Lenin: 48. TO MAXIM GORKY (original) (raw)

V. I. Lenin

48

To: MAXIM GORKY

Published: First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany I. Sent to Capri. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers,[1976], Moscow,Volume 35, pages 112-113.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
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

September 30, 1913

Dear A. M.,

This reply has been delayed a little. Sorry. How devilishly furious I was in Berne, and later!! I thought: if you were in Verona (the telegram from you about Bebel was from Verona)—or in some Rom...[2]?? Why, I could have come to Verona from Berne!! But from you at that time there was not a sound for months....

What you write about your illness worries me terribly. Are you doing the right thing in living without treatment at Capri? The Germans have excellent sanatoria (for example, at St. Blasien, near Switzerland) where they treat and_completely_ cure lung diseases, achieve complete healing, feed you up, then systematically accustom you to cold, harden you against catching cold, and turn out fit people, able to work.

While you, after Capri, and in winter, want to go to Russia???? I am terribly afraid that this will injure your health and undermine your working capacity. Are there_first-class_ doctors in that Italy of yours??

Really, go and visit some first-class doctor in Switzerland[1]or Germany, and set about a couple of months of _serious_treatment in a good sanatorium. Because to squander official property, i.e., to go on being ill and undermining your working capacity, is something quite intolerable in every respect.

I have heard (from the editor of Prosveshcheniye, who saw Ladyzhnikov) that you are dissatisfied with Pravda. Because it’s dry? That is true. But it’s not easy to correct this defect all at once. We haven’t the people. With great_difficulty, one year after it started, we secured a merely_tolerable editorial board in Petersburg.

(I have forwarded your letter to Prosveshcheniye.)

Write what your plans are, and what your health is like. I earnestly ask you to _set about your treatment seriously_— really, it is quite possible to be cured, and to let it go on is simply outrageous and criminal.

Yours,
Lenin

P.S. Some of the people we have had here, and some we shall have, are good. And have you seen “_Nash Put_”? What a success, eh? Our second paper. We shall start a third, too, in the South.

Address: Ulianow. Poronin (Galizien). Austria. (During the winter I shall be in Cracow: Lubomirskiego. 51.)

Notes

[1] I can find out names and addresses.—Lenin

[2] Lenin refers to a telegram sent by Maxim Gorky from Rimini to the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. about the death of August Bebel. It was published in Severnaya Pravda No. 4, August 4, 1913.