Published:
First published in 1929 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya No. 5.
Sent from Shushenskoye to Podolsk.
Printed from
the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 37,
pages 200-202.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup:
D. Moros
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
November 22, 1898
Today, Mother dearest, I have to write a long business letter to Anyuta. For this reason I shall not write to you, especially as Nadya has already compiled a very lengthy description of our life here and I have nothing to add to it. Her story is true in the main—only there is some exaggeration about my work on the “markets”.[1]
Yours,
V. U.
Ask Mitya to send Pamyatnaya knizhka Tulskoi gubernii[2] to Alexei Pavlovich Sklyarenko as soon as possible; I don’t know his address.
I received two of your letters together—dated November 1 and 4. There is a good side to the publication having been handed over to Vodovozova; at any rate, the work is certain to be done. Her account for the Studies seems to be perfectly correct and the smallness of the fee is due to the small number of copies.[5] I cannot, of course, accept such a fee for the “markets”. I intend to take advantage of Vodovozova’s offer (if you see her, convey to her, of course, many thanks from me) to publish my “markets”—as for the financial conditions, I leave it to you (if it will not be too much trouble) to discuss that with her; I do not know which is better, a definite fee or “all the net profit”. The more advantageous of those two methods of payment must, of course, be chosen, especially as I do not need the money in a hurry. The most important of the conditions attending publication is to ensure perfectly good proof-reading. Unless this is done it really is not worth while publishing anything. The proof-reading of the Studies was very bad. Apart from those misprints distorting the meaning[3] that I sent you,[6] there are numerous minor ones that comrades are already complaining to me about. It is absolutely necessary to have a very intelligent, professional proof-reader; that must be made an absolute condition and I am even willing to pay such a proof-reader double in view of the author’s being unable to read the proofs himself. This is especially true of tables—there are always mistakes galore, and in the “markets” there are a lot of tables. Then (even if you have the best proof-reader) I must have copies of the final page proofs sent to me immediately, signature by signature, and I will send you a list of misprints. The delay in issuing the book because of this will be (if they are sent punctually) at most a month; that is no great misfortune as long as the book is printed decently. With regard to the date of issue— the work can begin now (we have the third chapter in a fair copy and in a few days I shall finish the fourth, that is, half of the book; the second half is much easier, so I can confidently undertake to send to Moscow the last chapter by February 15, or even earlier); this would be particularly convenient for me, because I would have time to send in not only the misprints to the first signatures but perhaps some more important changes. The format and the type should provide for about 2,400 letters to a page; the whole work would then be no more than 30 signatures, say 500 pages in round figures (more pages would probably be too many and would be bulky for the reader). Lastly, with regard to the chart in Chapter II—special attention will be needed to make sure there are no mistakes in it. Please talk to Vodovozova about all this and answer me as soon as possible after you receive this letter. We shall send Chapters III and IV when they are finished, in about a fortnight.
Please send Manyasha another three copies of the Studies. Alexander Leontyevich’s[4] address is Gudina’s House, Opernaya Street, Archangel. I have sent them to all the comrades here. Another copy must be sent to the Samaran who writes in Nauchnoye Obozreniye.
Out of the third of the fee you have received, a half will cover the money sent by Mitya for Yelizaveta Vasilyevna. From the other half, please send a half to Kalmykova’s warehouse (I have run into debt there, and I order a lot of things) and use the remainder to subscribe to journals and newspapers for 1899; it is time, especially for the foreign publications.
Russkiye Vedomosti for one year—8 rubles 50 kopeks (pay for ten months for me);
Russkoye Bogatstvo for one year—9 rubles
Mir Bozhy for one year—8 rubles
Nivafor 1899 —7 rubles
Frankfurter Zeitung
for the first quarter of 1899—4 rubles 70 kopeks
Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, herausgegeben
von Heinrich Braun. For 1899—12 marks.
We here greatly appreciate newspapers and journals, especially those that arrive in good time; that is why I ask you to subscribe as early as possible.
Yours,
V. U.
Regards to all.
(Blos has been given to Basil, we no longer have it.)
[1] See Krupskaya’s Letter No. 11.—Ed. —Lenin
[2] Which I am sending by registered post to your address today.—Lenin
[3] At the same time as I sent the corrections to you I sent them to the écrivain with a request to print them, without fail, on a separate sheet, to be put into the book when it was sold. It is now necessary to make the same request of Vodovozova.—Lenin
[5] The book Vladimir Ilyin. Economic Studies and Essays was published in an edition of 1,200 copies.
[6] As we know from a later letter (December 12, 1898, No. 64 in this volume), the letter containing the list of misprints in Economic Studies and Essays was lost in the post. Lenin subsequently made corrections only to the article “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism”, when it was published in the book The Agrarian Question, Part I, 1908.
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