Written: Written December 3 or 4, 1909
Published:
First published in 1929 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya No. 11.
Sent from Paris.
Printed from
the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 37,
pages 440-441.
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.
• README
Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, Davydov’s House, Apt. 4, Bozheninsky Street, Devichye Polye, Moscow, Russia
Dear Manyasha,
Today I received an issue of Utro Rossii with the vulgar nonsense about Gorky.[1] For some days now a number of newspapers in Paris (L’Éclair) and in Berlin (Berliner Tageblatt)[2] have been engaged in similar lies. Some days ago there was a good refutation of this mass of lies in Vorwärts, where it was very correctly demonstrated and very wittily explained that this is all one big nonsensical invention. Some fool heard rumours he did not understand and got everything wrong—scraps he had picked up about otzovism, the school, philosophy and so on. Utro Rossii must be a shady little rag to have cooked up an “interview” just for the sake of sensation. Today Rech is also engaged in the fabrication of similar scandal. The Cadets are happy to have something to lie and talk scandal about.
How are you? How is Mother? I have had no news from you for quite a while. Write and let me know how you are getting on, what you are doing, and how Mitya is. There have been no changes here. Winter is beginning—! go to the library. The apartment is warm. Y.V. is feeling rather poorly. Nadya is zealously studying French.
All the best, kiss Mother many, many times.
Yours,
V. U.
P.S. Did you get the reply to the historian? With regard to my books at Sablino[3]—if the opportunity occurs, it would be fine to ask one of our St. Petersburg friends to send them to me here, if not all of them, then at least what there is of Marx and Engels and the best of the classics.
[1] On November 15, 1909, the newspaper Utro Rossii (Morning of Russia), organ of the Moscow industrialists published by P. P. Ryabushinsky, printed a libellous story about “M. Gorky’s Expulsion from the S. D. Party”. The “interview” of which Lenin writes was published on November 17 under the heading “The Excommunication of Maxim Gorky”. This libellous account was taken up by Rech and other bourgeois papers, Russian and foreign. In reply to the inventions about Gorky’s expulsion that were being spread by bourgeois newspapers Lenin wrote his article “The Bourgeois Press Fable About the Expulsion of Gorky” (see Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 106).
[2] L’Eclair (Lightning)–a Paris newspaper published from 1888 to 1939.
Berliner Tageblatt (Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung— Berlin Daily and Commercial Gazette)—published from 1871 to 1939.
[3] Lenin’s sister Anna, her husband Mark Yelizarov, and Lenin’s mother were living at the village of Sablino near a railway station of the same name, not far from St. Petersburg. Lenin visited his relatives there in 1905 and 1906. A room was allotted to him in the cottage and he was able to work and rest there.
| | | | | | |