“Primo Levi and His Auschwitz Companions: Between History and Literature”
Join us in person or virtually for RLL’s Virgilio Lecture Series featuring Sergio Luzzatto (University of Connecticut). The talks are free and open to the public. Register in advance to attend virtually.
April 16, 18 & 22, 2025 | 5:00-6:30 PM CDT
Swift Hall
Third-Floor Lecture Room
1025 E. 58th St.
Virtual registration
Perhaps Primo Levi would have become a writer even without the ordeal of Auschwitz. But he would have been a different writer had the history of the twentieth century not indelibly marked the young Italian chemist’s life with the experience of that abyss. Hence, his works must also be read through the lens of historical analysis—to untangle the complex interplay between documented fact and literary transfiguration. Primo Levi has entered history as the quintessential witness to the Final Solution. Yet, to what extent should his formidable testimony be reconsidered today as being at once a documented historical artifact and a product of literary craftsmanship?
- April 16 - “Is One So Guilty of Surviving?” The Chemical Kommando and the Evil Jew
- April 18 - “You,” “We,” and “I”: The Pronouns of the Final Solution
- April 22 - The Dutch Kapo and the Flatness of Characters
Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should email Ryan Brown (rdbrown5@uchicago.edu) in advance.
Sergio Luzzatto
Sergio Luzzatto is professor and the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, as well as from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His academic work focuses mostly on twentieth-century Italy. His publications cover a large ground – from the Thermidorian Reaction to the Italian Risorgimento, and from Interwar France to Post-World War II Italy – yet they have all contributed to a single “longue durée” historical field: the origins, evolutions, and transformations of Modern Europe’s political cultures.
He is the author of four monographs on French history (Mémoire de la Terreur, 1991; L’impôt du sang, 1996; L’automne de la Révolution, 2001; Bonbon Robespierre, 2010) and several books on Italian history (The Body of Il Duce, 2005; Padre Pio, 2010; Primo Levi’s Resistance, 2016; Dolore e furore. Una storia delle Brigate rosse, 2023). Padre Pio won the Cundill History Prize in 2011. His latest book in English is a contribution to twentieth-century Jewish history (Moshe’s Children: The Orphans of the Holocaust and the Birth of Israel, 2022), and his latest book in Italian deals with the famous Holocaust survivor and writer, Primo Levi (Primo Levi e i suoi compagni. Tra storia e letteratura, 2024). He is currently completing a book on a French late nineteenth-century figure: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès.