The Project

The Primo Levi Thesaurus is a website dedicated to Levi’s language, born from the PRIN 2022 (Progetto di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale, National Research Project, funded by the European Union - Next Generation EU) The Primo Levi Thesaurus. Genesis and Dissemination of a Twentieth-Century Corpus.

At the heart of the project are Levi’s sharp and surprising words, but above all, their ability to combine in juxtapositions where precision and imagination enhance each other. Primo Levi is not merely a taster of words; he is a weaver, who juxtaposes, interweaves, creates relationships, and from the juxtaposition his prose derives energy and vitality. Moreover, many key words reappear throughout his works, experimenting with different combinations, acquiring new resonances, or attaining fresh meanings. These recurrences and relaunches become a workshop of invention, where the often adventurous paths of voices that have never been abandoned, but made capable of reshaping themselves to respond to semantic needs in constant evolution, shine forth.

To highlight the richness of these combinations and returns, which are trademarks of Levi’s language, the Thesaurus is organised in the form of a vocabulary that catalogs words and expressions starting from his debut book, If This Is a Man (1947 and 1958). Each entry highlights the relationships each word weaves with neighboring terms, so as to make the connections that define meaning immediately visible, while also tracing the dissemination and reuse of each word throughout Levi’s entire body of work.

For each record, occurrences in Levi’s various works and their chronological evolution are provided. Related entries, also available in dedicated records, are listed.

This leads to a properly linguistic area of investigation (for details on its structure, see the Reading Guide in the Tools section), where the word is linked to its relations within the sentence, thus drawing the readers’attention to connections that determine meaning (arguments) or modify it (modifiers). Contexts are then made available for each meaning. XX

The website is aimed at scholars, teachers, translators, and Levi’s readers.

To the scholarly community, the project’s first recipient, the Primo Levi Thesaurus provides linguistic, philological and cultural-historical materials, classified and open access, that enhance, for the first time with such richness, an Italian 20th century author.

The second target audience is the world of education. Levi is a writer who has long been part of the school canon, so the site is intended as a point of reference for updating and planning teaching, particularly in the areas of language and the history of texts.

Finally, the Thesaurus aims to reach Levi’s Italian and foreign readers, and his translators, who are key-figures in the writer’s enduring global success, which date back a long way (the German translation of If This is a Man dates from 1961), and are of ever-increasing dimensions.