Letter to Karl Marx, March 7, 1856

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 7 March 1856


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

Manchester, 7 March 1856

Dear Marx,

Much obliged to you for your exhaustive letter [1] ad Slavica.[2] Eichhoff is already known to me as a philological quack who has actually out-quacked Klaproth (who did know something). I shall look into the business of the Goths in Igor[3] as soon as I have got the book. However, it has been established that a number of Goths remained in the Crimea until the 10th, and possibly the 11th, century; at least they figure as Goths in Byzantine [sources]. Could you let me know the title and price of Hanka and Swoboda's Bohemian anthology?[4] It is sure to be highly uncritical, for they are both complete asses.—Polish folk songs were published somewhere or other during the 40s.— I have found quotations from Götze, Wladimir,[5] etc., in Grimm's translation of Wuk's Serbische Grammatik with the comment 'unfortunately without the Russian text'. Kapper is a Prague Jew who published his Südslavische Wanderungen in the Bohemian constitutionalist paper[6] in 1848/49. He's a writer of belles lettres, but whether his translations are any good I couldn't say—j'en doute cependant.[7] All the Serbian wedding songs have been translated by the Jakob woman.[8] The political works you mention on the Hungarian and Turkish Serbs might be worth looking at if they are in the Museum[9] /

The Neue Preussische Zeitung isn't available in Manchester, but I followed the Pfeil business in the Kölner and the Augsburger[10] and derived much joy from it. However the penitent LEADER in the N. Pr.[11] was, of course, new to me; really too delightful, the sudden discovery that despite all the feudal gewgaws, nobility and bourgeoisie are today au fond[12] one.

What you say about Austria in regard to the Slavs and Protestantism is perfectly right. Fortunately a very strong form of

Protestantism has survived in Slovakia, and has greatly contributed to the inaction of the Slovaks against the Hungarians,[13] while in Bohemia every serious national movement other than the pro- letarian will in addition receive a strong admixture of Hussite historical memories which in turn will weaken the specifically national element. Pity about the Slovenian peasants who fought so splendidly in the 15th century.

I shall read about the Kars affair. What is Swan's piece called?[14]

The course taken by the Seileriad will assuredly please everyone except Liebknecht and the GREENGROCER. An unpleasant whiff of the cesspit.

Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir,[15] if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive. However all these were simply things which made it necessary to keep a sharp eye on him. But if he gets up to the kind of tricks that will actually result in his changing parties, I can't blame the Düsseldorf workers for the hatred they have conceived against him. I shall go and see Lupus this evening and put the matter to him. None of us ever trusted Lassalle but we did, of course, protect him against stupidities emanating from H. Bürgers. To my mind, everything should be allowed to proceed in the manner you prescribed for the Düsseldorfers. If he can be induced to commit a direct and OVERT ACT against the party, then we shall have him. But as yet there would seem to be none of that and in any case a row would be quite out of place.

The business of the Hatzfeldt woman and the 300,000 talers[16]

was quite new to me. I imagined she was simply receiving something monthly or yearly. He can never be forgiven for having saved Hatzfeldt from the black and yellow jacket.[17] I shall come back to the other matters. Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ See this volume, pp. 15-17.
  2. ↑ on things Slavonic
  3. ↑ Marx means The Lay of Igor's Host, a monument of old Russian literature describing the ill-starred campaign undertaken by Igor, Prince of Novgorod Severski, against the nomadic Polovtsians in 1185. The work was published in German several times. One edition appeared in Berlin in 1854 under the title Lied vom Heerzuge Igors. As follows from Marx's later letters to Engels, he found the Lay, in the language of the original and in French translation, in F. G. Eichhoff's book Histoire de la langue et de la littérature des slaves..., and later also a bilingual German edition, which he sent to Engels in Manchester.—15, 19, 26, 31, 37
  4. ↑ This refers to the so-called Königinhof manuscript, a collection of patriotic poems glorifying Bohemian antiquity, which the Czech philologist and poet Vaclav Hanka claimed to have discovered in a church in the village of Krâlowé Dwoîe (in German: Königinhof) in 1817. It was published in Czech under the title Kralodvorsky Rukopis in 1819, and in 1829 in Czech and in German, translated by the Czech poet Vaclav Alois Swoboda. Marx probably had the latter edition in mind. In the 1880s the manuscript was revealed to be a recent imitation.—19, 26
  5. ↑ See this volume, p. 20.
  6. ↑ probably the Constitutionelles Blatt aus Böhmen
  7. ↑ I doubt it, however.
  8. ↑ Thérèse Albertine Luise von Jakob Robinson (pen name: Talvj), who published the collection Volkslieder der Serben.
  9. ↑ the British Museum Library
  10. ↑ The Kölnische Zeitung and the Allgemeine Zeitung
  11. ↑ 'Den Streitenden', Neue Preußische Zeitung, No. 54, 4 March 1856.
  12. ↑ basically
  13. ↑ i.e. against the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 49
  14. ↑ A reference to A Narrative of the Siege of Kars... by H. Sandwith.
  15. ↑ come up in the world
  16. ↑ From 1846 to 1854 Ferdinand Lassalle handled Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt's divorce suit against Count Edmund Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg. The divorce was agreed to in July 1851. Later, the countess received 300,000 talers under the property settlement.—23, 27, 227
  17. ↑ See this volume, p. 23.