Ignazio Silone

Early life and career

He was born in the town of Pescina in the Abruzzo region and lost many family members, including his mother, in the 1915 Avezzano earthquake. His father had died in 1911. Silone joined the Young Socialists group of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), rising to be their leader.

He was a founding member of the breakaway Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) in 1921, and became one of its covert leaders during the Fascist regime. Ignazio's brother Romolo Tranquilli was arrested in 1928 for being a member of the PCI and died in prison in 1931 as a result of the severe beatings he received.

Opposition to Stalinism and return to the PSI

Silone in the 1920s.

Silone left Italy in 1927 on a mission to the Soviet Union and settled in Switzerland in 1930. While there, he declared his opposition to Joseph Stalin and the leadership of Comintern; consequently, he was expelled from the PCI. He suffered from tuberculosis and severe clinical depression and spent nearly a year in Swiss clinics; in Switzerland, Aline Valangin helped and played host to him and other migrants. As he recovered, Silone began writing his first novel, Fontamara, published in German translation in 1933. The English edition, first published by Penguin Books in September 1934, went through frequent reprintings during the 1930s, with the events of the Spanish Civil War and the escalation towards the outbreak of World War II increasing attention for its subject material.

The United States Army printed unauthorized versions of Fontamara and Bread and Wine and distributed them to the Italians during the liberation of Italy after 1943. These two books together with The Seed Beneath the Snow form the Abruzzo Trilogy. Silone returned to Italy only in 1944, and two years later he was elected as a PSI deputy.

In the course of World War II, he had become the leader of a clandestine socialist organization operating from Switzerland to support resistance groups in Nazi Germany-occupied Northern Italy. He also became an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent under the pseudonym of Len.

Following his contribution to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed (1949), Silone joined the Congress of Cultural Freedom and edited Tempo Presente. In 1967, with the discovery that the journal received secret funds from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Silone resigned and devoted all his energies to the writing of novels and autobiographical essays.

In 1969, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, a literary award for writers who deal with the theme of individual freedom and society. In 1971, he was the recipient of the prestigious Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Controversy

Silone in his last years.

Italian historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali found documents which, they claimed, 'proved' that Silone acted as an informant for the Fascist police from 1919 until 1930. The two historians published the results of their research in a work titled L'informatore. Silone, i comunisti e la polizia.

A 2005 biography by Biocca also includes documents showing Silone's involvement with the American intelligence (the OSS) during and after the World War, ultimately suggesting that Silone's political stands (as well as extensive literary work) should be reconsidered in light of a more complex personality and political engagements.

Ignazio Silone was married to Darina Laracy (1917-2003), an Irish student of Italian literature. He died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1978.

• Fontamara (1933)
• Fascism – Its Origin and Development (1934)
• Bread and Wine (1937) (original Italian title: Vino e Pane)
• The School for Dictators (1938; new edition 1963, translated by William Weaver)
• The Living Thoughts of Mazzini (1939)
• The Seed Beneath the Snow (1940)
• Ed egli si nascose. Dramma in quattro atti (1944)
• The God that Failed (contribution) (1949)
• Emergency Exit (1951); published in a collection of the same name with nine other works in 1969
• Handful of Blackberries (1952)
• Wine and Bread (1955 revised version of the 1937 title) (orig. Italian Vino e pane)
• Luca's Secret (1956) (orig. Italian Il Segreto di Luca)
• Story of a Humble Christian (1968) (orig. Italian L'avventura di un povero cristiano)
• Il seme sotto la neve. Edizione critica a cura di Alessandro La Monica, Firenze, Le Monnier Università, 2015.

Three of Silone's poems were included by Hanns Eisler in his Deutsche Sinfonie, along with poetry by Bertolt Brecht.

• A version of Fontamara, directed by Carlo Lizzani and starring Michele Placido, was released in 1977.

• Giuseppe Leone, Ignazio Silone, scrittore dell'intelligenza, Firenze Atheneum, Firenze, 1996, ISBN 88-7255-106-4
• Dario Biocca – Mauro Canali. L'informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia, Luni Editrice, Milano, Trento, 2000
• Giuseppe Tamburrano. Processo a Silone, La disavventura di un povero cristiano, Lacaita Editore, Rome, 2001
• Maria Moscardelli, La Coperta Abruzzese. Il filo della vita di Ignazio Silone, Ed. Aracne, Rome, 2004.
• Mauro Canali. Le spie del regime, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2004
• Dario Biocca. Silone. La doppia vita di un italiano, Rizzoli, Milan 2005.
• Mimmo Franzinelli, Silone in the 'thirties'. www.mimmofranzinelli.it/tool/home.php?s=0,1,55,57,63, n.d.
• Elizabeth Leake. The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone, University of Toronto Press Toronto, 2003
• Giuseppe Leone, Silone e Machiavelli: una scuola... che non crea prìncipi, Prefazione di Vittoriano Esposito, Centro Studi Ignazio Silone, Pescina, 2003.
• Giuseppe Leone, [rec. al vol. di] Maria Moscardelli, "La coperta abruzzese – Il filo della vita di Ignazio Silone", in "Marsica Domani", Avezzano, 31 ottobre 2005, pag. 9.
• Giuseppe Leone, Nulla di vero nel Silone di Biocca, su Marsica Domani, Avezzano, 2005.
• Fontamara on IMDb
• Giuseppe Leone, [rec. al vol. di] Valeria Giannantonio, "La scrittura oltre la vita ( Studi su Ignazio Silone)", su "Quaderni siloniani", 1-2/2005.
• Michael P.McDonald, Il caso Silone (in English), www.michaelmcdonaldweb.com/essays/ilcasosilone.htm, 2001.
• Maria Moscardelli, Silone reinvented", www.amici-silone.net/silone_reinvented.htm, 2005.
• Stanislao G. Pugliese. Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009
• Giuseppe Leone e Roberto Zambonini, "Puccini e le "more" di Silone: viaggio poetico-musicale fra "soavi fanciulle" e coraggiose eroine", Malgrate (Lc), 27 agosto 2009.
• Giuseppe Leone, "L'ennesimo bis del secondo "caso" Silone – Andrea Paganini e il suo "Ignazio Silone, l'uomo che si è salvato", su Pomezia-Notizie, Roma, Luglio 2010, pp. 10–11.
• Giuseppe Leone, Il "fenicottero" Silone nella revisione di Renzo Paris, Pomezia-Notizie, febbraio 2015, pp. 10–11.
• Ignazio Silone, Il seme sotto la neve. Edizione critica a cura di Alessandro La Monica, Milano-Firenze, Mondadori Education-Le Monnier Università, 2015.