Text addressed to Aleksandra, Liubov, Tatiana and Varvara Aleksandrovna Bakunina (November, 1835)

[There are two manuscripts by Bakunin with titles very close to “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis,” written one after the other and overlapping in some places, but substantially different. The 12,000-word “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” in the Dolgoff anthology is drawn from one of the later parts of a 54,000-word manuscript identified in the Collected Works collection with the title “Lettre à un Français.” A second manuscript, 10,000 words long, broken into separate letters, and identified as “Lettres à un Français sur la crise actuelle,” followed. Here is the first letter from the […]

The Policy of the International III L’Égalité, August 21, 1869; If the International at first showed itself indulgent toward the subversive and reactionary ideas, whether in politics and religion, that the workers might have when joining it, it was not through indifference toward these ideas. We cannot tax it with indifference since it detests them and rejects them with all the strength of its being, every reactionary idea being the overturning of the very principle of the Revolution, as we have already demonstrated in our preceding articles. That indulgence, we repeat again, is inspired by a high wisdom. Knowing perfectly […]

The working documents of an international movement can pose complicated problems for translators. Here, for example, is the text of a speech, apparently written in French, first reported in English, then translated back to French for the Collected Works from a Russian translation, though it is not immediately clear from which source the Russian translation was made. Now I have translated the second French version into English. In this case, given the simplicity of the sentiments expressed, all of this translation probably obscures very little in the text, but we can easily imagine cases where the vagueries of document preservation […]