Filologia della metamorfosi. Il 'Re dei Giudei' di Primo Levi da «La Stampa» a 'I sommersi e salvati'

It is a well-known fact that Primo Levi had a considerable tendency to reuse, rewrite, and restructure his own texts – drawing from this assumption, the contribution proposes a variant analysis of the chapter The Gray Zone (1986) and the article The King of the Jews (1977) by Primo Levi. In both texts, the author reports and comments on the story of Chaim Rumkowski, dean of the Lodz ghetto at the time of the Nazi occupation: Levi first published Rumkowski’s story in 1977, and modified it up while writing The Drowned and the Saved. Despite the article and the chapter might look alike, Levi writes and re-writes this text in two different periods of his career, revising it and making several changes. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the text changes noticeably: Levi’s intervention on the text will be analyzed in depth by surveying and reasoning about the additions, remakes, and deletions between the two versions. A philological, critical, and stylistic examination will be operated – the main purpose is to shed further light on the compositional process of The Drowned and the Saved, giving particular attention to textual variants.