Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy.
—Heinrich Heine, June 20, 1842

Ignazio Silone liked to say that every author writes different versions of the one book singular to him. In his own case, this book was the novel Fontamara, published inauspiciously in Switzerland in 1933. At the time Silone was poor, in exile, solitary, and on top of everything else suffering, as a result of consumption, from chronic ill-health. A couple of years earlier, he had broken with the Italian Communist party. He had been one of its eight most senior leaders. Palmiro Togliatti, the party’s secretary general and a subtle interpreter of Stalin’s every whim, had himself come to Switzerland to warn Silone that only someone of great strength could survive the break with the party. Silone was one such; he pe ...

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