[4] Carlo Muscetta was born and grew up at Avellino, a midsized town with a rich history, located approximately 50 kilometres (30 miles) inland to the east of Naples.
Between 1925 and 1928 he attended the Liceo Pietro Colletta (technical secondary academy) in Avellino, which according to one evidently unimpressed commentator might have led him to a career as a cost accountant.
[1] He graduated in 1934, successfully concluding his student career with a dissertation, supervised by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, concerning the nineteenth century literature scholar Francesco de Sanctis,[9] a subject to which he returned in his subsequent writings.
He was dismissed from his teaching post after he was overheard criticising the colonial war in Abyssinia, but found a new position at the "Istituto Di Cagno Abbrescia", a secondary school in nearby Bari through the intervention of Fiore.
[3] There are indications that even when he was a literature student in Naples, during a period in which Italy was increasingly governed as a one-party dictatorship, there were members of the university who regarded Muscetta as politically suspect.
[1] In 1937 the couple relocated to Pescara (Abruzzo) where Muscetta had been offered a more secure (and better paid) job at a "scuola magistrale" (secondary school with a strong academic focus).
He teamed up with one of these, Mario Alicata, to compile and publish "Avventure e scoperte: nuove letture per i ragazzi italiani della scuola media", an anthology of "adventure and discovery stories", aimed at younger teenagers.
[1][15] In 1940, together with the antifascist journalist Giaime Pintor, Muscetta became a member of the judging commission for the "Prelittoriali", a sub-section of the annual "Littoriali" in which he had competed with such success in 1939.
However, Muscetta took the idea of going along with fascism one step further, contributing during the early 1940s to the fortnightly literary magazine "Primato"[16] which was launched in March 1940, and thereafter directed by Giuseppe Bottai, the Fascist Education Minister in Mussolini's government between 1936 and 1943.
After 1943, Muscetta was able to insist forcefully that he had never fully conformed, even in his contributions to "Primato", to the characterisation which he imputed to Velio Spano, that he had been seen as a "young redeemed anti-fascist" ("un giovane antifascista redento").
Fellow members of the circle included Giaime Pintor, Cesare Pavese and Leone Ginzburg, each of whom on occasion made their own contributions to "Primato".
[3] As in the First World War, so in the second, the Italian government avoided military involvement for more than half a year following the outbreak of hostilities between the major power north of the Alps.
When Mussolini signalled support for his Germany allies by means of a brief (and militarily inconsequential) invasion of France from the south in June 1940, there was a polarising impact on public opinion.
During 1942/;43 the two men helped to set up "L'Italia Libera", an underground (at this stage) monthly newssheet presented as the party newspaper of the "Partito d'Azione" and produced in various places.
Their situation appeared grim, but all was not blackness: many years later a fellow inmate, Sandro Pertini would confide that whenever he came across Muscetta during the post-war decades he would think back to the image he retained in his mind of the literary critic from the Irpinia sitting on an upturned bucket robustly declaiming the stanzas of Orlando Furioso for the entertainment of fellow inmates in cell 339.
[7] Becoming increasingly alarmed about their prospects, the men from "L'Italia Libera" appealed to Amedeo Strazzera-Perniciani, Chairman of the Prison Visitors' and Assistance Commission, who had been able to meet them on 10 December 1943 and was then evidently able to arrange subsequent contacts.
At great personal risk, Strazzera-Perniciani gave them instructions to feign illness in order to secure transfer to the prison infirmary, thereby avoiding further interrogation sessions.
Natalia Ginzburg and Lucia Muscetta submitted their own appeals to Strazzera-Perniciani, who undertook to look after their husbands; and he was able to take steps that prevented the two men from being picked up in a truck for transported to Germany.
As the armies that would liberate Rome from the south, the situation inside the city grew progressively more chaotic, and on 26 March 1944 Carlo Muscetta managed to escape.
[3] The difference of opinion with Togliatti over Pratolini's text did nothing to endear Muscetta to the highly centralised party leadership, but the real breaking point came just over a year later over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956.
The "Manifesto" criticised the party leadership for "still not having formulated an open and meaningful condemnation of Stalinism", for having defined the uprising in Budapest as a counter-revolutionary insurrection, and deplored the Soviet intervention as a violation "of the principal of the autonomy of socialist states".
[27] Carlo Muscetta formally resigned from the party in July 1957, though the caustic spirit that had led him to join it ten years earlier remained undimmed.
Muscetta's literary criticism and other articles now appeared in "Mondoperaio", a monthly "political review magazine", at that time under the direction of Francesco De Martino and Pietro Nenni.
Student leaders looked to Muscetta as a source of spiritual inspiration and guidance, but of course they also took their cues from university protestors in the rest of Italy.
The informal but powerful pact that had existed between the more avant-garde of the professors and the students was suddenly worn out, not just in terms of cultural bonds and didactic empathy, but also on the political level more broadly.
[1][7] After he left the party in 1957, and during the 1960s, it becomes clear that Muscetta's theoretical literary method settled around three key interlinked concepts: (1) realism, (2) integral historicism and (3) what he termed the "militant character of criticism".
Many years later, in 1984, Muscetta's translation of "Les Fleurs du mal"/"I fiori del male" by Baudelaire – one of many versions in Italian – was also published by Laterza.
[1] In October 1974 Muscetta accepted an appointment as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris where he taught two one year courses, one on Petrarch and the other on Boccaccio.
[3] He left Paris in 1976 and made his home in Capalbio (Tuscany), a "medieval hill village"[32] an hour or so north of Rome, which again became the focus of his professional life.
During May and June of that year he undertook what amounted to a series of farewell lectures at the University of Calabria at Arcavacata (Cosenza) on the nineteenth century patriot-poet Vincenzo Padula.