Eugenio Corti and the Communism

Abstract

Eugenio Corti (1921–2014), marked by a precocious vocation as a writer, focuses on communism as the major danger of the twentieth century. Aiming to see by himself the ongoing experiment of the Soviet communism, he answered the call to arms by asking to be sent to the eastern front – despite disapproving the war of the German allies against Russia. While in Ukraine, he gets aware of the communist inhumanity and, still alive after the retreat, he devotes himself to the service of truth. He denounces the connivance of the western culture with the massacres provoked by the communist ideology.

The tragedy Processo e morte di Stalin (1962) originates from a long study of the theory and praxis of the communism in the Soviet Union, but also in China and Indochina. In this work, the Georgian dictator, forced by a conspiracy lead by Politburo members, analyzes the real communism; in the end, he demonstrates the practical impossibility of the ideal society of the “new mankind”, which this ideology longed for. Eugenio Corti was born on 21 January 1921, the same day when the history of Communist Party of Italy began after the split of the Italian Socialist Party: this coincidence of the dates is emblematic of the approach, both historical and transcendent, with which the Author will investigate the origin and the results of the communist experiment, denouncing the horrors perpetrated in the implementation of Marxist theories. Following this existential vocation, after a diary of his memories of the retreat from the Eastern front and after a novel about his experience in the regular army during the war of liberation of Italy from the German army, he dedicated himself to a long and consistent study of communist ideology. Alongside the works of Marx, Stalin and Lenin, he analyzed a large amount of studies on the philosophical roots of communism, including the accredited work of Isaac Deutscher on Stalin. In Corti’s view, Stalin addresses the failure of this utopian project to the unchangeability of the nature and of the human heart. By confuting the theses of marxism-leninism on the basis of reality, Corti shows that the evil is not found in unbalanced class relations, but in the human heart which, at the same time, constitutes the extreme defense of the universal human values.