Letter to Pyotr Lavrov, January 28, 1884

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 28 January 1884


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO PYOTR LAVROV

IN PARIS

London, 28 January 1884 122 Regent's Park Road, N.W.

My dear Lavrov,

Some three weeks ago I sent you a Standard containing an article I thought might be of interest to youc; I hope it reached you safely.

I am at present engaged — as my health at long last permits — in sorting out the books, etc., left by Marx. Amongst other things they comprise, thanks to the kindness of Danielson, an entire library of Russian books, with some very important material on present social conditions in Russia; it contains almost everything that has been brought out on the subject. At my age, and overburdened as I am with work, it would be impossible for me to resume a novo[1] the thorough-going survey of Russia so unfortunately interrupted by the death of our friend.[2] So it seemed to me, and Tussy is of the same opinion, that it was our duty to place these books at your disposal. In your capacity as the acknowledged representative of the revolutionary Russian emigration and as an old friend of the deceased, you have clearly more right than anyone else to the collection of books so devotedly provided by friends, both yours and ours, in Russia — either for your personal use or to form the nucleus of a library for the revolutionary Russian emigration. If you accept, I could send them either to your own address or to any other you might indicate this February. The only books I should keep here would be those from which Marx had made extracts, along with one or two others which I might need for the second volume of Capital1; the remainder when all deductions have been made, would amount to a hundred or so volumes at the outside.[3]

As for the second volume, I am at last beginning to see daylight. For the most important parts — i. e. the beginning and the end of the second book, Circulation of Capital, — we have a version dating from 1875 and later. To this nothing needs to be added save quotations in accordance with the indications supplied. For the middle section there are no fewer than four versions dating from before 1870, and therein lies the only difficulty. The third volume, Capitalist Production as a Whole, exists in two versions dating from before 1869; subsequent to that there is nothing but a few notes and a notebook full of equations, the purpose of which is to arrive at the many reasons why the Mehrwertsrate becomes the Profitrate[4] .[5] But the extracts from books both on Russia and on the United States[6] contain a vast amount of material and copious notes on land rent, while others relate to money capital, to credit and to paper money as an instrument of credit, etc. As yet I do not know what use I shall be able to make of this for the third book; it might perhaps be better to combine them in a separate publication, and I shall certainly do so if the difficulty of incorporating them into Capital proves too great. My chief concern is that the book should come out as soon as possible, and also and above all that the book I publish should be unmistakably a work by Marx.

Any day now we should receive copies of the 3rd edition of Volume I, and one will be sent off to you as soon as they arrive.

The Russian publications from Geneva — the Manifesto, etc.[7] — gave me much pleasure.

I have just had a letter from two Poles, Krzywicki and Sosnowski, requesting our consent to a Polish translation of Capital which, of course, we gave. Sosnowski is in Paris; do you, by any chance, know these citizens?[8]

Yours ever,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ anew
  2. ↑ Engels is referring to the extracts from statistical reports and specialised studies of the various forms of land ownership and the history of the village commune in Russia which Marx wrote down in the 1870s. He intended to use this material for the section on ground rent in Book III of Capital. However, this plan did not materialise (see Engels' Preface to Volume III of Capital, present edition, Vol. 37).
  3. ↑ Russian books from Marx's library were sent to Pyotr Lavrov on 3 March 1884. On 7 March he acknowledged their receipt from Engels. It is not known what happened to Lavrov's library, including these volumes.
  4. ↑ the rate of surplus value becomes the rate of profit
  5. ↑ 149
  6. ↑ From the late 1860s Marx studied agrarian relations in the United States, Belgium and Russia in the intention of using this material in the third book (Volume II) of Capital when examining the emergence of ground rent. It is clear from Marx's correspondence that he obtained some of the materials he used on agrarian relations in the United States from his friends there (see Marx's letters to Sigfrid Meyer of 4 July and 14 September 1868, and to George Julian Harney of 21 January 1871; present edition, Vols. 43 and 44). On Marx's notes from Russian sources see Note 57.
  7. ↑ The Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared twice in Russian in Geneva: in 1869, it was published by the Volnaya russkaya tipografiya publishing house and issued for a second time in 1882. It is not quite certain whether the first translation was by Mikhail Bakunin or Nikolai Lyubavin. The second Russian edition, supplied with a preface specially written by Marx and Engels (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 425-26), was prepared by Georgi Plekhanov and appeared in the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library series.
  8. ↑ 150