What Is Culture For?

The question followed me for a lifetime. It serves no purpose, was my first answer — and that is precisely its value. But the truth is it serves a great deal. It depends on how seriously you take it. From a single text — Sophocles' Oedipus — an entire discipline was born, and one that acts on the world: it teaches men to see what they would rather not. That is not ornament. That is an instrument.

In 2014 a bequest came, and I took it as the occasion to turn the page. I went back to books the way one leaves Plato's cave. I found myself like Diogenes with his lantern, in broad daylight, looking for the man.

A first book, on Tardieu. A second, on Panikkar. And then the story knocked at the door, wearing the features of an eminent scholar from the Pushkin House in Petersburg: Konstantin Barsht. He had heard of me through a colleague involved in my publishing project, and he was moved by a single conviction — in Italy, books are made well. He carried to the country of Manutius the fruit of a lifetime's study of Dostoevsky's manuscript drawings, most of them unpublished. Pages from the Russian archives, guarded like atomic secrets or sacred texts, accessible to a handful of scholars.

I do not know what providential madness pushed Barsht to entrust me with his lifework. But what could I do but stand at attention and answer the command of fate? One does not read Dostoevsky with impunity. I felt like the director of a small theatre handed an unpublished tragedy by Shakespeare: what do you do — refuse to stage it because the house may not fill?

One summer morning Barsht arrived in Bergamo, the city of Quarenghi. He had left a rainy Petersburg to find himself on a sunlit terrace, stifling, twenty degrees warmer. Perhaps out of enthusiasm, he took on a dish of steaming lasagne, which only a cold white could temper. The understanding was immediate, though the negotiation was long. Travels on both sides. At one moment of worry I remember his outburst: "I would not want to be accused of having sold off the patrimony of the Russian Federation." That gives the measure of the stakes. But in the end the agreement was made: three simultaneous editions — Russian, Italian, English. Worldwide exclusivity.

The project was demanding. The book was built around the manuscript, which had to be reproduced at 1:1 scale and with a fidelity that would give the reader, wherever in the world he might be, the impression of holding the original. Two hundred two illustrations, one million characters, the work of a lifetime.

In Petersburg I followed in Barsht's footsteps — literally. We walked the distance separating Raskolnikov's house from that of his victim: precisely seven hundred and twenty paces, as Dostoevsky had written.

In Bergamo we handled the proofs and the editing of the original text, thanks to a Russian scholar transplanted there, whose precision recalled the fencing she had practised in her youth. The laid-out file, set according to Italian typographic rules, was bounced back by the author's Petersburg consultants, who turned every italic into Russian guillemets. The text went back and forth a couple of times between different typographic norms, and in the end the Italian one was adopted. Not only because I found it more elegant, but because this had to be a transitional book: fusing the best of both cultures. The publisher is not a typographer. Manutius is not Gutenberg. Barsht understood.

We chose a particular paper, made in Italy, whose whiteness made the colours stand out without the irritating glare of coated stock. We took as our model a manuscript of the period, smuggled between socks and tourist guides to be analysed at the print shop and then returned to Petersburg. Thanks to this we could create two Pantone references — one for the yellowish wood-pulp paper, one for the brown ink of crushed walnuts that Dostoevsky once used.

After a year came the imprimatur. The gigantic Heidelberg press swallowed white sheets and spat out yellow manuscripts in brown ink. The launch. In Russia Barsht appeared on national channels; in the United States a full-page review in the Wall Street Journal; in Italy, front pages of the national press.

Through contacts I obtained the provisional consent of Agnès Letestu, étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet, to bring to Bergamo — for the book's launch — a ballet inspired by Dostoevsky's letters to his wife Anna. I proposed to the municipality of Bergamo to stage the performance at my own expense, in exchange for a venue. The municipality hedged, then refused, then staged a different Dostoevsky performance of its own. In certain contexts, the classics become hostages.

Then came the news that Barsht's monumental work had been awarded what is perhaps Russia's principal historical and literary prize — the Alexander Nevsky, section Naslednie, Heritage. The name of the saint in whose church I had been baptised in Paris reappeared in the most surprising way. The confluence of two histories, Italian and Russian, constituted an inheritance.

At the ceremony, the very elderly president of the Russian Academy of Sciences recounted how, as a very young man, he had approved the Soviet anthem and had quarrelled over it with Mayakovsky, who thought it dreadful. History, before my eyes. If you look at yourself in the mirror, you cannot see it.

The book sold respectably, but the house did not grow. Other works were published, the finances ran out. Publishing resembles compulsive gambling: one falls in love with texts, with covers, while the business drains personal resources. A shortage of entrepreneurial skill delegates the outcome of publications to Providence — which smacks of magical thinking, if not of narcissism.

But the story knocked at the door again, in a wholly unforeseeable way. January 2020. A well-known astrologer predicted a year favourable to travel. A few weeks later the nation was shut indoors. The evening news hammered out ever more implausible items. The measures alternated like contradictory injunctions aimed at obedience: masks no, then yes, and so on. And for anyone whose trade is working on texts, the word lockdown could not fail to raise suspicion: it is the punishment inflicted on unruly prisoners — confinement in a cell, twenty-four hours a day. Not to ask: what can I do, here, now, as a publisher? The answer followed of itself: provide material for reflection.

A military friend confided that his colleagues were terrified. In those same days a video was circulating of a priest baptising with a water pistol. But was facing death not their trade? As a young man I had been moved by a line from the Nicomachean Ethics: one must not live at any cost. So that is what it was for.

What struck me most was the flattening of educated people onto the mainstream position — malice included. People who had studied all their lives, and who then cross-examined you if you raised a doubt. I wondered what all that study had been for — not for understanding, evidently. And then I would see the butcher below my house, who asked himself the right questions — in that context, the very act of asking was the right thing — but who had bowed to the vaccine so as not to lose his job, the house with the mortgage to pay, the family. Like my dearest friend, at the opposite end of the social and cultural scale, vaccinated obtorto collo to protect his own. The dividing line, plainly, was not culture but the amor del vero. I understood, then, that culture is only an instrument — a sort of hammer with which you choose whether to sculpt a Pietà or drive the nails into the cross.

The book was published in March 2021. A 372-page investigation into the mishandling of Covid that confronted the official narrative head-on, resting on 1,072 footnotes based mostly on official documents. In the preface, Nicola Gratteri — then chief prosecutor and head of the anti-mafia district directorate in Catanzaro — wrote: "The first step from which no one is exempt is, in any case, the search for truth: only thus can the point of no return to which the Covid emergency has led us be transformed into an occasion for rebirth." Music to my ears.

Amazon blocked the page at once. Deleted it, in fact, without notice. Weeks of emails, bounced from one office to another around the world. The last I wrote to was a complaints office in India: having specified Gratteri's and Giorgianni's institutional roles — the latter also a leading magistrate in the fight against the mafia — I obtained the page's restoration.

The book exploded: first in general sales, ahead of manga and the publishing giants. The media came at it head down, at first with generic accusations of conspiracism, in a crescendo identical to the one Bulgakov describes in The Master and Margarita. Furious articles in which some went so far as to boast of not having read the book while reviewing it. Bulgakov's three stages — laughter, astonishment, fear — unfolded exactly as written. The third, fear, arrived when Bacco's reckless words on the radio about a Jewish lobby were attributed to the book, and the accusations shifted from conspiracism to antisemitism.

One sentence, unfortunately, in the last chapter, lent itself to being weaponised in that sense: the rabbi Rav Amnoc's charge against the Vatican, Windsor, Rothschild and Rockefeller of wanting to establish a new world order. It was a hair in the soup. But it was there.

The controversy took an ugly turn. A statement extrapolated from its context had once cost me my post at Rue Tillier. Now karma put a printed sentence in front of me. At that point Gianni Stella arrived — the veteran investigative journalist of the Corriere della Sera. He asked me for a copy of the book. I thanked him, begging him to read it, if he intended to review it; in those days that would have been a wholly unusual thing. And he did his job. He read. He criticised forcefully — almost distancing himself, in order to say the only thing that mattered: that in Strage di Stato there is no trace of antisemitism. Stella — a star by name and by nature. He was the one who saved the book. I thanked him "for having expressed his judgement after reading the book, and for his contribution to the truth."

Because in the end, that was the stake. Stella was the philosopher who silenced the sophists. The book has sown a great deal. It has done good, I think. I played my part, in that moment. But I count for less.