Giovanni Germanetto

Germanetto, Giovanni 

Born Jan. 18, 1885, in Turin; died Oct. 7, 1959, in Moscow. Italian writer; active in the Italian labor movement.

Germanetto was a member of the Italian Socialist Party from 1906 to 1921, when he’joined the Italian Communist Party (ICP). He was elected to the Central Committee of the ICP. Arrested many times and twice wounded by the fascists, he emigrated in January 1927. Germanetto lived in the USSR from 1930 to 1946 and wrote antifascist articles during World War II. Returning to his homeland in 1946, he was elected a member of the central auditing commission of the Central Committee of the ICP in 1948. Toward the end of his life he came to the USSR for medical treatment and wrote political and literary articles in the Soviet press.

Germanetto’s best known work is the autobiographical novella A Barber’s Notes (1930), published in the USSR in Russian, then published in 1931 in France in Italian with a foreward by P. Togliatti, and later translated into 24 languages. The book tells about the struggle of the Italian working class and the Communist Party against fascism.

WORKS

Memorie di un barbiere. Rome, 1962. (Foreword by P. Togliatti.)
In Russian translation:
Proletariat Italii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
Fenikottero. Moscow, 1935.
Traval’o. Moscow, 1938.

REFERENCES

Fink, B. “Dzhovanni Dzhermanetto.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1960, no. 1.
“Una vita esemplare.” L’Unita, 1959, Oct. 8, no. 279.

Z. P. POTAPOVA