V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v48; en:MT;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

TO ALEXEI MAXIMOVICH GORKY

September 30, 1913

Dear A. M.,

I am a bit late with my reply. Forgive me. How devilishly angry I was in Berne and afterwards!! I think: if you are in Verona (your telegram about Bebel was from Verona)—or some Rom...?? 247—why, I could have come to Verona from Berne!! And then for months not a word from you...

What you write about your illness alarms me terribly. Are you doing the right thing by living without treatment on Capri? The Germans have excellent sanatoria (for instance, in St. Blasien, near Switzerland), where they treat and completely cure lung ailments, secure complete cicatrisation, fatten the patients, then systematically accustom them to cold, harden them against chills, and discharge them fit and able to work.

And you, after Capri, in winter—to Russia???? I am terribly afraid that this will injure your health and undermine your capacity for work. Are there first-class doctors in this Italy of yours?

Really, you ought to go to a first-class doctor in Switzerland* or Germany, and spend two months on serious treatment in a good sanatorium. Otherwise, to waste government property, i.e., to fall ill and undermine your capacity for work, is absolutely inadmissible from every point of view.

I have heard (from the editor of Prosveshcheniye,** who saw Ladyzhnikov) that you are dissatisfied with Pravda. Because of its dryness? That is true. But it is not easy to correct this defect at once. There are no people. It was only with great difficulty, a year after we started, that we managed to get a tolerable editorial board in Petersburg. (I have forwarded your letter to Prosveshcheniye.) Write and tell me what your plans are and how your health is. I earnestly beg you to take up treatment seriously—upon my word, you can be completely cured, but to neglect it is positively sinful and criminal.

Yours,
Lenin

P.S. We have had, and partly will have, good people. Have you seen Nash Put?

What a success! Already the second newspaper. We shall start a third—in the South.

Address: Ulianow. Poronin (Galizien). Austria. (In winter I shall be in Cracow: Lubomirskiego. 51.)

* In Switzerland there are excellent doctors for the lungs, for instance, in the sanatoria of Dr. Turban (Davos) and others.
** Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment)—a Bolshevik legal monthly published in St. Petersburg from 1911 to 1914.