Primo Levi’s masterpieces return with Repubblica

How to read Primo Levi in the 21st century? How to deal with the author’s writings If this is a man truly embracing the richness of his work? Critics now agree that Levi is one of the greatest Italian authors of the twentieth century. Yet, the reader who has met him in the past, perhaps during his school years, may still lack the awareness of how returning to Primo Levi today is fruitful not only for understanding the past, but for framing the dynamics of the present. The monographic series that Repubblica now offers on newsstands, edited by the Primo Levi International Study Center of Turin in collaboration with Giulio Einaudi editions, is entitled, with this very intent, Primo Levi: a soul of great capacity.

This definition was coined for the Turin writer by another great author, the American Philip Rothin the famous interview with Levi for the New York Review of Book; thus Roth grasped the intellectual peculiarity of his interlocutor, writing of him «there is a single soul, of enviable capacity and without joints; I would say that not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable, but also the writer and the scientist.”

As Domenico Scarpa, consultant of the Primo Levi Center, notes well in the text that accompanies the volumes of the Repubblica series, «Roth realizes that the hyphens of that definition, witness-chemist-writer, are useless and indeed wrong».

There is only one Primo Levi: a young partisan, a Jew interned in Auschwitz, a survivor of the extermination, a chemist in the Siva company in Turin, but also a passionate and curious scholar of ethology, linguistics, cosmology. To begin reading or rereading it, one must in any case start from his triptych dedicated to the experience of the concentration camp but also of the return to the world of the “saved” to which he will never feel he completely belongs again.

As the first three releases of the Repubblica seriesgathered under the title Auschwitz: from afar, from inside, from outside, they open with Levi’s last book, the essay The Drowned and the Saved, in which, shortly before his death in 1987, the writer returned to explore the concentration camp universe. On newsstands starting tomorrow (for 8.90 euros on top of the price of the newspaper) The drowned and the saved is considered his spiritual testament: a reflection, interspersed with memories and stories, to recall and analyze after forty years not only his personal experience as a victim of the gears of the infernal machine of the Third Reich, but above all the concentration camp as an emblem of possible derivative of every authoritarian system. It is in those pages that Levi coins the concept of the gray zone, shifting the focus of the microscope from his story to the entire world that surrounded him: the other deportees but also their jailers.

As we read in the preface to the volume, signed by Tzvetan Todorov, Levi refers here to his first book, If This Is a Man, in «affirming our common humanity», with that strength, which is both moral and literary, which it allows him «without ever losing sight of the insurmountable distinction between Good and Evil», to «still take into account all the possible nuances». And if we consider this book, together with Todorov, as «a long harangue in favor of complexity, of the refusal to settle for easy answers», the choice to start the reading of Levi’s work from here appears clear to us, and the need to re-address it in light of the current times.

On January 27, on the occasion of Remembrance Day, Republic will be on newsstands with If this is a man, Levi’s debut, written immediately after the war; the most human testimony to the inhumanity of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was finished in 1947 and received some rejections before arriving at the publisher De Silva; only over the years will the novel that Umberto Saba define as “fatal”, written out of unavoidable necessity, acquire the place it deserves not only in memoirs, but in literature tout court. Followed, on February 3, Truce, in which the writer recalls the liberation of the extermination camp and his painful and daring journey home. Another 12 volumes will follow, starting with Natural Stories, which will allow us to find his voice again until the end of April.

Necklace

A soul of great capacity

With the three volumes The drowned and the saved, If this is a man e Truce the series entitled Primo Levi opens: a soul of great capacity, in 15 issues. The work is edited by the Primo Levi International Study Center of Turin in collaboration with Giulio Einaudi publisher and will be released on newsstands starting from Saturday 20 January (and for twelve weeks) at 8.90 euros in addition to the price of the newspaper, with The Republic.