Letter to Nikolai Danielson, June 3, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 3 June 1885


First published, in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, No. 2, St Petersburg, 1908
Reproduced from the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO NIKOLAI DANIELSON

IN ST PETERSBURG

London, 3 June 1885

Dear Sir,

I have received your letter of the 24 [April]/6 May and hope you will have received the sheets 21/26 forwarded to you 13th May.

To-day I forward 27/33, the conclusion. In a few days I hope to be able to send you the preface, etc. From that preface you will see that the ms. of Volume III has been written as early as 1864/66, and thus before the period when the author, thanks to your kindness, became so intimately acquainted with the agricultural system of your country: I am at present working at the chapter on the rent of land, and have so far not found any allusion to Russian conditions.[1] As soon as the whole manuscript shall have been transcribed into a legible handwriting, I shall have to work it out by comparison with what other materials have been left by the author, and there are, for the chapter on rent, very voluminous extracts from the various statistical works he owed to you — but whether these will contain any critical notes that can be made use of for this volume, I cannot as yet tell. Whatever there is, shall be used most conscientiously. At all events the mere work of transcription will occupy me far into autumn, and as the manuscript is nearly 600 pages in folio, it may again have to be divided into two volumes.

The analysis of rent is theoretically so complete that you will necessarily find therein a good deal of interest for the special conditions of your country. Still this ms. excludes the treatment of the pre-capitalistic forms of landed property; they are merely alluded to here and there for the sake of comparison.

Yours very sincerely,

P.W. Rosher[2]

  1. ↑ Between 1869 and 1873 Marx maintained regular correspondence with Nikolai Danielson, who systematically sent him Russian books and articles in journals dealing with the agrarian question in Russia. In his letter of 24 April (6 May) 1885, Danielson enquired of Engels whether the statistics on the Russian economy had been included in the third volume of Capital. The chapter on ground rent to which Engels refers forms part of Section 6 of Volume III of Capital (see present edition, Vol. 37).
  2. ↑ Engels' pseudonym in his correspondence with Nikolai Danielson; Engels used the name of the husband of his wife's niece — Percy White Rosher.