Italo Calvino, Communist

This short essay (“Notes from the Field”) argues that the Lezioni Americane/Six Memos for the Next Millennium represent not only Calvino’s literary legacy, but also his political legacy as a lifelong communist at heart, even though Calvino, who had fought as a member of the communist Garibaldi division in the anti-fascist Resistance in Liguria, officially resigned from the Italian Communist party in 1957. In spite of his subsequent distance from and even suspicion of politicians and politics per se, Calvino remained deeply political and committed in his thought and in his literary and critical work. For many who think of Calvino merely as the writer of combinatory narratives, the emulator of Jorge Louis Borges, the friend of George Perec and the theorist of “Lightness,” this may come as a surprise.