Written: Written in February-March 1912
Published:
First published in Bakinsky Rabochy No. 17, January 21, 1927.
Sent from Paris to Capri.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
page 24.
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
Dear A. M.,
I am very glad you have agreed to try and write a May Day leaflet.
I enclose the Conference resolutions.
I have seen Zhivoye Dyelo.[1] A rotten little liquidationist rag with an “approach”. Liberal propaganda. They are glad that the police prevent the question of the Party being openly discussed.
Zvezda will continue, either as a weekly or as a kopek daily.[2] You helped Zvezda very, very much with your splendid Tales, and that made me extremely joyful, so that the joy—if I am to talk straight—outweighed my sadness at your “affair” with the Chernovs and Amfiteatrovs[3].... Brr! I am glad, I must confess, that they are “going up the spout”.
But as for your having nothing to live on and not being able to get printed anywhere, that’s bad. You ought to have got rid of that leech Pyatnitsky long ago and appointed an honest agent, an agent pure and simple, to deal with Znaniye[4] (perhaps it’s already too late, I don’t know)!!! If only.... It would have been a gold mine....
I see Rozhkov’s Irkutskoye Slovo[5] very rarely. The man’s become a liquidator. And Chuzhak is an old ass, hardened and pretentious.
Yours,
Lenin
Thank M. F.[6] for her letter to Moscow, and a thousand greetings!
[1] Zhivoye Dyelo (Vital Cause)—Menshevik liquidationist legal weekly, published in St. Petersburg from January to April 1912. Sixteen issues appeared. Its contributors included L. Martov, F. Dan and P. Axelrod.
[2] The daily newspaper for the workers that succeeded Zvezda was Pravda (Truth), the first issue of which appeared on May 5, 1912.
[3] Reference is to Gorky’s work for the magazine Zavety (Behests), to which V. Chernov, a Socialist-Revolutionary leader, contributed, __PRINTERS_P_563_COMMENT__ 36* and for the magazine Sovremennik, which in 1911 was run by A. Amfiteatrov.
[4] Znaniye (Knowledge)—a book-publishing firm founded in St. Petersburg in 1898 by a group of writers. Gorky joined the firm later and virtually became its leading spirit. The managing director was K. P. Pyatnitsky.
[5] Irkutskoye Slovo (Irkutsk Word)—weekly newspaper with a Menshevik-liquidationist orientation (1911–12). = Its publisher, Rozhkov, a member of the R.S.D.L.P. since 1905, had in the years of reaction become one of the ideologists of liquidationism; N. Chuzhak (N. F. Nasimovich) was a literary critic.
[6] M. F.—Maria Fyodorovna Andreyeva—Gorky’s wife.
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