Written: Written not earlier than May 9–10, 1913
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 97-98.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Dear A. M.,
How do you stand about a little article or a story for the May issue of Prosveshcheniye? They write to me from there that they could publish 10–15 thousand (that’s how we are marching ahead!), if there were something from you. Drop me a line whether there will be.[1] Then Pravda reprints it, and we get 40,000 readers. Yes ... the affairs of Prosveshcheniye could begin to prosper; otherwise there does not exist, devil take it, a single consistent journal for the workers, for the Social-Democrats, for revolutionary democracy; nothing but rotten sour-pusses of one kind or another.
How is your health? Have you rested, and will you be taking a rest in the summer? It is essential, my word on it, that you should have a good rest!
Things are not too well with me. The wife is down with goitre. Nerves! My nerves are also playing me up a little. We are spending the summer in the village of Poronin, near Zakopane. (My address is: Herrn Wl. Ulianow, Poronin, Galizien, Austria.) It’s a good place, and healthy. Height about 700 metres. Suppose you took it into your head to pay us a visit? There will be interesting workers from Russia. Zakopane (seven versts from us) is a well-known health resort.
Have you seen Demyan Bedny’s Fables?[2] I will send them if you haven’t. If you have, write and say what you think of them.
Do you get Pravda and Luch regularly? Our cause is going ahead—in spite of everything—and the workers’ party is being built up as a revolutionary Social-Democratic party, against the liberal renegades, the liquidators. We shall have cause to celebrate one day. We are rejoicing just now at the victory of the workers in Petersburg over the liquidators when the Board of the new Metalworkers’ Union[3] was elected.
And “your” Lunacharsky is a line one!! Oh, what a fine fellow! Maeterlinck, he says, has “scientific mysticism”.... Or Lunacharsky and Bogdanov are perhaps no longer yours?
Joking apart. Keep well. Send me a couple of words.
Rest as well as you can.
Yours,
Lenin
Ulianow, Austria. Poronin (Galizien).
How did you find the jubilee number of Pravda?[4]
[1] In the May 1913 issue of Prosveshcheniye there are no works by Gorky, but the June issue contains his story “Krazha” (“The Theft”).
[2] Bedny, Demyan (Pridvorov, Y. A.) (1883–1945)—outstanding Soviet poet, joined the Bolshevik Party in 1912. In 1911 he had begun contributing to the Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda and Pravda. His poems and fables were fired with the spirit of the class struggle against the capitalist system and its defenders. During the period of foreign intervention and civil war Bedny went to the front as a poet-agitator.
[3] The elections of the Board of the Petersburg Metalworkers’ Union took place on April 21 (May 4), 1913. The meeting was attended by nearly 800 people and another 400 were unable to get in because there was no room. The Bolsheviks submitted a list of candidates for the Board that had been published in Pravda No. 91 and was distributed among those present. Despite the liquidators’ demand that candidates should be elected “irrespective of trend”, the majority of the meeting voted for the Pravda list; 10 out of the 14 successful candidates for the Board were Pravda nominees.
__PRINTERS_P_579_COMMENT__ 37*[4] Reference is to Pravda No. 92, April 23, 1913, which contained Lenin’s articles “Anniversary of Pravda” and “A Few Words on Results and Facts”.
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