In September 1928, in Milan, for the first time after Gramsci’s arrest, Piero Sraffa met Tatiana Schucht.

T.Schucht (sister of Gramsci’s wife, Julia, who lived in Moscow) was in regular correspondence with Gramsci (sentenced to 20 years in June 1928) and visited him in prison.

Sraffa, who also had come under serious threat in fascist Italy, in summer 1927, thanks to an offer sponsored by Keynes, had moved to Cambridge and from spring 1928 started travelling regularly to Italy during university vacations.

The September 1928 meeting was certainly aimed at establishing a liason (up to that time lacking) between Gramsci and the Italian communist party.

To make the liason effective, T.Schucht prepared a copy of each letter she recieved from Gramsci and sent it, or handed it in, to Sraffa. Sraffa, in turn, forwarded it to the centro estero of the Italian communist party.

On some occasions, however, originals and copies of the letters were not forwarded to the usual receivers. In particular, between the end of 1932 and the end of 1933 a significant number of letters were not forward to centro estero.

Following Gramsci’s explicit requests, Sraffa did not forward the copies of two crucial letters that Gramsci had sent to T.Schucht on 5 December 1932 and on 27 Februay 1933. Then, and in this case no request in that sense had come from Gramsci, Sraffa did not forward copies of more than three quarters of the letters to T.Schucht he had received between mid April and early December 1933 – in 1974 those copies were still with Sraffa.

Up to December 1932 Sraffa had forwarded copies of 126 out of 128 letters written by Gramsci to T.Schucht. The 1933 decision of refraining form forwarding to centro estero a large portion of Gramsci’s letters was certainly important and must have been taken with consideration.

In this paper we examine the content of the two letters Gramsci asked to be read only by Tatiana Schucht and Piero Sraffa and provide new information about them. Then we put forward an explanation of the reasons which may have prompted Sraffa to modify the praxis he had adhered to for more than four years and decide to keep for himself a substantial number of copies of Gramsci’s letters – two disasters caused Sraffa’s decision.

Keywords:  Sraffa,  Gramsci,  Italian political history