NOTE TO L. B. KAMENEV
[1921, late March]
Gorky is here. He seems to be complaining about the decision concerning Grzhebin*.
Do you know what the matter is?
1 We are speaking of the head of the publishing house established in 1919 in Petrograd—later with branches in Moscow and, still later, in Berlin—for the publication of fiction, scholarly works, and popular science literature.
The drafting of this note by V. I. Lenin likely dates to the period when the Central Committee of the RCP(b) was considering the advisability of having Z. I. Grzhebin print books under the “World Literature” imprint in Germany.
The Soviet Russian Trade Commissioner in Berlin, B. S. Stomonyakov, and the Deputy Trade Representative of the RSFSR in Germany, I. O. Lutovinov, opposed this proposal. On May 25, 1921, they submitted a statement to the Central Committee of the RCP(b), pointing out that the publishing apparatus established by the Soviet Russian Trade Representation in Germany would produce literature at a lower cost than Grzhebin’s enterprise.
Maxim Gorky (A. M. Peshkov) was a great proletarian writer, the founder of socialist realism, and the progenitor of Soviet literature.