Letters from Prison

St. Petersburg. Having emigrated, he lived with his wife and his children Evgenija (« Eugenia », « Genia »), Anna, Tat’jana (« Tatiana », « Tania »), and Viktor in Montpellier and Geneva. In 1893, in Geneva, he again had the opportunity to meet Lenin. At the beginning of the century, the Schucht family moved to Italy, to Rome, where Giulia studied at the Music Lyceum of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, graduating in violin in 1915. Anna also studied music, while Tatiana and Eugenia attended painting courses at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1913, the Schucht family began to leave Italy. Eugenia and Anna moved to Warsaw; Apollon and his son Vittorio moved to Switzerland. Towards the end of 1916, the family reunited in Moscow, except for Tatiana, who remained in Italy. In the summer of 1922, Giulia, who was teaching at the Music Lyceum of Ivanovo and was employed at the local section of the Communist Party, frequently went to the « Serebrjanyj bor » Silver Forest sanatorium near Moscow to visit her sister Eugenia, who was suffering from a nervous breakdown. At the sanatorium, she met Antonio Gramsci, who had been admitted shortly after his arrival in Moscow in June of that year. From their union, Delio was born in August 1924 and Giuliano in August 1926. In the autumn of 1925, Giulia came to Italy with little Delio. She returned to Moscow in the summer of 1926 and remained there, suffering from a severe nervous illness that prevented her from making the trip to Italy to see her husband.

In Rome, Tatiana, who had a degree in natural sciences, taught at the « Crandon » International Institute on Via Savoia. Passionate about medicine, she also frequented the circle of Professor Raffaele Bastianelli. Gramsci, having returned to Italy in May 1924, only made her acquaintance at the beginning of 1925: he was living at the time with the Schreider family, an exiled social-revolutionary. It was Tatiana who, despite her frail physical constitution, took care to assist him and alleviate his suffering after his arrest. She went to Milan when he was transferred there, visited him frequently in Turi after his conviction, and visited him more often, along with Gramsci's brother Carlo, in Formia and Rome. She returned to Moscow in 1939. She died in 1941.