Читать книгу The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III - Errico Malatesta - Страница 5

Davide Turcato

This volume collects Errico Malatesta’s writings from 1897 and 1898, and is part of Malatesta’s complete works, which encompass all his published and unpublished writings. The aim of this project is to document Malatesta’s thought as fully as possible.

Besides the texts whose authorship can be attributed to Malatesta, we also included texts authored by other people, which report views as expressed by Malatesta. This distinction between his own writings and other people’s writings intersects with the previous distinction between published and unpublished writings, leading to a fourfold partition that may be of use in classifying the documents that have been included in the complete works:

1. Own published writings: this is obviously the category comprising the vast majority of the texts. This group includes all articles, pamphlets, and other printed works by Malatesta.

2. Own unpublished writings: besides any works meant for publication that may have been written but never completed or delivered, we can place in this category all of Malatesta’s correspondence, to which a specific volume of the complete works will be devoted.

3. Other people’s published writings: included here are printed texts that, strictly speaking, are other people’s work, but which report almost directly Malatesta’s words—that is to say, interviews, speech reports, whenever they are sufficiently comprehensive and reliable, and transcripts of apologias in court. Included here as well are collective documents such as programs and manifestos, emanating from groups of which Malatesta was part.

4. Other people’s unpublished writings: into this category can be placed documents from government sources, such as speech reports drafted by informants and police officials, interrogation transcripts, and other trial records.

This last category requires a brief explanation. Documents in this class must obviously be treated with great caution, suggested by broad considerations of reliability—which, incidentally, also apply to reports carried in the press hostile to anarchism. Above all, however, caution is required by documents attributable to Malatesta but produced while he was in custody. Even though an interrogation can be superficially equated with an interview, the state of captivity in which it takes places should keep one from unproblematically regarding it as a genuine expression of the speaker’s thought. Suffice it to mention the “opportunistic” outlook expressed by Malatesta himself, who, commenting upon a comrade’s decision to refuse release on probation, argued that it was naïve “to deny oneself the opportunity to do good for the sake of repudiating empty formalities which carry no moral authority the moment they are forced upon us by brutish violence.”1 Rather than include or exclude these type of documents en bloc, we have decided to assess them on a case by case basis, in the light of two criteria: their political or autobiographical interest; and their degree of reliability, based on a comparison with other Malatesta sources. On the basis of these criteria, for instance, we have included here the hitherto unpublished interrogations of Malatesta during the instruction phase of the April 1898 trial, as well as his speeches during the courtroom proceedings.

With an author like Malatesta, one of the main problems an editor faces is represented by the attribution criteria. The seemingly obvious concept of “complete works,” as the set of works written in the author’s own hand, whilst valid in theory, is practically inapplicable in Malatesta’s case. The reason is that Malatesta’s writings are to be found mostly in periodicals edited by himself and are most often unsigned. The criterion of assembling only what can be demonstrably attributed to the author’s pen could be rigorously applied only at the cost of unacceptable exclusions that would defeat the very idea of “complete works”; or else, the pursuit of completeness would run the risk of turning into vaguely formulated and hardly generalizable ad hoc criteria applied on a case-by-case basis, which, in the final analysis, would be tantamount to an arbitrary and subjective selection. The dilemma has been tackled here by broadening the concept of authorship from the narrow meaning set out above to that of “intellectual responsibility”: when it could not be conclusively demonstrated either that a writing issued from Malatesta’s pen or that it did not, the writing was included if it could be shown that Malatesta made himself its “author” by taking on responsibility for it and openly acknowledging it as a faithful expressions of his thought. The concept of intellectual responsibility, though seemingly more vague, can actually translate into criteria that are more rigorous and explicit—and at the same time more practicable and less restrictive—than those set by the narrower concept of authorship. In other words, it is often easier to empirically ascertain a writing’s intellectual responsibility than its material authorship.

The basic assumption informing the criterion of intellectual responsibility is simple and is set out by Malatesta himself in L’Agitazione. Commenting on an article that appeared in a review, he notes that, as it was signed by the editorial board, the article can be deemed as having come from the pen of the director, “or, at any rate, published under his responsibility.” One can legitimately presume that the same criterion applied to other people’s periodicals was all the more applied by Malatesta to his own. Similar to an article signed by an editorial board, it can be presumed, until proven otherwise, that an article published by Malatesta, unsigned and with no accompanying editorial note, in his own political newspapers, was by him, or had at least been read, reviewed, and approved by him, and thus fully reflected his thought. So, with regard to the broad “grey area” of writings that were carried in Malatesta’s periodicals and for which there is no proof attesting incontrovertibly to their material authorship, the criterion of ascribing the writing to the periodical’s editor becomes decisive.

Obviously this criterion is applicable to differing degrees, varying from paper to paper, depending on the paper’s editorial line-up and the extent of Malatesta’s involvement and freedom of action within the editorial group. In this respect, L’Agitazione is one of Malatesta’s periodicals where unsigned writings can most widely and confidently be credited to him. He was directly involved in the decision to launch that periodical and was responsible for its editing from the outset. Therefore, the periodical definitely bears his imprint. Furthermore, the underground life into which Malatesta was forced for most of the time in question afforded him the opportunity to steadily devote himself to the paper’s editing. The identity of opinions between Malatesta and L’Agitazione was explicitly confirmed in the columns of the paper itself. In response to claims of an alleged change in Malatesta’s tactics, L’Agitazione carried the following “Note from the Editors”: “Errico Malatesta is one of our contributors and he absolutely upholds the same principles and the same tactics as our newspaper champions. So anybody with an interest in finding out what Malatesta thinks has only to read L’Agitazione. Anyone attributing to him ideas contrary to those of L’Agitazione is telling lies.” Again, in his apologia at the April 1898 trial, faced with accusations based upon writings that had appeared in the anarchist press, Malatesta rejected responsibility for writings that had appeared in other papers, while he stated to “fully recognize” L’Agitazione as his paper and to accept “full responsibility” for its whole series.2

Just as the goal of accounting for Malatesta’s thought justifies the inclusion of unsigned texts, it also acts as a filter on the basis of which such texts have been selected, excluding those that have limited value as expressions of thought. As a rule, we excluded columns, such as the ones dealing with the “social movement” or the “anarchist-socialist movement,” which are usually compilations of correspondence, extracts from other newspapers, or news items, anyway. More generally, we excluded articles that have mainly an informative nature, rather than of comment or criticism, such as: the frequent updates on the distribution and conditions of anarchists in forced residence; the ones rehashing articles already appeared in the foreign anarchist and socialist press; news stories, such as detailed accounts of police abuses; and items of merely local or fleeting interest, or in which reflection and comment are confined, anyway, to brief remarks restating known concepts thoroughly explored in other articles. The application of these criteria has at all times been tempered by common sense and for every criterion exceptions have been made and explained in footnotes.

In any case, inclusion or exclusion always affects entire articles, thus avoiding the intermediate solution of reprinting articles partially. The only exception has been items that appear in columns that are normally excluded, such as “From Letters and Postcards.” For example, in the event that a letter signed by Malatesta was published in one of those columns, we have included only the item in question rather than the entire column. Conversely, columns normally included, such as “Trifles”—once Malatesta took charge of it—have been reprinted in full, including sections that would have been excluded if they had appeared on their own.

Furthermore, when the text by Malatesta consists of an editor’s note to someone else’s article, parts of the article being commented upon have been summarized or omitted, wherever doing so was no impairment to the understanding of Malatesta’s response. The summarized parts are enclosed in square brackets. In general, square brackets always enclose editor’s interventions. We also excluded from other people’s reports of Malatesta’s speeches parts unrelated to the actual report, such as personal comments by the writer. In all cases the omissions have been signalled through the insertion of three spaced dots (. . .) that graphically differ from the ellipsis (…) used in the text by the author.

As for the time span covered by this volume, we decided to slightly bring the starting date forward. Although sparse articles by Malatesta appeared in January 1897, we set the volume’s start to the polemic between Malatesta and Francesco Saverio Merlino, which began between late February and early March 1897, rather than to the beginning of the calendar year. Clearly, the writings from January 1897 have been included in the chronologically preceding volume. The polemic with Merlino constitutes the natural prologue to Malatesta’s time with L’Agitazione, which soon became the forum of that controversy and to which this volume is almost entirely devoted. Indeed, this volume includes the entire period when L’Agitazione was edited by Malatesta, which is to say, from the first issue in March 1897 through to January 1898. With few exceptions, the writings included here are from that periodical.

The texts are laid out in the chronological order in which they were published or written, with the few items that did not appear in L’Agitazione inserted into that periodical’s main sequence. In this way the reader can the more readily understand cross-references between articles, such as Malatesta’s comments in L’Agitazione on an interview that appeared earlier in Avanti. The only exception to the chronological order is serialized articles. In this case follow-up instalments have been added to the opening item, with the transitions between instalments signalled in footnotes. Finally, fragmentary reports and statements that have been excluded from the main body for reasons of brevity or questionable reliability, and that are therefore of merely documentary interest, have been collated in the “Press Clippings” section.

Malatesta’s works span a period of sixty years and were published in a broad range of publications in many countries and languages. Because of such diversity, we have not attempted to enforce uniformity of stylistic conventions. Rather, in a spirit of documentary editing, we have made an effort to reproduce those works as faithfully as possible. As a rule, unless stylistic changes were required by linguistic or cultural differences between the source language and English (such as, for example, different capitalization conventions), we have preserved typesetting styles from the original sources. Hence what might appear as inconsistencies in the present volume adhere to the original publications.

Rather than indicating by means of notes which articles are signed, the signatures have been placed directly in the text, as they appear in the original text. Therefore, articles without a signature in the text should be considered unsigned. Malatesta’s own footnotes are preceded by the phrase “Author’s note” in square brackets. All other notes are by the editor.

As we have done for each volume, we have prefaced Malatesta’s texts with an introductory essay by an authoritative scholar in the history of anarchism and Malatesta’s works. Besides setting the historical context, the essay offers an interpretation of Malatesta’s thought and action during the period concerned. In entrusting the introductory essays to a range of scholars, we aim to offer an overview of the critical literature on Malatesta and a sample of possible interpretations of his work. The readers should not expect those interpretations to make up a coherent whole. In this “choir” there are as many dissonances as harmonies among the various voices. So, we are far from intending to offer any “official” interpretation that may steer and influence the reading of Malatesta. Rather, if there is any intent in offering dissonant voices, it might be that of stimulating a healthy scepticism. After all, one of the main purposes of this project is to make available to everyone texts hitherto accessible only to a narrow circle of academics and researchers. Readers are therefore encouraged to form their own interpretation of Malatesta on his texts, and subject the introductory essays to a critical scrutiny on the basis of that interpretation.

Finally, I wish to thank Maurizio Antonioli for having given me access to periodicals of the time, Tomaso Marabini for his invaluable help in going through those periodicals, and Barry Pateman for his expert advice about editorial criteria. I also thank Pietro Di Paola, Paolo Finzi, Carl Levy, and the late Nunzio Pernicone for having read and commented upon a preliminary draft of this foreword.

1 “List of Political Coatti,” p. 166 of this volume.

2 “From Letters and Postcards” and “Court of Ancona: Trial of Malatesta and Co.” p. 329 and 447 of this volume, respectively.