Engels–Lafargue Correspondence, Volume One (1868–1886)

This is a primary source, and a first-rate one.

What the Foreign Languages Publishing House issued in Moscow in 1959, in Yvonne Kapp's translation, is the correspondence between Frederick Engels and Paul and Laura Lafargue from 1868 to 1886 - Laura being Marx's second daughter, Paul her husband and one of the founders of French Marxism - translated from the French edition compiled and annotated by Emile Bottigelli for Editions Sociales in Paris. Kapp was the biographer of Eleanor Marx, and no one has written with more feeling about the Marx circle in its London years.

The letters begin with a courtship, and the first of them is a small comic masterpiece. In March 1868 Lafargue - a Creole medical student from Bordeaux, twenty-six, recently struck off the English medical registers for his part in the International - wrote to ask Engels to be a witness at his wedding. He hails him, in French, as "the great beheader of champagne bottles, fathomless swallower of ale and other adulterated trash, secretary to the Spaniards", wishes him the protection of "the god of good carousals", and announces that "Mr. Lafargue, medical student, bachelor, is about to marry Miss J. Laura Marx, spinster" - a stringer, he adds, "of metaphysical pearls".

What follows over eighteen years is the unguarded working correspondence of the man who was steering the international socialist movement by post: the founding of the French workers' party, the quarrels with the Possibilists, the Paris Commune and its aftermath, the long labour on Marx's manuscripts. It is the closest view available of how the movement was actually assembled, in letters written without an eye to posterity.

Volume One of three. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.