«DWhere has a good family girl ever seen who doesn’t play the plan? “,” What will people think about you? “. Thus urged by his mother Anna Hoffmann, as he tells in his autobiography, Angelica Balabanoff dreamed of a different life.
Anželika Isaakovna Balabanova, so it was originally called, was born in an comfortable Jewish family between 1869 and 1878 (she has always been vague on the dates but on her tomb she made 1877 written). Last of sixteen children (of whom seven dead), It was the jewel intended for a Altaborghese wedding. Rebellious from childhood, intolerant of injustices Towards the weakest and the rigid and superficial education that was given to her, Angelica lived surrounded by rulers.
Around 1885, he wins enrollment in a women’s school in Kharkov and then a few months in an institute for Signorine in Montreux, Switzerland: renounces the paternal inheritance and only armed part of a monthly scarnochased by the curse of his mother.
Angelica Balabanoff (1878-1965) (Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images Via Getty Images)
A choice that will save her life: the whole family will be overwhelmed by the Russian revolution. The Biography-Romanzo Camarade Balabanoff. Vie et moures de la grandmère du socialisme (Armand Colin 2024) by Alberto Toscano, correspondent for the Italian press in Paris since 1986, rekindled attention on A passionate woman, idealist and uncompromising vestal Of the socialist cause, polyglot (he spoke and wrote in Russian, Italian, German, English, French and Swedish), destined to cover a leading role in the international socialist political environment and then forgotten.
Friend of Rosa Luxembourg
Angelica’s life crosses the ferments of the early twentieth century, Two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution and post -war socialism. His story crosses that of the major protagonists of the twentieth century left, men and women. Together with the latter Balabanoff he fought, united by the political and feminist commitment, each with a different vision.
Photo dedication of the socialist Argentina Altobelli by Balabanoff.
Friend of the Rosa Luxembourg activist, the anarchist and essayist Emma Goldman (who preached the open couple), in the period spent in Milan Angelica knows and works with Anna Kuliscioff, doctor, journalist and revolutionary. He also finds the German Clara Zetkin, a communist and fighter for women’s emancipation, the seamstress, activist and journalist Rosa Genoni and the trade unionist Maria Giusti (who will be the mother of ten children, among these the writer and actress Goliarda Sapienza) with whom he had founded the magazine in Switzerland Come on, companions!then melted with The defense of women.
Pacifist, contrary to war
Three men in particular stand out in the large context of contacts. Since 1900, after graduating from Brussels and studies in Germany, the lessons of Antonio Labriola, a Marxist philosopher and intellectual who introduces her to the Socialist Party. In Switzerland, in St. Gallo, a few years later, sent by the party, he meets and becomes a mentor of a young and neurotic Benito Mussolini.
Angelica Balabanoff and David Ben Gurion a Tel Aviv in 1962 (Government Press Office)
In 1912, the future dictator now in his career will want to in the Lombard capital to co-make the socialist newspaper L‘After you! With the First World War behind the doors, Balabanoff, at the end of July 1914, represents Italy at the meeting of the International Socialist Party in Brussels: we try to ward off the war. On the contrary, Mussolini is interventionist. A betrayal that will never forgive him which will be added, after the conflict, the foundation of the fascist party.
Goodbye to the Socialist Party
In 1917 our passionate reached Lenin in Russia, which he had known in Zurich, to join the Bolshevik revolution. Her contribution to the top of the party, the general secretary of the Comintern, but a visit to Ukraine hungry by the famine orchestrated by Lenin, the dramatic and definitive meetings with her family and the increasingly authoritarian drift of the revolutionary apparatus convince her to abandon home and left at the end of 1921.
Congress of Italian socialists in Grenoble in 1928, Balabanoff is the only woman present.
It is the beginning of new peregrinations: Stockholm, where he discovers the pleasure of reading (loves Leopardi) and writing poems, and then Vienna. Antonio Gramsci finds it in 1924 and receive the news of Lenin’s death together. Since 1926 he has been in Paris, an Italian anti -fascist exile center. Relations with Moscow, who had repeatedly invited her to return, Angelica is an atypical, anti -communist, militant of the socialist cause between projects and public events.
Judged an “old pantofola”
During the Second World War she repairs in New York and in 1947 he returned to Rome. Now elderly, but still combative, he lavished to support Giuseppe Saragat against Pietro Nenni, who judges too close to the Communist Party, in the famous split of Palazzo Barberini. “The old slippers”, as some call it, is however increasingly isolated. While everything is known about his political activity, his private life remains secret. Not even one and a half meters high, not very attractive, equipped with a fascinating personality, she was a born hour (so much so as to give lectures to Lenin).
Conference in Frankfurt of 1929.
Of frugal tastes and few needs, always consistent with her choices, Angelica aborted any privilege.Totically emancipated, but very reserved, she has never admitted relationships with the opposite sex, although it seems certain its sentimental history with Mussolini (however denied by both), as well as the one with the socialist Oddino Morgari.
Kind and affectionate
Few now the direct testimonies of those who have known him. Marina Cattaneo, vice-president of the Anna Kuliscioff Institute in Milan and grandson of the socialist exponent Ivan Matteo Lombardo, a great friend of Angelica since the time of New York, remembers her as a sort of gentle and affectionate aunt who took her on the knees in the frequent visits at home.
Among the faithful also the journalist Giorgio Giannelli and his wife Guglielmina France, at the house of which Balabanoff lived for some time. His son Emanuele has a vague memory while his sister Angelica – so called in her honor – perfectly remembers the elderly and kind lady who always prepared tea. It was a crowded house: with them he lived in the great -grandmother Giuseppina, very Catholic, who called Balabanoff “La Bolscevica”: they competed for the girl.
When Angelicica left this world in 1965 in the apartment in the Montesacro district in Rome, I am near the Lombard (who will establish a scholarship in her memory to the humanitarian society of Milan) and Giannelli. Poor game from Tchernigov Angelica dies poor in the capital, invoking the mother: “Mamuska, Mamuska”. It is buried in the Acatholic cemetery of Rome, on the side of the pyramid Cestia, in the Russian sector, near Antonio Gramsci and not far from Andrea Camilleri, his admirer.
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