in Paris

122, Regent’s Park Road, N.W.  
London, 28 January 1884

My dear Lavrov,

About three weeks ago I sent you a “Standard” with an article that might interest you; I hope you received it.

I am now occupied – my health finally permits it – in putting in order the books, etc., left by Marx. Among them there is the whole Russian library which he owed to Danielson and which contains very important material on the present social situation in Russia; it includes almost everything that has appeared. At my age and with my overwork it is impossible for me to take up afresh the thorough studies of Russia in which death unfortunately interrupted our friend. I therefore thought, and Tussy is of the same opinion as myself, that it is our duty to place these books at your disposal. You, as the recognised representative of the Russian revolutionary emigration as well as an old friend of the deceased, have certainly more right than anyone else to a collection of books that came into being thanks to the devotion of your and our friends in Russia, whether for your personal use or to form the nucleus of a library of the Russian revolutionary emigration. If you agree, I could send them to you – to your address or to any other you may indicate – in the course of February. I shall only keep here the books from which Marx made excerpts, and a few others which I might need for Volume II of “Capital”; after deducting these, there will not be more than about a hundred volumes left.

As regards this Volume II, I am at last beginning to see my way clearly. For Book II, the circulation of capital, we have for the most important parts, that is for the beginning and the end, a version dating from 1875 and later. Here only quotations have to be inserted according to the indications available. For the middle part there are no fewer than 4 versions from before 1870; that is the only difficulty. Book III, capitalist production considered in its totality, exists in two versions from before 1869; from a later period we have only a few notes and a whole notebook of equations for calculating the various factors which lead to the transformation of the rate of surplus-value into the rate of profit. But the excerpts from books on Russia and on the United States contain a mass of material and remarks on ground-rent, others relate to money-capital, credit, paper money as a means of credit, etc. I do not yet know how I shall be able to use them for Book III; perhaps it will be better to bring them together in a separate publication, which I shall certainly do if the difficulty of incorporating them into “Capital” proves too great. What matters to me above all is that the book should appear as soon as possible, and especially that it should genuinely be a work of Marx that I am publishing.

We are daily expecting copies of the 3rd edition of Volume I, and we shall send you one as soon as we receive them.

The Russian translations from Geneva – the “Manifesto”, etc. – have given me great pleasure.

I received a letter from two Poles, Krzywicki and Sosnowski, asking for our consent to a Polish translation of “Capital” – we have naturally given it. Sosnowski is in Paris; do you happen to know these citizens?

Yours fraternally,  
F. Engels