Letter to Maxim Gorky, November 22, 1910

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Dear A. M.,

November 22, 1910

I wrote you a few days ago when sending Rabochaya Gazeta, and asked what had come of the journal we talked about in the summer and about which you promised to write to me.

I see in Rech today a notice about Sovremennik, published “with the closest and exclusive [that is what is printed! illiterately, but so much the more pretentiously and significantly I participation of Amfiteatrov” and with you as a regular contributor.

What is this? How does it happen? A “large monthly” journal, with sections on “politics, science, history, social life”—why, this is something quite different from symposia aiming at a concentration of the best forces of belles-lettres. Such a journal should either have a perfectly definite, serious and consistent trend, or it will inevitably disgrace itself and those taking part in it. Vestnik Yevropy has a trend—a poor, watery, worthless trend—but one which serves a definite element, certain sections of the bourgeoisie, and which also unites definite circles of the professorate and officialdom, and the so-called intelligentsia from among the “respectable” (or rather, would-be respectable) liberals. Russkaya Mysl has a trend, an odious trend, but one which performs a very good service for the counter-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie. Russkoye Bogatstvo has a trend—a Narodnik, Narodnik-Cadet trend—but one which has kept its line for scores of years, and which serves definite sections of the population. Sovremenny Mir has a trend—often Menshevik-Cadet trend (at present with a leaning towards pro-Party Menshevism)—but a trend A journal without a trend is an absurdity, a ridiculous, scandalous and harmful thing. And what sort of trend can there be with the “exclusive participation” of Amfiteatrov? One cannot expect G. Lopatin to provide a trend, and if the talk (said also to have got into the newspapers) is true about Kachorovsky’s participation, then that is a “trend”, but a trend of the blockheads, a S.R. trend.

During our talk in the summer when I told you that I had all but written you a disappointed letter about Confessions but did not send it because of the split with the Machists which had begun at that time, you replied: “it’s a pity you did not send it”. Then you went on to reproach me for not going to the Capri school, and you said that, if matters had taken a different course, the breakaway of the Machists and otzovists might have cost you less nervous strain, less waste of energy. Recalling these talks, I have now decided to write to you without putting it off and without waiting for any verification, while the impression the news has made is still fresh.

I think that a political and economic monthly with the exclusive participation of Amfiteatrov is something many times worse than a special Machist-otzovist faction. What was and still is bad about this faction is that the ideological trend deviated and still deviates from Marxism, from Social-Democracy, without, however, going so far as a break with Marxism, and only creating confusion.

Amfiteatrov’s journal (his Krasnoye Znamya did well to die when it did!) is a political act, a political enterprise in which there is not even a realisation that a general “leftism” is not enough for a policy, that after 1905 to talk seriously about politics without making clear one’s attitude towards Marxism and Social-Democracy is out of the question, impossible, inconceivable.

Things are turning out bad. It’s saddening.

Yours,

Lenin

To M.F.—salut et fraternité.