Varianti di stato e edizioni fantasma della "Vita Agra" di Luciano Bianciardi

This paper reconstructs the publishing history of La vita agra by Luciano Bianciardi, analyzing the sequence of printed witnesses issued between the first Rizzoli edition of 1962 and the ninth edition of 1971. Through an accurate and extensive collation of copies from each edition/issue, the history of variants is clarified, the enigmatic absence of an eighth edition is investigated, and, most importantly, the paper reflects on the presence –typically excluded from 20th-century authorial philology– of a (macro)state variant.