Lenin: 168. TO HIS MOTHER (original) (raw)

V. I. Lenin

168

To: HIS MOTHER[1]

Written: Written in the summer of 1908
Published: First published in 1929 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya No. 11. Sent from Geneva to Mikhnevo, Serpukhov Uyezd, Moscow Gubernia. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers,1977, Moscow,Volume 37, page 389.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup: D. Moros
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive. You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README

P.S. Today I read an amusing newspaper article on the inhabitants of Mars in connection with a new English book by Lowell, Mars and Its Canals. Lowell is an astronomer who has worked for a long time in a special observatory which, I believe, is the best in the world (in America).

It is a scientific work. It argues that Mars is inhabitable, that the canals are a miracle of engineering, that people on that planet must be two and two-thirds the size of our people here, and that they, furthermore, have trunks and are covered with feathers or animal skins and have four_or six_ legs. Hmm... the author[2]cheated us by describing the Martian beauties only in part, according to the principle that “... the deceit that elevates is dearer to us than a host of vulgar truths”.[3]

A new story by Gorky has been published—The Last.

Notes

[1] The letter to which this is the postscript has been lost.—Ed

.

[2] A. Bogdanov, author of the novel Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star).—Ed.

[3] These words are from Alexander Pushkin’s The Hero.