Letter to Filippo Turati, March 7, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 7 March 1891


First published, in Italian, in Critica Sociale, No. 6, Milano, 10 March 1891
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO FILIPPO TURATI

IN MILAN

London, 7 March 1891

122 Regent's Park Road, N. W.

Dear Sir,

Very many thanks for your kind letter of 23 February,[1] the 3 numbers of the Critica Sociale and your offer to send it to me regularly in future. As former Secretary for Italy on the General Council of the International I naturally take a great interest in the progress of the socialist movement in your country and particularly in Lombardy where, as a young man, I spent three months,[2] of which I still retain happy memories.

I should like to thank you equally for the good wishes you were kind enough to send me on the occasion of the publication of the article by Marxa in the Neue Zeit. In publishing it I was merely carrying out my duty to the memory of Marx on the one hand and to the German party on the other.

You are quite right when you wonder whether I shall have time to contribute either to your revue or to the socialist library you are about to publish. Indeed the preparation of new editions of Marx's works and of my own pamphlets will barely leave my time to finish the manuscript of Volume III of Marx's Capital. Just now I have four pamphlets1 to revise, complete and furnish with new introductions, so how can I possibly find time for any other work? Nevertheless I wish you every success and shall be interested to see a good Italian translation of our 1847 Manifesto[3] and, were you to find that one or other of my articles might be of interest to the Italian public, I should be delighted to re-read my work in your bella e ricchissima lingua.c E con distinta stima La saluto,[4]

F. Engels

di Lei amico Stepniak viaggia in questo momento neW America.e

a Critique of the Gotha Programme - c rich and beautiful language - e Your friend Stepniak is at present on his way to America.

  1. ↑ The fragment of this letter was published earlier in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, pp. 690-91 and in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, International Publishers, N. Y., 1968, pp. 690-91.
  2. ↑ Engels was corresponding secretary for Italy on the General Council of the International in 1871-72 and the General Council's provisional representative for Italy in 1873. He visited Lombardy between May and mid-September 1841, on a tour of North Italy. He described his impressions in the essay 'Wanderings in Lombardy', published in the journal Athenäum, Nos 48 and 49, 4 and 11 December 1841 (see present edition, Vol. 2, pp. 170-80).
  3. ↑ K. Marx, F. Engels, 'Il Manifesto del Partito Comunista (1848)', Lotto di Classe, Nos. 8, 10, 12, 13, 15-17, 19-22; 17-18 September, 1-2, 15-16, 22-23 October, 5-6, 12-13, 19-20 November, 3-4, 10-11, 17-18, 24-25 December 1892.
  4. ↑ With my best compliments and greetings