Franco Fortini

Source: picture submitted by the author.

Florence, 1917-Milan, 1994

Poet, literary critic and translator, Franco Fortini contributed to the development of critical thought about Marxism in Italy. He helped found several independent left-wing magazines in the second half of the twentieth century, such as “Il Politecnico”, “Ragionamenti”, “Officina”, “Quaderni Rossi” and “Quaderni Piacentini” and was an occasional editor for “L’Espresso”, “L’Europeo”, “Corriere della Sera” and “Il Manifesto”. His most widely read translations include Goethe’s Faust, Brecht’s poetry, Kafka and Proust. The Franco Fortini archive preserves more than six thousand letters documenting Fortini’s correspondence with European intellectuals of the period (http://www.centrofortini.unisi.it/archivio.html).
Fortini’s critical writings span fifty years, from the second half of the Forties to the first years of the Nineties, and show a lifelong interest in Soviet Russia. He considered the history of the Soviet Union to be an integral part of his own and the West’s relationship with Marxism and believed it essential to take a critical stance towards socialist societies such as the USSR, where, despite the XX Congress, the repressive legacy of Stalin continued to be felt.
After the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1958, Fortini read Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak which led him to think about the connection between the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism and International Socialism. Later, he acknowledged the failure of Khrushchev’s Thaw and the whole Soviet socialist experience. Dissent became a frequent theme in his papers and political-ideological reflections.
The section Paesi allegorici (Allegorical countries) of Questioni di frontiera (Border Issues), a collection of Fortini’s literary and political writings from 1963 to 1977 contains a review of Denisovich, an article written after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Italy, a short summarizing note on Solzhenitsyn and an essay on the memoirs of the mathematician Leonid Pliushch.
The central article of the collection, Più velenoso di quanto pensiate (More poisonous than you think) reflects on the phenomenon and importance of dissent, which was also the focus of Fortini’s speech at in the conference organised in Venice by “Il Manifesto” group, entitled Potere e opposizione nelle società post rivoluzionarie (Power and opposition in post revolutionary societies). In his journalistic activity, Fortini often wrote on the same theme, for example in an essay on the Daniel-Siniavskii case in 1965 and a note on Amal’rik in 1980.
Fortini saw intellectual protest in the USSR as a reaction to social and political repression and the direct consequence of a refusal to properly assess the country’s Stalinist past.
The condemnation of Stalinism was always a central element in Fortini’s thinking. During his exile in Switzerland in the last phase of the Second World War, alongside the works of Marx and Lenin, he read V. Serge’s pamphlet, Où va la révolution russe?, the minutes of Bukharin’s trials and A. Malraux’s L’espoir (cf. Fortini 2003: 464-465; Santarone 2014). From his years with the magazine “Politecnico” (1947-1948) Fortini expounded a Marxist, anti-Stalinist theory, which he continued to believe in throughout his life and which is evident in much of his writing on dissent. Fortini identified two consequences of Stalinism in contemporary Soviet society: the first concerned the memory of the revolution, which risked being tainted by the failure of the Soviet regime; the second was the disappearance of a real Socialist perspective in the USSR, both in terms of socioeconomic policy and as a utopian ideal. In La statua di Stalin (Stalin’s Statue), a film by C. Mangini and L. Dal Fra, for which Fortini wrote the script, Stalinism is judged from a perspective that remains Marxist and communist but which condemns the trials, the purges, the deportations and the politically motivated executions that took place in Soviet Russia.  Stalin’s influence on the history of Western Communism is openly interrogated (cf. Santarone, 2014).
Until the Soviet invasion of Budapest, Fortini saw in the Thaw a real possibility of overcoming Stalinism. He later used the example of Doctor Zhivago as evidence of the presence of an anti-Stalinist intellectual resistance in the USSR, capable of revealing irremediable cracks in the Soviet political and ideological system.
After Zhivago, Soviet opposition literature tended to contrast interior liberty and social constraint which condemned the individual to live in a state of repression. For Fortini, however, the lack of a changing historical perspective was “the first true sign of surrender from the USSR” (Fortini 1977: 159) and the integration between spiritual and material needs was an inescapable precondition for establishing a Socialist utopia which could only be realised if change came about through political action.
Fortini wrote about dissent as an phenomenon within Marxism. The individualism at the root of dissent was commonly criticized by Italian Marxists as a westernist misreading of the Soviet conscience, that was to be attributed to intellectual minorities or classes. Fortini, like many of his fellow Marxists, did not share the ideological content of the intellectual protest beyond the Iron Curtain but he defended its political value, since it represented an opportunity to reveal the oppressive nature of Soviet socialism and investigate the relationship between political repression and the economic and social-political structures in the USSR.
Fortini differed both from PCI (Italian Communist Party) activists and those on the extraparlamentary left, who, regarding most Soviet dissenters as liberal conservatives, were reluctant to enter into debates about Soviet repression.
During these years, characterised by increasing terrorist activity in Italy, Fortini engaged in dialogue with the “Gruppo del Manifesto”, contributed to the magazine “Quaderni piacentini”, delivered speeches to students and visited political prisoners. He attempted to demythologize the Soviet experience in order to save Western Communism from the legacy of the October Revolution at a time when the Italian left was grappling with the historical compromise, Eurocommunism, the increasing radicalism of extraparlamentary groups and social protest, and reform was represented by the workers statute of rights and the legalisation of divorce.
Dissenting literature from the USSR and the testimony of Soviet exiles demonstrated that in the Soviet Union socialism was no longer a practicable solution and could not offer a point of reference for Western Marxism. For Fortini, Marxism in the USSR was “a lie inculcated since school, […] faked, worse than any catechism” (Fortini 1977: 165). The historical and existential truths offered by Soviet dissidents to the West could not be ignored by Western communist opinion.

Alessandra Reccia
[30^th June 2021]

Translation by Diletta Bacci

 Bibliography

• Fortini F., Rileggendo Pasternak, Verifica dei poteri, in Id., Saggi ed epigrammi, L. Lenzini (ed.), Mondadori, Milano 2003.
• Fortini F., Tre testi per film. “All’armi siam fascisti” 1961, “Scioperi a Torino” 1962, “La statua di Stalin” 1963, Edizioni Avanti!, Milano 1963.
• Fortini F., Di fronte alla violenza delle scelte, “Il Giorno”, 17th February 1966.
• Fortini F., I paesi allegorici, in Id., Questioni di frontiera, Einaudi, Torino 1977.
• Fortini F., Più velenoso di quanto pensiate, in Id., Questioni di frontiera, Einaudi, Torino 1977: 16-43.
• Fortini F., Non mi basta la contemplazione atterrita della contraddizione, Potere e opposizione nelle società post-rivoluzionarie, “Il Manifesto”, Quaderno 8, Alfani, Roma 1978.
• Fortini F., Un dialogo ininterrotto. Interviste 1952-1994, a cura di V. Abati, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003: 464-465.
• Santarone D., Internazionalismo di Fortini: la statua di Stalin, “Ospite Ingrato”, 2nd December 2014, https://www.ospiteingrato.unisi.it/internazionalismo-di-fortini-la-statua-di-stalin/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).