Autobiografia Literatura Kultura Media

The author analyzes research work of biographers and historians of literature who include themselves (their own experience of reading the past) in the narrative, thus influencing the way the object of their study is being presented. The analysis is based on the book by Sergio Luzzatto Partigia. Una storia della Resistenza designed as a deconstruction of basic myths founding the Italian memory of ‘La Resistenza,’ i.e. anti-fascist resistance movement. He focuses on the role of Primo Levi as the central figure of the Italian post-war memory and identity. The article is based on a thesis saying that books such as this, presenting an experience oscillating between an academic text and a quasi-autobiographical confession, demand inclusion of a specific modality of some of its narrative elements such as its protagonists. This specificity consists of their ‘flattening’ as a condition sine qua non enabling a communitary context of an experience as a communicable fact. This process occurs in Luzzatto’s book nevertheless the declared attempt to present Primo Levi as a living person (as opposed to a textual witness).