Written: Written September 30, 1897 Sent from Tesinskoye to Moscow
Published:
First published in 1931 in Lenin’s Letters to Relatives.
Printed from
the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 37,
pages 128-129.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup:
D. Moros
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
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commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
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Text
September 30
I am writing to you from Tesinskoye, Mother dearest, as I promised. I arrived here yesterday evening. It took us a long time to get here because there were three of us (Basil, I and a boy I took with me) with our luggage on a one-horse cart, and the horse a lazy one at that.
The Tes people[1] are well fixed up. They have an excellent flat in a big two-storey house (in Shusha there are no such houses), the best in the village. They have the entire top floor, four good rooms with a kitchen and an entrance hall. The rooms are big, light, and clean with high ceilings and the furniture is good—in short, an excellent apartment for six rubles a month. Gleb now has a job of some sort. Thanks to this they have been able to manage and the financial crisis is over—there was, however, a time when things were tight. A. M. has taken a job as a nurse in the village of Sagaiskoye, several dozen versts from here in the same district. She will probably not keep the job for long because her health will certainly not permit her to continue such work and she is expected to return in a month. Gleb does not look too well, he is always poorly and gets irritable. Basil is flourishing. E.E. feels quite at home in the family and is doing all the household chores; she had a hard time in the summer and even now it is not easy for her, as she has to do all the work herself. It is impossible to find servants here. In summer you cannot get anyone, even temporarily. At the moment there is a woman who comes in and helps with the work.
We all went shooting together today. The weather is excellent and we are enjoying ourselves. I have permission for five days and will leave on Friday or Saturday—straight back to Shusha, about 70 versts from here.
I received a letter from Mark quite a while ago (dated September 12). I am awaiting news of how he finished up his “liquidator’s trip” to Kazan. He wrote to me, among other things, about a dog. In Shusha I have a mongrel pup and hope to have it as a gun dog next year. It would cost a mint of money to bring a dog here from Russia. He also asks about my book—it is still frozen. When I get back to Shusha I hope to get down to work more seriously and will then write in greater detail. Kisses for you and Manyasha.
Your,
V. U.
Everybody here also says that I have put on a lot of weight this summer, am sunburned and look like a real Siberian. That is what shooting and village life do for you! All the Petersburg ailments have been shaken off!
All the people in Tes send you, it goes without saying, lots of greetings.
[1] G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, his mother, and V. V. Starkov.—Ed.
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