V. I.   Lenin

168

To:   HIS MOTHER[1]


Written: Written in the summer of 1908
Published: First published in 1929 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya No. 11. Sent from Geneva to Mikhnevo, Serpukhov Uyezd, Moscow Gubernia. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 37, page 389.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup: D. Moros
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive.   You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.README


P.S. Today I read an amusing newspaper article on the inhabitants of Mars in connection with a new English book by Lowell, Mars and Its Canals. Lowell is an astronomer who has worked for a long time in a special observatory which, I believe, is the best in the world (in America).

It is a scientific work. It argues that Mars is inhabitable, that the canals are a miracle of engineering, that people on that planet must be two and two-thirds the size of our people here, and that they, furthermore, have trunks and are covered with feathers or animal skins and have four or six legs. Hmm... the author[2] cheated us by describing the Martian beauties only in part, according to the principle that “... the deceit that elevates is dearer to us than a host of vulgar truths”.[3]

A new story by Gorky has been published—The Last.


Notes

[1] The letter to which this is the postscript has been lost.—Ed

.

[2] A. Bogdanov, author of the novel Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star).—Ed.

[3] These words are from Alexander Pushkin’s The Hero.


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