Abstract

This article explores the presence of Honoré de Balzac in the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci dealt with the literature relating the content of the work with its intellectual and political context of production, without subtracting the importance of artistic creation and innovation from Balzac. There is a treatment of the author as intellectual, in the terms defined by Gramsci himself, in which the role of cultural direction exerted by Balzac is emphasized. Its production is treated as an important element of French culture of the nineteenth century, spread beyond the territorial limits of that country and its own historical time. From this perspective, Gramsci considers the possibility that Balzac was a source of Marx. Balzac 's study, as a concrete intellectual approached by Gramsci, allows us to know the organic connection that he proposed between literature, politics and philosophy, being the articulation between diverse languages, one of the main characteristics of philosophy of praxis - denomination that Gramsci gave to the thinking of Marx and Engels.