THE LONG GOODBYE
In the absence of revolution, Perry Anderson turns to realism
by BRUCE ROBBINS
P
ublished in the late 1940s, a decade
after his death, the Italian volumes of
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
started the process of his secular
canonization. A founder of the Ital-
ian Communist Party, Gramsci had spent
11 years in Fascist custody. During thisperiod, while his teeth fell out and his
health failed, Gramsci filled 3,000 note-
book pages with reflections on anything
and everything he believed was relevant to
Italian history and politics, and the pros-
pects for the left in Europe. To get past the
prison censors, he did so in coded, some-
times enigmatic abstractions. In 1937, still
in Fascist custody, he died never having
seen one of his two sons. At the time, he
was mourned by his Communist comrades
but by few outside those circles, and cer-tainly fewer outside of Italy.
Today, Gramsci is a household name;
one no longer hears it pronounced as if heBruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation
Professor in the Humanities at Columbia
University. His most recent book is The
Beneficiary.The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci
By Perry Anderson
Verso. 192 pp. $24.95The H-Word
The Peripeteia of Hegemony
By Perry Anderson
Verso. 208 pp. $26.95ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA