Written: Written at the beginning of November 1913
Published:
First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany I.
Sent from Cracow to Capri.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 265.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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Dear Alexei Maximych,
I am sending you today by registered book-post the beginning of a novel which is to go into Prosveshcheniye. We think that you will not object. But if, by any chance, you should, cable to Prosveshcheniye: “Postpone Voitinsky” or “Don’t carry Voitinsky’s novel”.[1]
The news that you are being given a new kind of treatment by “a Bolshevik”, even if a former one, has really worried me. The saints preserve us from comrade-doctors in general, and Bolshevik-doctors in particular! Really and truly, in 99 cases out of 100 the comrade-doctors are “asses”, as a good doctor once said to me. I assure you that you should consult (except on minor complaints) only first-class men. It is terrible to try out on yourself the inventions of a Bolshevik! The only reassuring thing is the supervision of professors in Naples, if these professors really know their business.... You know, if you do go in winter, in any case call on some first-class doctors in Switzerland and in Vienna—there will be no excuse for not doing so! How do you feel now?
Yours,
N. Lenin
P.S. Over here things are not at all bad; in St. Petersburg, the workers are organising on party lines in all the legal societies, including the sick benefit societies. There were some interesting and practical lads here, too.
My address: Wl. Ulianow. Ulica Lubomirskiego. 51. Kraków. Krakau (Galizien).
[1] An extract from V. Voitinsky’s novel The Waves, entitled “A Ray of Light in the Night”, was published in Prosveshcheniye No. 4, 1914. But Lenin’s letter of mid-November 1913 to A. M. Gorky (see p. 266 of this volume) shows that Gorky was against the publication of Voitinsky’s novel in Prosveshcheniye. That is why it is not quite clear whether the reference is to The Waves or to another of Voitinsky’s manuscripts.
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