Refugee Literature. IV

This text is not available, or incomplete, please help if you can !

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Note from MECW :

Engels wrote the fourth article in the Refugee Literature series on the advice of Marx. Having acquainted himself with Tkachov’s Offener Brief an Herrn Friedrich Engels. Verfasser der Artikel “ Flüchtlings-Literatur” in Nr. 117 und 118 des “Volksstaat” (Zurich, 1874), Marx passed it on to Engels with the following note upon the cover: “Go to it, but in jovial fashion. So stupid, that Bakunin may have contributed. What Peter Tkachov is above all trying to tell his readers is that you had treated him as an enemy, and he therefore invents all manner of disputes that never occurred” (see Marx’s letter to Engels, February-March 1875, present edition, Vol. 45).

The article was printed by Der Volksstaat, Nos. 36 and 37, March 28 and April 2, 1875.

Excerpts from it were published in English for the first time in the collection: K. Marx, F. Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, pp. 114, 408-09. In full, it appears in English for the first time.

Refugee Literature. IV

The readers of the Volksstaat have suffered a misfortune.

...

Excerpt published under the title « On Tkachov » in K. Marx, F. Engels, On Literature and Art

But, says Herr Tkachov, I have used “every possible kind of abuse” against him. Now a certain kind of abuse, so-called invective, is one of the most effective forms of rhetoric which, when required, is employed by all great orators and of which William Cobbett, the most powerful English political writer, possessed such mastery that he is still admired and serves as a model that has yet to be matched.