Letter to Sophie von Hatzfeldt, October 16, 1864

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 16 October 1864


First published in: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922
Published in English for the first time in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 42

MARX TO SOPHIE VON HATZFELDT

IN BERLIN

[Copy]

London, 16 October 1864 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

My dear Countess,

In recent weeks I have been so seriously ill that I was obliged to keep to my bed and hence, unfortunately, to defer until now my reply to your friendly letter of 1 October.

I assure you that I still cannot bring myself to accept Lassalle's death as a fait accompli! I see him in my mind's eye so full of life, spirit, energy and plans, so very, very young, and now suddenly his voice is silenced and his breath departed—I find it impossible to reconcile the two, to conceive of both simultaneously, and the reality oppresses me like an awful, nightmarish dream.

You are quite right to imply that no one appreciated Lassalle's greatness and significance better than I. He himself was most aware of this, as his letters to me show. As long as the correspondence between us lasted, I always expressed to him my heartfelt appreciation of his achievements, on the one hand, while always frankly advising him of my criticisms and reservations regarding those things I considered faulty, on the other.

In one of his last letters to me he wrote, in that peculiarly forceful manner he had, of the satisfaction that this gave him. But, apart from all his abilities, I felt affection for him as a person. The pity is that we have always concealed this fact from one another, as if we were going to live for ever...[1]

  1. ↑ The end of the letter is missing.