ENGELS TO PYOTR LAVROV:! 

London, 5 February 1884 

My dear Lavrov, 

So I shall send you the books; that is agreed.* 
The 2nd volume ‘*— ah! If you only knew, my old friend, how it 

* K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.-* See Marx’s letter to Engels 
of 29 January 1869 (present edition, Vol. 43, p. 211).-° E.P. Mead, ‘The Steam- 
King’; see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 474-77.-4 See this volume, p. 88.-° of 
Marx’s Capital 

weighs on me! But then six months have gone to waste, thanks to my 
infernal illness. And, even so, I shan’t be able to set about things seri- 
ously before the middle of March. It will take me up till then to get 
all the books, papers, periodicals, etc., in order, and I can’t work on 
them for more than a few hours a day without becoming overtired. It 
weighs on me all the more heavily for the knowledge that there is not 
another living soul who can decipher that writing and those abbrevia- 
tions of words and style. As to publication by instalments, !5> that will 
depend to some extent upon the editor and upon legislation in Ger- 
many; hitherto I have not thought such a method particularly useful 
for a book of this kind. I shall try and do what Aonatuus * wants in re- 
gard to the proofs. But then Bspa 3acyauus ° wrote to me a couple of 
months ago asking whether I would allow her to do the translation. 
I told her that I regarded Aonatun+ as having first refusal and that it 
was still too soon to talk about the matter. What could be discussed 
at once, however, would be the possibility of publishing the transla- 
tion in Russia. Do you think that might be done? The 2nd book is pure- 
ly scientific, dealing solely with questions as from bourgeois to bour- 
geois, but the 3rd will contain passages which make me doubt the very 
possibility of their being published in Germany under the Anti- 
Socialist Law.?7 

The same difficulty applies to the publication of Marx’s complete 
works, and that is only one of the many difficulties to be overcome. 
I have some 60 sheets (each of 16 printed pages) of old manuscripts 
by Marx and myself dating from between 1845 and 1848. Of this ma- 
terial only extracts could be published, but I shan’t be able to get 
down to it until I have finished with the manuscript of the 2nd 
volume of Capital. So all we can do is wait. 

The article you speak of, and which we no longer have here, will 
amount to between 3 and 5 printed sheets; it is a detailed summary of 
the political development of France from 24 February 1848 up till 
1851. It is summed up in the /8th Brumaire* but all the same it is 
worth translating. I myselfam on the lookout for a complete set of the 
Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue,’ only */;ths of which are in my posses- 
sion. 

@ (Russ.) Lopatin- (Russ.) Vera Zasulich-° See this volume, p. 65.-? 
K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.-° Neue  Rheinische 
Kettung. Politisch-dkonomische Revue 

Deville sent me his manuscript! for revision. Being indisposed, 
I confined myself to the theoretical part where I found little that need- 
ed correcting. However the descriptive part has been done in too 
great haste. To begin with, it is at times unintelligible to anyone who 
has not read the original and, what is more, he frequently presents 
Marx’s conclusions while passing over the conditions under which 
those conclusions alone hold good; at times that gives a somewhat 
false impression. I have drawn his attention to this, but they were 
much too eager to publish the book. 

Yours ever, 

F. Engels