Letters of Jenny Marx 1860
Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 567;
First published: abridged (in Russian) in Voprosy istorii KPSS, Moscow, 1978 and in full (in Russian) in The Correspondence of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Members of the Marx Family, 1835-1871, Moscow, 1983.
My Dear Karl,
A thousand thanks for the letter and the specie. I have not got Rheinländer’s address, since you took your address book away with you. But, so as to lose no time, I have, none the less, written to him and directed the letter to Mark Lane, care of Gänsewinkel. I could not think of anybody who might be able to tell me his address, which is not indicated in his letters. If you think the letter might fail to reach him by this means, you had better write to him yourself. I shall at once betake my humble being to Baccalaureus and make my report. We have indeed learned of late to distinguish true and loyal friends from shams. What a difference between the lesser folk and the grandees. Lassalle, by the by, has grown fearfully stupid and narrow-minded; even that modicum of lawyer’s acumen he had has gone to the devil, and Heraclitus has made him hellishly dull and dark. None of his raisonnements is valid, each overturning the last. Nothing could have given me greater pleasure than the news about your book. Russia has always been good ground for you. In the long run, everything is going better than I had sometimes dared to hope in my hours of solitude. One becomes so beset by doubts and fears and in the end one despairs of everything, particularly when one thinks of the universal duplicity, baseness and cowardice — the Germans’ behaviour with regard to the Humboldt case alone is enough to make them worthy of being liberated, kicked and Jena-ed by Bonaparte. Oh, what a crew! Just a few lines today. A thousand greetings from your dear, good, cheerful children and your
Jenny