The New York herald., 1922-10-08

attention. Three volumes of the thirty
two volume edition of the works of Marx
and Engels have already appeared. Le-
mines writings are to be published in
twenty volumes, five of which are now on
sale. 1t is characteristic that the works of
the chief exponents of the materialistic
philosophy are singled out for early publi-
cation.
Aside from the Gosizdat and the private
firms one must also take into account the
publishing activities of the various depart
ments of the Government, as, for example.
the Commissariats, the Supreme Council
of National Economy. the Central Statisti-
cal Committee, &c. Then there are the CO.
operatives which issue chiefly works on
economics. and the various associations of
authors which have been mentioned in an
other connection, and which bring out
imaginative writings for the most part.
Finally, there is the extensive literature
issued beyond the Russian frontier by
emigres.
BY far the most valuable and lasting
contribution of the emigres is in the nature
of memoirs. Ministers without Cabinets,
Generals without armies, diplomats with
out governments, professors without
chairs. statesmen without a state. turn
their idle energies to recording their ex-
periences during the revolution. II these
"reminiscences are not issued between COW
ers they find their way into the so-called
Archives of the Russian Revolution" a
Russian publication issued in Berlin under
the editorship of I. V. Hessen, or into the
pages of the monthly Russian Thought,
published in Prague.
Five large volumes of the Archives"
have appeared to date. They contain a great
deal of substantial material, bearing chiefly
on the civil war. According to the editor.
the aim of the publication is to furnish
source material for a true history of the
revolution. As matter of fact, we have
here almost exclusively the viewpoint of
those who are out of sympathy with the
present regime, so that one must trust the
future historian TO steer a middle course
between history as it was written in these
Archives and as ii appears in such Soviet
publications as The Proletariat Revolu-
tion." "The Red Archives" and so forth.
Perhaps the most telling and certainly the
most interesting stuff in the collection is
unpretentious narratives and diaries deal
ing with daily life in Revolutionary Russia.
fairly typical example is presented by
Prof. Donskoy's story of his fight from
Moscow to Berlin. This was originally
written for the family records and is ad-
dressed to his baby grandchld 1t opens
thus: MY dear Lodochka: On a wintry
evening in 1929. when you were not vet
years old, sat with you in an unheated
room in small house in one of the sub
urbs of the city of Minsk. Dusk was fall
ing. Your mother and your granny were
fumhiing over the stove and you. in a
warm coat and hat (sic). snuggled in my
arms. 1t was that evening that l
resolved to describe in detail our flight
from Moscow and the circumstances which
led me to leave Russia, so that when you
grow up and learn how to read and under
stand what you read you may decide for
yourself whether or not your grandfather
did right when he carried you away from
Russia There is similar narrative. writ
ten by Gen. Wrangers mother for her
grandchildren. describing her life i'm Petro-
grad from 1918 to 1920. Volume w. con-
tains study of the last days of the old
regime by Alexander Biloxi, the late poet