V. I.

Lenin

183

To:   MAXIM GORKY

November 16, 1909

Dear Alexei Maximovich, I have been fully convinced all the time that you and Comrade Mikhail were the
most hardened factionalists of the new faction, with whom it would be silly of
me to try and talk in a friendly way. Today for the first time I met Comrade
Mikhail, and had a heart-to-heart chat with him both about affairs and about
you, and I perceived that I had been cruelly mistaken. Believe me, the
philosopher Hegel was right: life proceeds by contradictions, and living
contradictions are so much richer, more varied and deeper in content than they
may seem at first sight to a man’s mind. I regarded the school as
merely the centre of a new faction. This has turned out to be
wrong—not in the sense that it was not the centre of a new faction (the
school was this centre and is so at the present time), but in the sense that
this was incomplete, not the whole truth. Subjectively, certain people made such
a centre out of the school, objectively, it was such, but in addition the
school drew to it real front-rank workers from real working-class life. What happened was that, besides the contradiction between the old and the new faction, a
contradiction developed on Capri, between some of the Social-Democratic
intellectuals and the workers from Russia, who will bring Social-Democracy on to
the true path at all costs and whatever happens, and who will do so
despite all the squabbling and dissension abroad, despite the
“incidents”, and so on and so forth. People like Mikhail are a
guarantee of it. Moreover, it turned out that a contradiction developed in the
school between elements of the Capri Social-Democratic intelligentsia.

I gathered from Mikhail that you are taking things hard, dear A. M. You have
seen the working class and Social-Democratic movement from an aspect and in
forms and manifestations which already more than once in the history of Russia
and Western Europe have led intellectuals of little faith to despair of the
workers’ movement and Social-Democracy. I am confident that this will not
happen in your case, and after my talk with Mikhail I want to shake your hand
heartily. With your gifts as an artist you have rendered such a tremendous
service to the working-class movement of Russia—and indeed not only of
Russia—and will render a still greater service yet, that it is on no
account permissible for you to fall a prey to moods of depression evoked by
episodes of the struggle abroad. Conditions occur when the course of the
working-class movement inevitably gives rise to this struggle abroad, and to
splits, dissension and the quarrelling among the circles
—but this is not because of the workers’ movement being intrinsically weak
or Social-Democracy intrinsically erroneous, but because the elements out of
which the working class has to forge its Party are too heterogeneous and diverse
in calibre. The working class will forge it in any case, it will forge an
excellent revolutionary Social-Democratic Party in Russia, and it will do so
more speedily than Sometimes seems likely from the standpoint of the
thrice-accursed emigrant position; it will forge it more surely than might be
imagined if one were to judge by some external manifestations and individual
episodes. People like Mikhail are a guarantee of that.

All the very best to you and to Maria Fyodorovna. I am now hopeful that we shall
meet again and not as enemies.

Yours,

Lenin

Wl. Oulianoff, 4, Rue Marie Rose, 4, Paris, XIV