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Special pages :
Letter to Maxim Gorky, September 15, 1911
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1971, Moscow, Volume 36, pages 185-186
September 15, 1911
Dear A. M.,
It must have been two months ago that I wrote to you lastâat the beginning of the school[1] (it is now over, and the students have gone away). There was no reply, and I was wondering whether the ânegotiationsâ had become protracted or whether anything had radically changed. Leshchenko was here the other day and told me about Capri, and I was very glad to learn that the whole trouble was the postponement of the meetings you had had in mind until âafter the fairâ.[2] But the plans at Capri, Leshchenko said, were unchanged: a literary monthly, a full-sized paper and also, I understand, a tabloid.
Yes, all this would be very welcome indeed just now. The liquidators are buying Kievskaya Kopeika (so they say in St. Petersburg, whence we had a letter today), and are transferring it to St. Petersburg. It would be extremely important to organise a counter-attack.
So far we have been able only to collect our last cash for reviving Zvezda. I very much count on your help: send us an article. Help is particularly important at the beginning, because it wonât be easy to resume an interrupted publication.
Have you received the pamphlet by Kamenev, and have you read it? I cherish the hope that it must dissipate some of the prejudices you seem to have against its author.
Our Party affairs are in a pretty mess, but still things are coming to a head. Plekhanov is hedging, he always acts that wayâitâs like a diseaseâbefore things break. Martov sent Kautsky and Zetkin the translation (in typescript) of his pamphlet, and this was a great help to us: both Kautsky and Clara Zetkin said some pretty harsh things about the pamphlet: the former called it âdisgustingâ, the latter âdirtyâ.
Well, all the best. Do write for Zvezda.
Drop me a line, if you feel equal to the effort. Warm greetings to Maria Fyodorovna.
Yours,
Lenin
- â In the summer of 1911, the Bolshevik centre set up a Party school in Longjumeau near Paris for Party workers coming from Russia. Among the lecturers were Lenin, Inessa Armand and N. A. Semashko. Among those who attended the lectures and seminars were G. K. Orjonikidze, Y. D. Zevin, I. I. Schvarz, the workers I. S. Belostotsky, A. I. Dogadov, and I. V. Prisyagin. Graduates carried out important Party work in Russia.
For details of the letter mentioned by Lenin, see present edition, Vol. 34, pp. 446â47. - â The âfairâ was apparently a code name for the meeting of CC members in Paris on May 28âJune 4 (June 10â17), 1911.