Marx Engels Marxism

The catalogue records this as a Progress Publishers title of 1968. The book itself disagrees: its title page reads "V. I. LENIN / MARX - ENGELS - MARXISM / Third English Edition / Revised and Enlarged / FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE / MOSCOW 1947".

What it gathers is a Lenin reader of real use: the major texts in which he set out what Marx and Engels had established and what he took from them - "Karl Marx", "Frederick Engels", "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism", "Marxism and Revisionism", the writings on dialectics and on the state - with an apparatus that is better than most. Its compilers built an index of every Marx and Engels citation in the volume, which makes it navigable in a way few anthologies of the period are.

It is also, and inseparably, a document of 1947. The editorial matter belongs to the high Stalin period and argues its positions in that period's voice, at a moment when the camps had been built, the nations deported, and the war was three years past. The two things are bound together in one volume, and the second is the reason a modern reader needs a guide as well as a text.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what the 1947 apparatus is doing around the Lenin it presents.