramsci’s romantic relationship with Julia may actually be dated with certainty only to the autumn of 1923. In support of this thesis, the article reconstructs Gramsci’s human and political biography during the period he spent in Soviet Russia.