17. K. Marx. Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski
Dear Sir,(1)
The author(2) of the article "Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr. Zhukovsky" is obviously an intelligent man and, had he found a single passage in my account of "primitive accumulation" to support his conclusions, he would have quoted it. For want of such a passage he considers it necessary to seize hold of an annexe, a polemical sortie against a Russian "belletrist"(3) printed in the appendix to the first German edition of Capital What do I there reproach this writer for? The fact that he discovered "Russian" communism not in Russia but in the book by Haxthausen,(4) the adviser to the Prussian Government, and that in his hands the Russian community serves only as an argument to prove that the old, rotten Europe must be regenerated by the victory of Pan-Slavism. My appreciation of this writer may be correct, it may be wrong, but in neither case could it provide the key to my views on the efforts "pyccKHxt Aio^eft HaÜTH AAJI CBoero OTe^ecTBa nyTb
pa3BHTiH, OTAHHHblH OTT» TOrO, KOTOpblMT» IIIAa H H^CTb 3 a n a 4 H a » Eßpona etc."(5)
In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital— which the author of the article about Mr. Zhukovsky knows,