Our Notes & References

First and only edition of this scarce collection of anarchist revolutionary essays, surprisingly attractively bound.

Petr Nikitich Tkachev (1844-86) was a Russian literary critic and political activist whom Nikolai Berdiaev considered “more of a predecessor of the Bolsheviks than Marx and Engels”.

During the student unrest in Moscow in the late 1860s, Tkachev led a small radical faction and was repeatedly arrested. In 1871 he emigrated and began writing for the socialist journals “Vpered!” and in his own Narodnik journal “Nabat” (“Alarm”), which advocated the creation of secret revolutionary cells in Russia and sympathised with terrorist acts.

Although Tkachev is typically grouped among the Narodniks, and has been largely forgotten due to his early death in a French insane asylum, he in fact is an important early progenitor of Lenin’s views on the revolution. In an open letter to Friedrich Engels (1875), Tkachev described the Russian revolutionary movement in proto-Leninist terms, as a carefully prepared event organised by a small group rather than a gradual mass phenomenon. Engels wrote a reply to Tkachev in 1875, and a “postscript” of fifteen pages in 1894, both of which were published in Leipzig. Unsurprisingly, thus, the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev compares the dispute between Tkachev and Engels to the disagreements between Lenin and Plekhanov, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (In The Origin of Russian Communism).

This is the first book edition, gathering texts published in the author’s journal ‘Nabat’ from December 1875 to February 1876.

Sarce: we could not trace any copy at auction either in Russia or beyond, although we are aware of one copy passing in the trade (in modern binding). KVK and OCLC show copies at the National Library of Israel, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Monash, and Princeton, to which we can add a handful of copies in Russia, as well as two in the UK: LSE (Copac) and the BL.

Bibliography

Dekker & Nordemann Catalogue 26 (1980): The two Russian revolutions. The libraries of Leon Bernstein and Boris Souvarine, 296; Svod. Kat. russk. nelegalnoi i zapreshchennoi pechati XIX v., 1874.