82 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Instead, he displays an extraordinary sensitivity both to larger politcal-historical problems of the class struggle and to the specific needs of the people he writes to. The letters also bring out the wide range of interests of the man, and his ability to look at everything from a critical standpoint. Throughout imprisonment, Gramsci tries to remain active. We learn from his letter of 2 January 1927 to Picro Sraffa that Gramsci and some others have started a school to teach history, mathematics, French^ German and geography, catering to the prisoners' varied levels of development. In a letter to his sister-in-law from Ustica jail he unfolds the plan: cc 1) to keep healthy, in fact, to improve my health; 2) to study German and Russian systematically; and 3) to study economics and history. Along with others, I will also work out a rational method of physical exercise".2 In a subsequent letter, he wrote her that he would like ^to set up a plan for the intense, systematic study of some subject that would absorb and concentrate my inner life."8 He mentions four projects: history of Italian intellectuals, a study of comparative linguistics^ a study of Pirandello and the Italian theatre, and finally, an essay on popular tastes in literature. The amazing fact. of the matter is that his actual efforts and writings during imprisonment achieved even more than this ambitious plan embodied, as the Prison Notebooks show. Flash a/Flint While most of Gramsci's letters in this selection are analytical discussions of political problems and work projects, there are quite a few which are touchingly personal, and remarkably humorous. He writes to his wife Guilia on the photographs she had sent: I was glad to have photographs of you and the children. When too much time intervenes between one visual impression and the next, ugly thoughts fill up the interim...Now lam truly happy... Please write me a long letter about yourself and the babies and send me a photograph at least every six months, so that lean watch them develop and see your smile more often.4 And in another letter to her, we read: ^Sweetheart, think a bit and then write me along letter about the malyshi (the little ones)... Dearest, I am so isolated that your letters are like bread which nourishes me...Why do you continue to measure out the rations that you send me?"5 But Gramsci certainly was not given to self-pity or sentimentality. He writes to his mother on 26 March: ^Each day I grow stronger and more resistant to inner agitations. As you know, I have never been excessively sentimental...Like flint, I need to be struck by steel in order for sparks to fly out from me."6 From the letters, as from his entire political practice, Gramsci comes through as a man full of political commitment and affection for people. He writes to his mother on 10 May 1928: