An Italian Source for the East Central European Reflection on Totalitarianism: Nicola Chiaromonte and the Polish Exiles and Dissidents (original) (raw)

Throughout the Cold War Fascism and totalitarianism, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism were often perceived and interpreted as reciprocally inconsistent categories, either basically avoiding to cope with Communist totalitarianism or exclusively focussing on it. In the post-1989 period anti-totalitarianism became the legitimizing key of the new democratic orders, but it boosted searches for genealogies still marked by binary perspectives. I aim at reconstructing the complex links between pre- and post-1945 intellectual history within a ‘beyond Cold War’ perspective, analyzing the ways in which a selective and creative appropriation of the anti-liberal culture contributed to the elaboration of a liberal critique of totalitarianism. Nicola Chiaromonte, exiled in Paris and in the US in the 1930s and in the 1940s, was a member of the antifascist revolutionary circle Giustizia e Libertà and a collaborator of the libertarian and anti-totalitarian journal Politics. These circles developed insightful interpretations of the totalitarian thought and experiments, coming to terms with the differences between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Union as well as with their common background in the Great War. In the post-1945 period Chiaromonte kept intense relationships with Czesław Miłosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Jerzy Giedroyc, Konstanty Jeleński, Alexander Wat, Jóseph Czapski, Sławomir Mrożek, and took active part in the editorial and intellectual environment of Kultura. He was recognized as one of the most influential interlocutors by the Polish exiles in the 1950s and 1960s and by the pioneers of the Polish dissidence in the 1970s. I will start from the essay Sur le fascisme published by Chiaromonte on the journal Europe in 1936 and translated in Polish by Wojciech Karpiński in 1973. As Adam Michnik pointed out, the clandestine circulation of Chiaromonte's essay contributed to providing the intellectual background for the formation of the Polish illegal opposition of Kor in the mid-1970s. Fascism as a ‘totalitarianism’ was characterized by the ‘alteration of the vocabulary’, implying a simplification in the representation of reality and a subsequent loss of sense of responsibility. Chiaromonte's early experiences of the Italian Fascism allowed him to develop the analytical and conceptual tools for understanding Soviet Communism (and Nazism), and his Polish friends applied them to the Communist experiences in Eastern Europe. The relationship between violence and propaganda, the crisis of the idea of progress (or ‘nihilism’) and the ascent of the political religions, the faith in History and the problem of Evil represented some of the main topics of their dialogues and collaborations (especially on Chiaromonte's journal Tempo presente, between 1956 and 1968), and all of them amounted to a reflection upon totalitarianism as the deepest sense of modernity. I particularly aim at: a) providing a comparative close reading of Chiaromonte's and Polish intellectuals' analytical and historical perspectives upon totalitarianism, with a special focus on their peculiar hybridization of liberal and anti-liberal thought; b) understanding their emphasis on ‘truth’ as the main way of coping with the epistemological, ethical, and political implications of totalitarianism and of conceiving an oppositional strategy against it.