V. I.

Lenin

TO P. B. AXELROD

November 3

I received your letter yesterday, dear P. B., and have today already sent off the note to my sister. I have not
passed on the letter to V. I.

Before I forget : please, let me know to whom the cushion
and the English book you sent here were addressed. I have not yet received them. If you sent them postlagernd , was
it the ordinary postlagernd or Bahnhofpostlagernd , [1] or
some other way? V. I. could not tell me, and I have been
waiting for your letter all this time, but there is no mention of this in it. Since I don’t know the name in the
address, I cannot make inquiries. Please, ask Vera Pavlovna
to drop me a line about this, and kindly forgive me for
worrying you again and again with these trifles.

As regards the article on Liebknecht, truly we don’t know what to do. Your article turned out to be long enough
for the journal : 8 pages (according to V. I., similar to those
in Nakanune [2] in small type, i.e., about 8,000 letters per
page)—this makes 64,000 letters, and even if we take Nakanune’s larger type, it will come to about 50,000 letters]
Our paper will have the Vorwärts format, also in three columns. Each column of about 6,000 letters, which means
that half your article will take up an entire page of the
newspaper, plus another column! This is extremely inconvenient for the paper, apart from the inconvenience of
dividing up such an article as yours about Liebknecht.

I will calculate all this more precisely when your article arrives. We shall do our best to carry it, but if this
proves to be impossible because of the size, will you be so good as to allow us to publish it as a pamphlet
supplement to the paper (if you are writing about Liebknecht
separately for the journal)? We are now setting up the May Day Demonstrations in Kharkov pamphlet (50,000 letters);
then will come the turn of the paper, and then of your pamphlet about Liebknecht; if it proves necessary, an obituary
could be written for the paper, with a reference to the
pamphlet. What do you think of that?

I repeat that all this is mere supposition; it is essential
to make an exact calculation, and when I do this, on receipt of your article, I will write to you at once.

I wish you all the best, and particularly that you should
get well again as soon as possible. Kindest regards to your family.

Yours, Petrov

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Notes:
[1]
Railway poste restante.— Ed .

[2]
Nakanune (On the Eve)—a Narodnik monthly published in
Russian in London from January 1899 to February 1902, under the
editorship of Y. A. Serebryakov. There were a total of 37 issues.