Letter to Giuseppe Canepa, January 9, 1894

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 9 January 1894


First published, abridged, in Italian in a weekly L'Era nuova No. 1, 4 March 1894 and in full in Russian in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXIX, Moscow, 1946
Printed according to the draft manuscript collated with the text in the weekly reprinted in the book: K. Marx, F. Engels, Scriti italiani, Milano-Roma, 1955
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50


ENGELS TO GIUSEPPE CANEPA

IN DIANO MARINA

[Draft]

[London, 9 January 1894]

Dear citizen,

Please excuse me for writing to you in French. Over the last twenty years I have lost whatever little ability I had in the use of Italian.

I have tried to find a short epigraph of the kind you wish 320 from the works of Marx, whom alone of the modern socialists, it would seem, is able to stand on a par with the great Florentine.[1] However, I have found nothing except the following passage taken from the Communist Manifesto (Italian edition of Critica Sociale, p. 35): "Al posto della vecehia società borghese divisa in class; cozzanti fra loro, subenta un'associazione, nella quale il libero sviluppo di ciascumo è la condizione per il libero sviluppo di tutti".[2]

It is almost impossible to sum up the spirit of the new age of the future in just a few words without lapsing into either utopianism or empty words.

Please accept my apologies if the quotation I offer is not wholly satisfactory. However, as you must be ready for the 21 (a date that augurs well, the execution of citizen Louis Capet), there is no time to lose.

E con distinti saluti Suo[3]

  1. ↑ Dante
  2. ↑ "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, this edition, Vol. 6, p. 506).
  3. ↑ Respectfully yours