If This Is a Man by Primo Levi. Without a tomorrow

CYCLE: Tomorrow
SPEAKER: Robert Gordon
DATE: Tuesday, September 29, 6:00 PM
LOCATION: Bibliotheca Maior - Sala della Crociera

In January 1944, Primo Levi arrived at the Fossoli concentration and transit camp near Carpi, a Jewish prisoner of the Fascists. Shortly thereafter, on February 22nd, along with 650 companions, he was deported by train to Auschwitz, "a name without meaning... yet it had to correspond to a place on this earth." They traveled toward certain death, toward "the bottom" (il fondo), toward a universe with no future.
Levi miraculously managed to survive and return to bear witness, starting with his extraordinary first book, If This Is a Man (published in 1947), which has since become a cornerstone of 20th-century literature. Among its many facets, If This Is a Man confronts this suspended and frozen temporal-historical reality; this lecture intends to examine this Levi, a witness to a world "without a tomorrow."

Robert S.C. Gordon is a Professor of Italian Studies and the Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of several studies on the memory of the Shoah (The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010, published in Italy as Scolpitelo nei cuori, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2013) and on the work of Primo Levi (Primo Levi: Le virtù dell’uomo normale, Carocci, Rome 2003; Primo Levi magico, Carocci, Rome 2024). Recently, he published a study on the role of chance and fortune in modern literature, titled Modern Luck (UCL Press, London 2023).

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