An improbable encounter: Rudyard Kipling and Antonio Gramsci

This article attempts to explore Antonio Gramsci's interest in Rudyard Kipling that stretches uninterrupted from 1915, when Gramsci began to sign his journalistic articles with the pseudonym Raksha (the mother wolf in "The Jungle Books") to the years of imprisonment in his notebooks and letters. It focuses attention on some of Gramsci's early journalistic writings that constitute the beginnings of his encounter with Kipling. The aim of this article is to show the extent and nature of the dialogue that took place between Kipling and Gramsci and show what this connection can contribute to the study of the reception of Kipling in Italy. It also opens up some broader questions about the responses to Kipling's work in Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century