Written: Written at the end of April 1908
Published:
First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XIII.
Sent from Geneva to Capri.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 161.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
Dear Maria Fyodorovna,
I enclose a letter from our librarian to A. M.
The thing is this. I want very much A. M. to write a legal open letter to the Russian papers, asking assistance for the Kuklin Library in Geneva by the dispatch to it of newspapers of the period of the revolution and material on its history.
A very short letter explaining to the general public why assistance to the library is also important for the work both of Gorky himself and of many other literary men he knows.[1]
I would ask you to arrange to have the letter hectographed (I hope Zinovy Alexeyevich will not refuse to help in this) and sent to all Russian newspapers and journals of a more or less decent trend.
Please organise all this!
I would ask Zinovy Alexeyevich to send me by slow delivery the books which Victor did not take, unless Natalia Bogdanovna takes them.
All good wishes,
Yours,
Lenin
May Day greetings!
[1] The Russian Proletarian Library, collected by the Social– Democrat G. A. Kuklin, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1905, and a book storehouse and a printing press were conveyed by him into the full possession of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. in July 1905, as he said in his “Statement” which appeared in Proletary No. 7 on July 10 (June 27), 1905.
In response to Lenin’s request, Gorky sent a letter to the editors of Russian magazines and newspapers calling for collections of material on the history of the 1905–07 revolution, files of various local publications, in particular, dailies, etc. Gorky’s letter was published in a number of magazines and newspapers in September 1908.
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