Opere complete, I e II
Primo Levi. Opere complete, ed. Marco Belpoliti in collaboration with Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi. Introduction by Daniele Del Giudice.
Since1997, the year in which the two volumes of the Opere edited by Marco Belpoliti were published in the Nuova Universale Einaudi series, research has brought to light many previously unknown or lost writings in the pages of newspapers, journals and archives. Hence this new edition, again edited by Belpoliti and accompanied by new text news, offers us a body of works that is significantly richer.
The new edition opens with the version of If This is a Man published by De Silva in1947. In the Pagine sparse section section, twenty-five texts have been added, including short stories, reviews, and eyewitness accounts. The appendix presents Levi’s doctoral thesis, the radio versions of If This is a Man and The Truce and Levi’s text notes to school editions of his works. Thus the new edition has taken shape as the most complete body of Levi’s works that has ever been published. Furthermore, discussion about Levi, exhibits, the Primo Levi Lectures and even the recent American edition of The Complete Works enabled the editor to take into account many new contributions, leading him, to broaden, modify, and, in many cases, completely reformulate the textual notes and comments.
“Now Levi is a full-fledged writer, something that was not established twenty years ago in 1997 when the first edition of these works, Opere, was published. The work of an entire generation of critics and writers, who were young at that time, has surely contributed to this change of attitude. They studiedLevi’sworks with a double focus on testimony and literature. In this sense, Daniele Del Giudice’s Introduction to the first edition of Opere, republished here, had a leading role in the change of the interpretative paradigm. Now that Levi is finally considered a writer even on the international level and has been liberated, as you might say, from his exclusive role as witness, there is still critical work that l needs to be done, for which I hope this new edition will be useful for. We need to take the writer back into the field of the witness. It is from the bond between these two aspects of his personality as an author that a different and more complex vision of this work can emerge.”
From the editor’s Foreword.
Read the interview with Marco Belpoliti by Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi.