Letter to Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, February 7, 1899

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February 7, 1899

Today I am sending you, Mother dearest, another small package (registered)—first, the issue of Izvestiya[1] I was asked to return and, second, a review[2] that I ask you to pass on to the writer. By the next post I will send a little addition to Chapter VII. I hope it will not be too late. I think I forgot to write last time that according to my rough calculation the whole book contains about 934,000 letters. This is not very much, altogether something like 467 printed pages, counting 2,000 letters to a page. If, however, there are fewer letters to the page, for instance 1,680 (as in Tugan-Baranovsky’s Crises)—which, of course, would make the edition unnecessarily expensive—there will be about 530 pages.

Anyuta apparently did not receive the letter (written a very long time ago) in which I asked her to send me (1) a decent German translation of Turgenev and (2) a detailed German grammar (even one in German for Germans, because those for Russians are usually very brief).[3] I want to make a real study of German. Now I ask you to send me a Russian-German Dictionary, one of those we have at home, Lenström, or better, Reiff’s dictionary of Russian and three European languages. I wanted to order Pavlovsky’s Russian-German Dictionary from Kalmykova’s, but it is being issued in parts and only half of it has appeared.

Yours,

V. U.

Regards to all.

  1. Lenin apparently returned one of the issues of Wolfe’s Izvestiya with a letter in invisible ink. For purposes of secrecy he wrote that he had been asked for it.
  2. This refers to Lenin’s review of Parvus’s book The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis. Economic Essays. The review was published in Nachalo No. 3 for 1899 (see Collected Works, Vol. 4, pp. 65–66).
  3. See Letter No. 65.—Ed.