Letter to Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, Mid-May, 1928

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The General Outline of My Work

I received the memoirs by V. I. Vitte and am now reading them with interest. This book will surely prove to have things of use for me. That is because, in addition to my basic work – summing up world developments since the imperialist war – I am also working on my memoirs. Preobrazhensky put me up to that. I want to approach these memoirs in a broader way – that is, place them against the background of a certain epoch. I'm beginning from the "very beginning," from the countryside, followed by Odessa, later on Nikolaev, prison, exile, etc. The first part, which I have completed, culminates at Nikolaev – but before the Southern Russian Workers Union. I have dug the old periodicals, beginning with the 1870s, out of the library here. … I have made fairly wide use of these periodicals already and will make more excavations into them in the future. As auxiliary sources I'm now hunting up books of the most varied content, including for example, a guide to the cities of Odessa and Nikolaev, publications of the Kherson zemstvos and province zemstvos, memoirs by Narodniks and members of the People's Will, documents from the first phase of Russian Marxism, memoirs by officials, statistics on industrial development, especially in the south, and so on and so forth. … I absolutely do not intend to write a "scholarly work." But the main thing I want to do is provide – or more important, preserve – a sense of perspective, because the war and revolution have pushed aside the past, even pressed it back, so much that the young generation doesn't look for any long-term explanations of events. In particular this makes possible the most vulgar distortions of the prewar period.

This is the general outline of my work, which makes it both easier and more difficult to answer your question of exactly which books I need. I would give anything to have access to the Odessa newspapers of the period 1888-98 and the Nikolaev newspaper from 1895 to 1898. But it would seem that that is impossible unless some Odessa or Nikolaev comrade has kept a complete set from the old days, but that's hardly likely. … Of course I would conscientiously return anything sent to me to be read.

The second part of my memoirs will be on the Southern Russian Workers Union, prison in Nikolaev, Kherson, and Odessa, Butyrka prison in Moscow, the Alexandrov transit prison, Ust-Kut, and in general the whole period of Siberian exile. For the first part I have already written fairly extensive drafts. For the second part I haven't gotten down to work yet, but I have begun to collect material. Needless to say, on the second part your cooperation could have irreplaceable importance for me, both in the gathering of appropriate material and as far as personal reminiscences go. In particular I would like to go back over what we read in prison and exile, what books and issues concerned us, etc. I don't know if you've had occasion to write your memoirs touching on that period? It would be appropriate. They could of course be printed separately, but even in manuscript they could be of great help to me in my work. … It's hardly likely that one would find other such favorable conditions for writing one's memoirs as in blessed Alma-Ata. One condition: please do not buy any books for this work under any circumstances; just pick them up if a favorable occasion arises. As for the main work that I am doing, which I mentioned first, I will enclose here a brief report on what kinds of books I need. If you have appropriate books at hand, please send me a list of them without actually mailing the books, and then I'll write you which of them I would need. This way we would avoid duplicates being sent from different places. That's all, it would seem, as far as books go.