Antonio Gramsci: A Great & Terrible World — Pre-Prison Letters 1908-1926, by Derek Boothman (Lawrence and Wishart, £25)

In the 1970s, four decades after his death in a fascist prison in 1937, the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci became something of a polarising figure in the international communist movement.

Those who wished to promote a specifically “Western” road to socialism sought justification in the voluminous notebooks which Gramsci compiled, under heavy censorship, while in prison.

Others, such as John Hoffman in his Gramscian Challenge, argued the contrary. Gramsci, he claimed, maintained and in some respects deepened Lenin’s revolutionary perspectives on the state.

Times have changed, yet Gramsci remains a key figure for socialists. He helped direct the mobilisation of the Italian working class in its revolutionary years from 1919 to 1921 and then, over the two subsequent decades, sought to understand how fascism came to dominate Italy and then so much of Europe.

Derek Boothman’s collection of Gramsci’s letters provides for the first time all his surviving correspondence before the prison years, ranging from his schoolboy pleas for financial help to those written immediately prior to his arrest in 1926 as underground secretary of the Italian Communist Party.

The richest and most interesting period of correspondence covers the years 1922 to 1926. The previous years are disappointingly thin and there is very little about his involvement in the factory council movement in Turin and even less on his “materialist” linguistic research at Turin University.

This deficit is, however, made up by what follows. In these years Gramsci was either in Moscow or Vienna and writing to colleagues in the party leadership or, as a deputy in the Italian parliament, to the three Schucht sisters, Russian Bolsheviks who he met in Moscow. One of them, Julia, eventually became his partner and bore his two sons.

The most famous exchange was that with Palmiro Togliatti in 1926, who a year later became leader of the party. Gramsci wrote a draft letter from Rome to the Communist International on the open divisions that had developed within the Soviet party, divisions which were being used by government propagandists in Italy to confuse and demoralise the Italian left.

He uses the word “hegemony” to describe the prestige won among Italian workers over the previous years by the clear united leadership of the Communist International, now being undermined at a time when the battered contingents of the Italian working class needed it most.

Gramsci strongly disputed the line taken by the opposition faction led by Trotsky and Zinoviev. Their denunciation of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry struck at a key element in the programme of the Italian party.

Yet Gramsci also deplored the failure of both sides to contain the dispute. He argued that it was essential to continue the type of centralised but encompassing collective leadership developed by Lenin.

There is much else in the volume. Gramsci’s letters to Julia describe the day-to-day fluctuations in the battle to sustain resistance to Mussolini’s fascism, in which Gramsci maintains an optimism that might in hindsight seem misplaced but which in struggle was essential.

Though the book is pricey for a paperback, it is certainly worth ordering through libraries.