Moving, cataloguing and preserving Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.

This essay reconstructs some events which, even though not directly concerning either the content or the chronology of the composition of Antonio Gramsci’s Notebooks, crucially marked their existence. The relevant events may be listed in four groups: (1) the January 1934 shipment of some of the notebooks Gramsci had had in Turi prison to the Formia clinic where he had been hospitalised and of some others to Rome, to the residential address of his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht; (2) the numbering and cataloguing of the Notebooks that Tatiana Schucht did a few weeks after Gramsci’s death (special attention will be paid to the results of the expertise carried out by the Istituto centrale per il restauro e la conservazione del patrimonio archivistico e librario on some of the labels that Tatiana pasted on the notebooks she catalogued); (3) their shipment to Moscow, between 1937 and 1938, and their preservation until they were returned to Rome after the end of the Second World War; (4) the differences in the ways Gramsci's Notebooks were counted and the different total that they were said to consist of. The proposed reconstruction will stress the importance of often underestimated data: the presence of a sketchbook among those normally referred to as notebooks; the fact that Tatiana herself, while numbering thirty-one of Gramsci’s notebooks, did not number two large-format notebooks, which can be assumed to have remained separate from the others for a long time; and the existence of two other large-format notebooks on which Tatiana began to prepare, without completing them, a catalogue of the topics and a complete transcription of the notebooks written by Gramsci. Moreover, it will become clear that the hypotheses put forward by those who supported the thesis of the subtraction of one or more notebooks lack solid foundations and are unnecessary.