Ornella Labriola: the loneliness of an irreducible memory

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Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the particular case concerning Ornella Labriola (1908-1991), who lived between Italy and Soviet Union. She was a guest of the famous hotel “Lux” in Moscow, the dwelling place of international Communism during the years of Stalinism. In that place, happened her love story with Giuseppe Rimola (1905-1938), delegate of Italian young communists in the Kjm (the Young Communist International). He was arrested and condemned to death as ”people’s enemy” in the gyre concerning he terror of Stalinism. During all her life, Ornella Labriola only desired to show people the truth about the death of her own partner, also to rescue the sense of her own existence and choices. The biographical approach of our research permits to emphasize witness’s feelings, believes, values and auto-reflexivity. Labriola was interviewed a year before her death. Her narration is focused on her relationship with ideology, with the revolutionary time when she grew, with the political treat as it was perceived during the thirties and forties; but also she talked about her love relation with her partner in a cultural context in which it was normal to sacrifice own private life on the altar of revolutionary necessities.

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Les Usages de la Biographie

Giovanni Levi (1989)

Raymond Queneau note qu'« il y eut des époques où l'on pouvait raconter la vie d'un homme en faisant abstraction de tout événement historique ». On pourrait aussi bien avancer qu'il y eut des époques — qui nous sont peut-être plus proches — où il était possible de relater un événement historique en faisant abstraction de toute destinée individuelle. Nous vivons aujourd'hui une phase intermédiaire : plus que jamais, la biographie se trouve au coeur des préoccupations des historiens, mais elle accuse clairement ses ambiguïtés. Dans certains cas, on y recourt afin de souligner l'irréductibilité des individus et de leurs comportements à des systèmes normatifs généraux, au nom de l'expérience vécue ; dans d'autres, en revanche, elle est perçue comme le lieu idéal où éprouver la validité des hypothèses scientifiques concernant les pratiques et le fonctionnement effectif des lois et des règles sociales. Arnaldo Momigliano a souligné tout à la fois l'ambiguïté et la fécondité de la biographie : d'un côté, « il n'est pas surprenant que la biographie soit en train de s'installer au centre de la recherche historique. The essential questions raised in the methodological investigations of contemporary historiography can also be found in biography, e.g. those of its relations with other social sciences, of the relations between norms and behavior and between groups and individuals that constitute them, of the limits of human freedom and rationality, and of scales of analysis. On the basis of a typology and an analysis of the implications of biographies that break with the linear and factual tradition, this article stresses the unexplored complexity ofthe biographical perspective.