Word: lenin
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...LETTERS OF LENIN-Translated & edited by Elizabeth Hill & Doris Mudie- Harcourt, Brace...
...nonrevolutionary readers, Lenin's letters are likely to be disappointingly unexplosive. Such readers may not even agree at first with Editors Hill & Mudie that from them "there emerges above all the vivid figure of Lenin himself." Lenin's letters are like business letters. But it was a big business he was about, and as his scheme slowly progresses from small successes to failure to near-success to triumph, even businessmen readers will scarce forbear to cheer. Irritation, anger when schemes go wrong or partners fail him, Lenin frequently shows; personal feeling, almost never. The letters to his wife...
...Lenin's letters begin in 1895, when he was a 25-year-old lawyer and already a fledgling revolutionary. Little less than a year later he writes from a Petersburg prison, awaiting his long journey to three years in Siberia. Krupskaya, arrested later, was allowed to join him there. They were married, but when Lenin's term was up she still had a year to serve. Lenin's first letter to her after their separation is a lengthy dissertation on intraParty politics. When Krupskaya was released she joined Lenin's exile in Europe...
...their correspondence grew, the revolutionaries referred to themselves and each other by various nicknames. Lunacharsky became "the Destroyer." Litvinoff "Papa"'; Lenin, after trying various signatures such as "Meyer" and "Petroff," became the "Old Man." Lenin's organizing ability, implacable common sense and long view gradually put him in control of the majority (Bolsheviks) in the organization. His letters show that he was not an opportunist but a confessed "necessitarian." "I know, I know it very well, I never forget this, but that is the tragedy (I promise you 'tragedy' is not too strong a word...
...Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, was an "ex-tremely plain woman, really ugly," who prompted Max Eastman to say: "Lenin would probably get well if he had a pretty girl!" In Paris, Poet McKay joined the expatriate throngs, caught a hacking cough by posing in the nude, was given a check to keep him three months in southern France by John Reed's widow, Louise Bryant. He gave up a job in Rex Ingram's Nice movie studio after chasing a co-worker with a knife, and wrote his sensational novel Home To Harlem. In Morocco, McKay...