V. I.

Lenin

22

To:   G. V. PLEKHANOV

July 25, 1901

Dear G. V., Yesterday I received the books on the agrarian question.
Thank you for them. I am pretty deeply immersed in my “agrarian” article against Chernov (and partly Hertz
and Bulgakov). I think this Chernov needs to be trounced
unmercifully . [1]

Velika was here just now and read extracts from your letter to her. As regards the proofs, we have already done
“everything in our power”, i.e., we have sent Dietz corrections to be inserted in the text if it is not too late; if
it is, we shall specify them without fail at the end of the
book so that there will be no great harm done really. My
wife read the proofs and compared them with the manuscript (the phrase on which you have made the marginal
note, “I didn’t have that!” proved to be a slip of the pen on
your part. As I have just seen from the manuscript, you
actually did write “the May uprising”. We have corrected
this too). Since proof-reader mistakes are unavoidable,
we shall from now on apply the “tactics” proposed by you:
we shall send the author the first proofs (the second will
be too late), for him to correct not individual letters and
characters, since that will be done by the proof-reader and
is indeed not important, but only places where the sense is distorted by the omission of words and phrases or by
the replacement of one word by another.

I received my article [2] from P. B. with his letter. P. B.
is also in favour of toning it down. Needless to say, I have
already introduced all the mitigations concretely indicated
by you and P. B. As regards changing the whole tone Of the article, or replacing all attacks by tongue-in-cheek
edification, although I like this plan of yours, I doubt
whether I could do it. If I didn’t feel any “irritation”
against the author I would not have written like that. But
since there is “irritation” (understandable not only to us
but to every Social-Democratic reader of the preface), I am
no longer able to conceal it, and cannot exercise cunning
here. I shall try to tone it down still more and make still further reservations; perhaps something will come
of it.

I shall pass on to Alexei your comments on his essay (he
has long been looking forward to them). He probably forgot to tell you that he himself passed his subject about
Mikhailovsky on to Ryazanov (the latter is now writing it). I understood that you were writing a review of At the Post of Honour , which we sent you.

All the very best.

Yours....

If you see Koltsov, give him many thanks from me for
Volnoye Slovo . [3]

O yes, I almost forgot. I should like to ask your advice
on the following question. This same swine Chernov quotes
F. Engels’s article “The German Peasant” in Russkoye Bogatstvo , 1900, No. 1, where at the end Engels says that
it is necessary to “restore the Mark”. I found this article.
It turned out to be a translation of the Anhang to the
Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft —
“Die Mark”; moreover in “Russkoye Bogatstvo” at the end two paragraphs (18 lines) have been inserted which are absent in the original . I compared all the rest of the translation
paragraph by paragraph, but the devil knows where these
two paragraphs have come from. This outrage ought to be exposed, only—isn’t there a misunderstanding here perhaps? Isn’t there another text of this article by Engels?
In a note to the Russian translation, the editors of
Russkoye Bogatstvo say:

“ This article of his (Engels) appeared in the eighties
tin 1882? the preface to Entwicklung is marked September
21, 1882] in a German magazine [? Neue Zeit ? or Zuricher Sozialdemokrat ? [4] Do you know? ] without his signature
[?]. But in a copy of it, which Engels sent to one of his
friends [sic! Danielson? Did you hear anything about this
from Engels? ] he signed it with his initials.” In addition,
it is said, the historical part of the article is identical with
the preface to “Schlesische Milliarde” and with an article
in Neue Rheinische Zeitung [5] ( April-March 1849 ).

Could you help me to get to the bottom of this? Wasn’t there another text of the article “Die Mark” in Neue Rheinische Zeitung or elsewhere? Gould Engels later have thrown
out the end about “the restoration of the Mark”?