Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were written under fascist imprisonment and smuggled out.

Evidence

Among those arrested was Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a member of parliament-but the regime was no longer interested in niceties about parliamentary immunity. He had also, since August 1924, been the general secretary of the Communist Party-though of course under such political conditions the identity of party officials was kept secret. He was 35 years old. At his trial in 1928, the official prosecutor ended his peroration with the famous demand to the judge: “We must stop this brain working for twenty years!” But, although Gramsci was to be dead long before those twenty years were up, released, his health broken, only in time to die under guard in a clinic rather than in prison, yet for as long as his physique held out his jailers did not succeed in stopping his brain from working. The product of those years of slow death in prison were the 2,848 pages of handwritten notes which he left to be smuggled out of the clinic and out of Italy after his death, and of which this volume is a selection. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 34

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Grounds the conditions under which all Gramscian concepts in later readings were produced — relevant framing for hegemonia and common sense in the Islamophobia module.

Related

• The fascist regime isolated Gramsci through chained transfers and planted agents (similarity 0.86)
• Gramsci was held in near-total isolation and surveillance in Milan for over a year (similarity 0.86)
• Fascist prison conditions nearly killed Gramsci before transfer to Formia (similarity 0.85)
• Gramsci’s major theoretical work was written in prison without library access (similarity 0.84)
• Fascist imprisonment ended Gramsci’s active intellectual life at forty-six (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks during an eleven-year physical death-agony (similarity 0.82)
• Censorship forced Gramsci’s political commentary into opaque, allusive form in prison (similarity 0.82)
• Prison censorship forced Gramsci to rewrite his notebooks using veiled language. (similarity 0.80)
• The prison Notebooks’ fragmentary form shapes how his concepts must be read (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci died in 1937 in a Rome clinic, days after his sentence expired (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s leadership combined anti-sectarian party norms with mass responsiveness (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s notebooks are too fragmentary for definitive claims about his project. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The fascist regime isolated Gramsci through chained transfers and planted agents #expands (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 227
• Incarceration’s isolation from source texts shaped Gramsci’s theoretical work. #complicates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2782