Lenin and Books

The catalogue of Lenin's private library in the Kremlin lists more than 8,400 titles. A further 900 books, magazines and newspapers carrying his marginal marks were collected by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. This anthology is built on that evidence.

Compiled by A. Z. Okorokov and finished in late 1970 for the Lenin centenary, it falls into two parts. "Lenin on Books" prints forty-six items by Lenin himself - on libraries, publishing, reading and the book trade. "Books in Lenin's Life" adds thirteen memoirs by people who knew him.

The memoirs are the find. Shushanik Manucharyants, his Kremlin librarian from 1920 to 1924, records the instructions he wrote on books to route them through his own system, and remembers him asking her in May 1922 to gather the literature on the scientific management of labour for a work he was struck down before he could write. Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich describes bringing him the Book Chamber's register of everything published in the country and watching him mark it up - then counted the result: of seventy-four books Lenin marked on the positions of the various parties, seventy-one were by authors hostile to the Bolsheviks. In the middle of a civil war, the head of the Soviet government was reading his opponents in bulk and in the original.

There is much else: the 1913 comparison of the New York Public Library with Russian provision, the four demands of November 1917 for the Petrograd Public Library, the 1896 letter from a remand prison arranging to have statistical yearbooks delivered to the cell, and the application to the Director of the British Museum signed with an alias.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which audits the volume's twenty-two marked excerpts against the Collected Works.