V. I.

Lenin

September 15, 1911

Dear A. M., It must have been two months ago that I wrote to you
last—at the beginning of the school [1] (it is now over, and
the students have gone away). There was no reply, and I
was wondering whether the “negotiations” had become protracted or whether anything had radically changed.
Leshchenko was here the other day and told me about Capri,
and I was very glad to learn that the whole trouble was
the postponement of the meetings you had had in mind until
“after the fair”. [2] But the plans at Capri, Leshchenko
said, were unchanged: a literary monthly, a full-sized paper
and also, I understand, a tabloid.

Yes, all this would be very welcome indeed just now.
The liquidators are buying Kievskaya Kopeika (so they say in St. Petersburg, whence we had a letter today), and
are transferring it to St. Petersburg. It would be extremely
important to organise a counter-attack.

So far we have been able only to collect our last cash for reviving Zvezda . I very much count on your help: send
us an article. Help is particularly important at the beginning, because it won’t be easy to resume an interrupted
publication.

Have you received the pamphlet by Kamenev, and have you read it? I cherish the hope that it must dissipate some
of the prejudices you seem to have against its author.

Our Party affairs are in a pretty mess, but still things
are coming to a head. Plekhanov is hedging, he always acts
that way—it’s like a disease—before things break. Martov
sent Kautsky and Zetkin the translation (in typescript)

of his pamphlet, and this was a great help to us: both
Kautsky and Clara Zetkin said some pretty harsh things about the
pamphlet: the former called it “disgusting”, the latter
“dirty”.

Well, all the best. Do write for Zvezda .

Drop me a line, if you feel equal to the effort. Warm greetings to Maria Fyodorovna.

Yours, Lenin