Letter to Pavel Axelrod, November 19, 1900

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November 19, 1900

Dear P. B.,

I have just received your letter of November 17, and read your remarks with great interest. Of course we shall try without fail to send you as many articles as possible, as this is valuable for the publications in all respects, quite apart from your natural interest in them. One thing we are sorry about is that our secretary is Ăźberarbeitet[1] ; but this will change soon all the same, because serious reforms are afoot in the matter of Kinderpflege.[2][3]

Danevich has sent in an item of about 12,000 letters for the paper, on the French national congress; I hesitate to say whether it is entirely suitable. Very possibly we shall manage without it if we have your chronicle of events, which we are awaiting impatiently. Danevich is writing a big article on French affairs for the journal.[4]

The enclosed letter is for Rolau: my colleague is writing to him about our “tea” business, because we think that my correspondent Skubiks is not in town.[5] Please be good enough to pass this letter on to Rolau, and ask him to reply to us at once (forgive me for troubling you with such a request: I hope you can entrust, say, Gurevich with this). But if Rolau is not in town, would you be so kind as to read the letter addressed to him, and have a talk about its matter, if only with Skubiks’s wife. The thing is that we must have a definite reply as soon as possible, and if neither Rolau nor Skubiks is available, this can’t be done otherwise than by a personal talk between you and someone of their company.

As regards the article by L. Axelrod,[6] I quite agree with you that it should first of all be sent to G. V.

Every good wish, and excuse this too hasty letter.

Yours,

Petrov

  1. ↑ Overworked.—Ed.
  2. ↑ Child care.—Ed.
  3. ↑ A reference to the fact that I. G. Smidovich-Lehmann was expecting a child.
  4. ↑ There was no article in Iskra No. 1 on French affairs by Danevich (E. L. Gurevich). His first article, “Letters from France. Letter One”, appeared in Iskra No. 6 in July 1901. No articles by Danevich on the subject were carried by Zarya.
  5. ↑ A reference to the transportation of Iskra literature to Russia via the Baltic provinces, which was undertaken by Latvian students, Ernests Rolau and Eduards Skubiks, who were then resident in Zurich. It later turned out that the police had been aware of the existence of this transportation group; both consignments of Iskra publications organised by Rolau and Skubiks in December 1900 and June 1901 had been confiscated. Transportation was finally organised in mid-1901.
  6. ↑ A reference to the article by Lubov Axelrod (Orthodox), “Why We Don’t Want to Go Back?” (on the book written by the liberal, subsequently a reactionary, N. A. Berdayev, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy) carried in Zarya’s double issue No. 2–3 in December 1901.