Gramsci died in 1937 in a Rome clinic, days after his sentence expired

Evidence

The transfer to Formia had, in any case, come too late to save him. Renewed international pressure ensured that he was at least granted provisional liberty, in accordance with his constitutional rights, although in point of fact this meant no more than that the bars were removed from his window and that he was allowed to go for walks. Eventually, in August 1935, he was moved to a proper clinic, the “Quisisana” in Rome. He was now suffering from arterio-sclerosis, from a tubercular infection of the back known as Potts disease and from pulmonary tuberculosis, and was subject to high blood-pressure, angina, gout and acute gastric disorders. His prison sentence, less remissions, was due to expire on 21 April 1937, after which, if his health permitted, he hoped to retire to Sardinia for convalescence. But when the time came he was too ill to move from the clinic, and on 27 April he died. Tatiana, while making the funeral arrangements, managed to smuggle the thirty-three notebooks out -of Gramsci’s room and via the diplomatic bag to Moscow. They had been “the focus to my inner life”, and the continuation in Gramsci’s prison cell of his life as a revolutionary. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 240

Categorization

• XREF: The transit of the notebooks to Moscow via Tatiana connects to the material afterlife of prison writings that survive their author — parallels Foucault’s prison writing and the curated posthumous canonization of thinkers.