V. I.

Lenin

TO P. B. AXELROD

July 21, 1901

Dear P. B., I was intending to reply to your letter, but kept putting
it off until I received the article. Don’t be in any particular
hurry with it, if it is hard work, or even give up reading
it altogether, to give yourself a rest and have some proper
treatment. G. V. has already written to me in considerable
detail where he sees changes desirable, and I shall of course
try to make all these changes [3] (but as to changing the
tone ... I really don’t know whether I can do that. It is
hardly likely that I can write in diplomatic tones about a
gentleman who arouses such violent feelings in me. And I don’t
think G. V. is quite right when he says that my “hatred”
will be incomprehensible for the reader: I will quote the
example of Parvus, who, without any knowledge of the author, after reading the introduction felt the same
hostility to this “dolt”, as he called him—but that is in
parenthesis). I very much disapproved of our having imposed two jobs on you (reading my article and Orthodox’s)
just when you had gone away for treatment and a rest. Try
rather to make really good use of the period of your treatment, and do not by any means burden yourself with a
close reading of the manuscripts.

Please, write (and send manuscripts and everything else)
only to the following address:
Herrn Dr. Med. Carl Lehmann.
Gabelsbergerstrasse 20 a/II.
München (inside: fur Meyer ).

The Rittmeyer address is no longer good (but if you have sent something to Rittmeyer before receiving this letter,
we shall still get it).

Do you happen to have Liebknecht’s book Zur Grundund Bodenfrage (Leipzig 1876)? Or perhaps one of the
Zurich comrades has it? I need it very much for an article
against Chernov, and it is not available at the library
here, nor has Parvus or Lehmann got it.

Well, so long. I wish you the very best, and hope you have a good rest and are thoroughly fit again.

Yours, Petrov

P.S. Here’s another request: do you (or Greulich)
happen to have the minutes of the congresses of the International
—or
Vorbote [4] (which, I believe, carried the full reports)?
This Chernov fellow keeps worrying me: I do believe the
scoundrel has distorted things in referring to the minutes
of the congresses of the International, and putting down
as “dogmatic Marxism” even the “solidarised communities” (of
Rittinghausen). [5] If you could help me with this material, I should be very grateful.

[ But if you have to go to a lot of trouble to find these
references, don’t do it, please : I shall manage somehow.]

Here’s yet another request (I feel that I’m making a hog of myself—piling up request upon request—but it’s
hard to stop once you’ve started. But really , if you have to
go to a lot of trouble, like travelling about in search of
the books, etc., let it go, and “shelve” my applications.
I’ll manage somehow. I shall make mincemeat of Chernov in any case). The fact is that the swine Chernov quotes
Engels’s article, “The German Peasant” (in Russkoye Bogatstvo , 1900, No. 1). When I found the article I discovered
that it was a translation of Engels’s article “ Die Mark ”
( Anhang [1] to the pamphlet, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft ) [6] (I’ve only got the
4th edition of the pamphlet, 1891), but at the end of the
translated text there is an addition of two tirades in Russian which the original does not have and which contain highly
dubious statements: “restore (sic!) the mark”, etc.

I wonder what that is: a distortion by Russkoye Bogatstvo ? In which case they ought to be pilloried good and
proper. But first we must look at this from every side:
a footnote to the Russian article says that Engels’s article
“appeared in one of the German magazines in the 1880s, without his signature. But the offprint which Engels sent
to one of his friends was signed with his initials”.
(1) Have you any idea which “German magazine” it is? Could it be
Neue Zeit?
(2) Do you happen to have an early edition of the pamphlet Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie, etc. , with the “ Die Mark” Anhang ? It is necessary
to make a collation to find out whether the early editions
contained the tirades the 4th edition does not have ( although this is very unlikely).

Then I need for the purposes of comparison the pamphlet: W. Wolff, Die schlesische Milliarde , [7] which I was
unable to find at the local library and which is not available at the Vorwärts Buchhandlung [2] either—it’s been sold
out.