Letter to Karl Kautsky, January 26, 1893

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 26 January 1893


First published in: Aus der Frühzeit des Marxismus. Engels Briefwechsel mit Kautsky, Prague, 1935
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50


ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY

IN STUTTGART

London, 26 January 1893

Dear Baron,

Gine has just told me that you are awaiting an answer from me about Marx's biography.[1] It had in fact escaped my mind that this was urgent. Please accept my apologies.

I wouldn't know what to add to the material you mentioned—unless perhaps one or two bits from the sketch[2] in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften that was sent to you. Elster—a cousin of Conrad Schmidt's who referred him to me—asked me to write something for him, which I did, wholly from our own standpoint, all unsuspecting that be would print it—after he had deleted a few excessively unbourgeois passages. Well, it's all one to me.

The matter of the Neue Zeit has, of course, been shelved for the time being on account of Dietz's treatment, apart from the fact of your having spoken to August.[3] He says it is impossible to revert to a monthly. In which case the external arrangements will doubtless remain pretty well unaltered—and it is up to the editors to make the paper more meaty and more amusing for its readers. At all events it seems to me that any drastic change will have to be put off until Dietz is fit for work again. And you yourself will in any case be swamped with a superfluity of good and well-meaning advice regarding your own department, so I shall spare you that.

Tussy is tremendously busy agitating; she has been in the Midlands, Edinburgh and Aberdeen and is supposed to be coming here today. When I see her, I shall ask her for some personal reminiscences about Moor.

I gave Ede the Brazilian paper,[4] though I told him that the importance of these South American parties is always in inverse proportion to the grandiosity of their programmes.

Ede is gradually recovering from his neurasthenia; he has likewise regained his old sprightliness, as is evident from his personal behaviour and also from his article on Wolf to whom he does too much honour.[5] I believe that what he now needs most of all is something to liven and cheer him up in order that his soundness of judgement may once more gain complete control over his still somewhat excessive aspirations after justice.

Nothing fresh to report otherwise.—Also and, belatedly, a Happy New Year to you.

Your F.E.

  1. ↑ Franz Mehring, Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Lebens, Leipzig, 1918.
  2. ↑ F. Engels, Marx, Heinrich Karl.
  3. ↑ See this volume, pp 49 50, 53 54
  4. ↑ L'Avenir Social (The Social Future), organ of the Brazilian Socialist Party, which began to be published in October 1892 in Rio de Janeiro.
  5. ↑ E. Bernstein, 'Der neueste Vernichter des Sozialismus', Die Neue Zeit, Vol. I, Nos. 16, 17, Stuttgart, 1892/93.