590
PARTISAN REVIEW
ment . There is another set of assumptions attached to Berlinguer's position.
His mentor, the postwar leader of the Communists, Togliatti, supposed from
the beginning that no revolution was possible in a country belonging to the
Atlantic bloc. Instead, he set about the task of developing a party which
would not be a Leninist avant-garde but a large popular movement. The
doubling of the Communist vote in a generation (from eighteen percent to
nearly twice that) suggests that Togliatti was not wrong . Many on the left,
including socialists and left Catholics as well as revolutionary Marxists skepti–
cal of the Communists' reformism, have doubts about the compromise.
Would it not entail saving a Christian Democratic Party seemingly intent on
destroying itself? And would not the left suffer, at best, the fate of the
German Social Democrats and-at worst-that of the French Socialists in the
Fourth Republic? The proponents of the compromise have one answer. The
first priority is to preserve Italian democracy. A left which took power with
fifty-one or fifty-three percent of the vote might not be able to do so; it might
suffer a combination of outside intervention and a domestic coup, on the
Chilean model. A left which entered government in alliance with a strong
Catholic component could appeal to its Catholic allies (and their voters) to
join it in defense of the constitution and national independence. The argu-
ment continues-and so does the decomposition of the Christian Democrats.
The left may have, soon, no alternative but to assume office without them-
but with a lot of Catholic voters having changed camps. What is interesting
about the notion of "historical compromise" is its descent from Gramsci's
ideas . It also bespeaks the supreme confidence of the Italian Communists in
their ability to reshape Italian culture.
{'
My Italian friends were, ofcourse, in the midst of these discussions when
I arrived. Paolo Milano, a longtime resident of New York and now
Espresso's
literary editor, took me to a gallery opening and then to a reception. The
color, elegance, gaiety of the Italians was striking. I'd just been to similar
events in Paris, which seemed heavier, nonhern, Protestant by comparison:
one sensed points being made, careers advanced . In
Rome
life was play,
serious but full. I wondered whether Italy might not experience a new ren–
aissance. It had been a provincial country since the end of the seventeenth
century, when the center of Europe's cultural gravity shifted nonhward to
London and Paris. The new turn in Italian politics coincides with continuing
vitality in the arts and in thought. Drama, film, and the novel are very much
alive in Italy; so is a concrete and
yet
profound kind of contemporary eth–
nography . Aesthetics, linguistics, political economy, philosophy, flourish.
The end of fascism released enormous cultural energy. The end of the society
dominated by the Christian Democrats may release still more. The Italian
Communists are far from philistine : their culture is more like that of
Lunacharsky, not Zhdanov.
