243. TO HIS SISTER MARIA (original) (raw)

V. I. Lenin

243

To: HIS SISTER MARIA

Written: Written November 12 or 13, 1913
Published: First published in 1929 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya No. 11. Sent from Krakow. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers,1977, Moscow,Volume 37, pages 504-505.
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

Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova,
Samarin’s House, Apt. 3,
Moskovskaya Street,
Vologda,
Russia

Dear Manyasha,

I received your letter a few days after I had posted you a letter from Nadya and me.

You make me ashamed of myself for my silence. I really am at fault—there has been a lot of bother over our moving and because of the influenza. Now Y.V. here is ill—she has had a very bad attack of influenza but is now recovering.

You ask about new German literature. I have just finished reading the four volumes of the Marx-Engels correspondence. I want to write about it in_Prosveshcheniye_.[1]There is much of interest. It is a pity the publishers— those Bosches!—charge such a price for it—40 marks! I have not yet read Beer’s new History of Socialism in England, but I soon shall.

Cunow’s book on the origin of religion appeared recently. I would send it to you (I can buy it) but I am afraid it would not reach you. If you receive or can obtain Neue Zeit, there is a list in it of all the interesting things. I do not see any new bourgeois literature. If you like I can send you a list of all new books in German (a small publication I get every month, it is put out by Hinrichs, a bookseller in Leipzig).

All the best. Give Mother many kisses for me and for Nadya.

Yours,
V. U.

It is a long time since I had word from Anyuta.

I am reading Octave Mirbeau’s Dingo. In my opinion it is no good.

Notes

[1] In September 1913, four volumes of the Marx-Engels correspondence were published in German. Lenin planned a big work about this correspondence, the beginning of which was his article “The Marx-Engels Correspondence” (see Collected Works, Vol. 19, pp. 552–58).

In a thick notebook containing 76 pages, now in the CentralArchives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Central Committee of the C.P.S.U., Lenin made notes on about 300 letters and made extracts from 15 that are of theoretical importance; he also compiled a short thematic index to his notes. The four volumes on which Lenin worked have been preserved; they have passages underlined or encircled and also marked N.B. in the margins; the remarks are made in pencil in four different colours. This material was published in Moscow as a separate edition in 1959 under the title of Konspekt “Perepiski K. Marksa i F. Engelsa”(Conspectus of the Marx-Engels Correspondence).

It had been intended to publish Lenin’s essay in the journal_Prosveshcheniye_ in 1914 (as reported in _Proletarskaya Pravda_on December 14, 1913) but it remained unfinished and was first published in Pravda on November 28, 1920 on the Occasion of the centenary of Engels’s birth.