Lenin on language

Some four hundred and forty passages of Lenin on language, gathered across eight sections and an appendix: a sentence from a letter, a marginal note from the Hegel conspectus, a paragraph from a Duma speech, a telegram.

The compilers, P. N. Denisov and N. A. Kondrashov, sign the preface and state their method without evasion - the translations come from the forty-five-volume English Collected Works, with corrections made against the fifth Russian edition. Each passage carries its source line, so every extract can be traced back.

The material is genuinely interesting and scattered nowhere else: Lenin on the national question and the languages of the empire, on whether a state should have an official language, on translation, on political style and the corruption of political speech, on literacy, on dictionaries, and the notes on Hegel where questions of logic and language meet.

Its stated audience is broad and academic - linguists, and specialists in literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences.

One bibliographical note. Progress is named here only as the source of the translations. The book never calls itself a Progress title, and the only imprint recoverable from the volume advertises forthcoming books under Raduga Publishers. The house is very probably Raduga; the front matter of the surviving scan is too damaged to be certain.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the chapter of Soviet linguistics the volume does not mention.