Letter to Pyotr Lavrov, August 10, 1878

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 10 August 1878


First published, in Russian, in Letopisi marksizma, Book V, Moscow-Leningrad, 1930
Printed according to the original
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


ENGELS TO PYOTR LAVROV

IN PARIS

London, 10 August 1878
122 Regent's Park Road, N. W.

My dear Mr Lavrov,

I hope you have received the copy of my anti-Diihring[1] which I sent off to you yesterday. I should have sent it earlier had I known your present address. I wrote to Smirnov,[2] 4 Lower Charles St., and then to Lopatin,[3] 6 rue Linné, to ask for it, but neither has replied. Could you let me know where I should send Lopatin's copy? We find his silence somewhat disturbing, for an earlier letter,[4] sent to him at the same address, was forwarded to him to Switzerland where, or so he wrote and told me, he intended to stay only until the month of June; and since then Nachalo[5] reports his having been arrested in Russia.[6] Although the news is not without chronological snags, his silence makes us anxious.

As you will have seen, the German Darwinians have, in response to Virchow's appeal,[7] come out unequivocally against socialism.

Haeckel, whose pamphlet I have just received, limits himself to speaking in general terms about the 'crazy doctrines of socialism',[8]

but Mr Oscar Schmidt of Strasbourg is going to flatten us con amore[9] at the natural scientists' conference[10] in Kassel.[11] It's a waste of effort. If reaction in Germany gets the bit between its teeth, its first victims, after the socialists, will be the Darwinians. Anyway, whatever happens to them, I shall take it upon myself to reply to these gentlemen.[12] And in any case, we have every reason to be satisfied with that event as, indeed, with events in general. Mr Bismarck who, for 7 years, has been working for us as if he was in our pay, now appears incapable of moderating his offers to speed up the advent of socialism. Après moi le déluge[13] does not suffice him; he insists upon having that deluge in his own lifetime—let his will be done. I am only afraid that he will do his work too well and that the deluge will arrive before its appointed time.

Yours sincerely,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ The first complete edition of Engels' Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. Philosophie. Politische Oekonomie. Sozialismus, with the author's preface, was published in Leipzig in early July 1878.
  2. ↑ See this volume, pp. 312 13.
  3. ↑ Engels' letter has not been found.
  4. ↑ Ida Pauli
  5. ↑ Nachalo (The Beginning)
  6. ↑ Nachalo (No. 2, April 1878) wrote: 'Arrested in St Petersburg the other day were: 1) Pyankov, detained by the police in Furshtadtskaya St. and beaten within an inch of his life without the slightest provocation; exiled (!!) to Archangel; 2) Goloushev, chief witness in the Zasulich case; 3) Pavlovsky and 4) Lopatin.
    Lavrov wrote on 11 August in reply to Engels' letter: 'The news reported by Nachalo relates either to the brother of our Lopatin, a participant in the "trial of the 193", or to his cousin, who has just been deported to Vologda Gubernia, having been involved in the Kiev students' case. Our Lopatin had come over from Switzerland but then left again for a while; I think he will be back in about a month, if not earlier. He has not left an address, but I had a letter from him about a fortnight ago.'
  7. ↑ Engels is referring to Rudolf Virchow's speech at the 50th congress of German natural scientists and physicians in Munich on 22 September 1877. Virchow associated Darwinism with the socialist movement and declared it dangerous to the existing social system (see R. Virchow, Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft im modernen Staat, Berlin, 1877, S. 12). Engels ironically wrote that Virchow had 'amiably tipped the wink'.
  8. ↑ E. Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre, Stuttgart, 1878, pp. 3 4. Engels quotes from Haeckel in German.
  9. ↑ lovingly
  10. ↑ In the original: 'Naturforscherver sammlung'. See this volume, p. 312.
  11. ↑ On 18 July 1878, the London journal Nature (Vol. XVIII, No. 455, p. 316) printed the programme of the 51st congress of natural scientists and physicians scheduled for 18-24 September in Kassel. Among the reports to be read was Oscar Schmidt's 'On the Relation of Darwinism to Social Democracy'.
    On 23 July, Oscar Schmidt stated his willingness to send Engels a copy of his report, which was to appear in the November issue of the Deutsche Rundschau. It also came out as a pamphlet: O. Schmidt, Darwinismus und Socialdemocratie, Bonn, 1878.
  12. ↑ Engels intended to subject to criticism the Darwinians', including Oscar Schmidt's, writings against socialism in his Dialectics of Nature (see present edition, Vol. 25, p. 314), but did not carry out this plan.
  13. ↑ Après moi (or nous) le deluge!—a phrase attributed to Mme de Pompadour or to Mme Du Barry, who addressed it to Louis XV.