{"id":143194,"date":"2024-07-25T14:27:03","date_gmt":"2024-07-25T21:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=143194"},"modified":"2024-07-25T14:27:03","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T21:27:03","slug":"inessa-armand-and-lenin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2024\/07\/25\/inessa-armand-and-lenin\/","title":{"rendered":"Inessa Armand and Lenin:"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sena Thoradeniya Courtesy Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Inessa and Lenin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolution, Romance, Femininity and Music\u201d: A response<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Having read about Inessa Armand in the sixties, who was laid to rest in Kremlin Wall Necropolis in the Red Square Moscow in 1920, the first woman revolutionary to receive this honour, I never thought that she would reappear in a Sri Lankan newspaper after more than a century. Thanks to Satyajith Andradi (SA) for introducing her to Sri Lankan readers in The Island <\/em>of 10 July 2024 (Inessa Armand \u2013 revolution, romance, femininity and music\u201d). I am beyond grateful to him for not using vulgar phrases used by some Western writers to tarnish Inessa\u2019s and Lenin\u2019s images depicting Inessa as Lenin\u2019s mistress\u201d or secret lover\u201d and Lenin\u2019s wife as a deadweight\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not pretend that I know something about music or of great musicians or that I am a film buff. This brief account on Lenin and Inessa is aimed at just to share my readings about these two great revolutionaries and nothing more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Inessa Fyodorovna Armand (1874-1920) joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1904; she was a professional revolutionary, a prominent and an active member of the international working class and communist movements. She did party work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich, Geneva, Berne and many other European cities. During the first world war she played an active part under Lenin\u2019s guidance in the organisation of the international women\u2019s and youth conferences. She was entrusted by Lenin with the task of spreading Bolshevik ideas among the French socialists, young people and trade unionists. She played an important role in the Great October Revolution. After the October Revolution she functioned as a member of the Moscow Gubernia (Governorate) Committee of the Communist Party and the Moscow Gubernia Executive Committee and the Chairman of the Moscow Gubernia Economic Council. From 1918 she oversaw the Women\u2019s Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is SA writing about Inessa and Lenin now? In Sri Lanka the Communists of yesteryear, never discussed revolutionary work of Inessa. Even the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)\u201d (1951), mentions Lenin\u2019s arrival from exile in only two sentences. Do we have any historical moments to commemorate now? Yes. When Lenin was in exile in Zurich, from 1914 Germany was butchering Russian soldiers in their thousands on the eastern front. It was during 1918-1920, foreign military intervention, blockade of the infant Soviet Country and the bourgeois -landlord- White Guard counter revolution took place. The Soviet Republic defeated the combined forces of British- French \u2013 Polish- Japanese interventionists and bourgeois -landlord- White Guard counter revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SA quotes what Maxim Gorky had recollected about Lenin\u2019s comments on \u2018Appassionata\u2019, at Yekaterina Peshkova in Moscow one evening, listening to Isaiah Dobrovein playing Beethoven\u2019s sonatas\u201d (Collected Works of Maxim Gorky, Volume 27). Yekaterina Peshkova was Gorky\u2019s first wife; Isaiah Dobrovein was a Russian pianist, conductor and composer. Catherine Merridale also in her book, Lenin on the Train\u201d (First US edition 2017) quotes Gorky, but the translation differs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SA asks: how Lenin acquired such a refined appreciation of classical music\u201d? Dmitry Ilych Ulyanov, Lenin\u2019s brother and one of the veterans of the Bolshevik Party gives some clues: Vladimir Ilych learned to play piano when he was still a boy. Mother used to say that he had a fine ear and an aptitude for music.\u201d  According to Dmitry, Vladimir Ilych gave up music when he entered the Gymnasium not because it interfered with his studies; in those days piano playing was considered rather an unsuitable occupation for boys. But Dmitry adds that all his life Vladimir Ilych loved music and always appreciated its finer points. Dmitry recollects his visit to the opera with Vladimir Ilych when they were living in Kazan in 1888. Vladimir had gone to the opera even when he had been under police surveillance!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dmitry adds that their mother was very fond of the piano. She played and sang many of the old airs and love songs and had a liking for selections from the opera Askold\u2019s Grave\u201d and sang some parts of it (opera by Alexey Verstovsky). He recalls Volodya (Vladimir) often humming melodies from the opera and singing with Olga (Lenin\u2019s sister, best and closest companion in his childhood and youth, who died when she was only eighteen years) as his accompanist. Dmitry says that Volodya knew of Heine\u2019s lyrics and Faust. Nadezhda Krupskaya also recalls that when they were exiled in Siberia, they had a copy of Faust and a volume of German poet Heine\u2019s poems, both in German.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When their family was staying in Samara region in the Summer of 1889, Olga had been playing on the piano and finished with the Marseillaise; just then Vladimir Ilych came into the room quite unexpectedly and asked Olga and Dmitry to sing The Internationale;  it was the first time that Dmitry heard The Internationale; hardly anyone in Russia knew it then. Vladimir Ilych sat down at the piano with Olga and they played the new tune and then sang it together in French. (From Reminiscences of Lenin by His Relatives\u201d, 1956)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During their second emigration to Paris, Vladimir Ilych found pleasure in frequenting cafes and suburban theatres in Paris to listen to revolutionary chansonniers (poets, song writers, singers) of the working class, says Krupskaya. They had the services of a French charwoman (a cleaner) a couple of hours a day. Once Ilych heard her singing a song about Alsace. He asked her to sing it over again and memorided the words he often sang: You have seized Alsace and Lorraine, but in spite of that we shall remain French; you have managed to Germanise our fields, but never will you have our hearts\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not intend to go into details of what authors and their works Lenin liked most and his comments on those works. Lenin had written many articles on art and literature. Nadezhda Krupskaya in her recollections (Reminiscences of Lenin by His Relatives\u201d, (1956) and Recollections of Lenin\u201d (1931)), Maxim Gorky (Collected Works\u201d), Clara Zetkin, one of the founders of the German Communist Party and outstanding figure in German and International working-class movement, ( My Recollections of Lenin\u201d (1956)), Anatoly Lunacharsky, prominent revolutionary and People\u2019s Commissar of Education and Chairman of the Academic Council of the USSR (1932) and many others had shed much light on this aspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how he cultivated a profound love for the music of Beethoven\u201d? In Lenin\u2019s many writings on art and literature we don\u2019t come across any reference either to Beethoven or music, although Engels only in one instance refers to Beethoven in his Notes on Germany\u201d:  Economic position of Germany during the Continental Blockade \u2013 The period of greatest humiliation from abroad coincides with a period of great brilliance in literature and philosophy while music reaches its culmination in Beethoven\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now some thoughts about the letters written by Lenin to Inessa Armand.  The letters that Lenin had written appear in his Collected Works, Volumes 34, 36, 37, 44 and 45 respectively; Volume 37 carries letters Lenin had written to his relatives, his mother (Maria Alexandrovna), wife Krupskaya, brother Dmitry (Mitya), sisters Maria (Manyasha) and Anna (Anyuta) and brother-in-law (Mark Yelizarov) respectively. His letters to Inessa Armand appear in Collected Works Volume 35, February 1912- December 1922, Letters (First Printing 1966) and Collected Works Volume 43, December 1893- October 1917, Letters (First Printing 1969) respectively. It should not be construed that all these two volumes contain letters written by Lenin only to Inessa Armand. They contain hundreds of letters written by Lenin to prominent people of the day including Maxim Gorky and Lunacharsky, Marxist theorists, party leaders, leaders of the international workingmen\u2019s and Communist movement, revolutionaries, many institutions and bodies. All in all, Volume 35 contains 321 letters and Volume 43 includes 587 letters respectively. Volume 35 carries 23 letters Lenin had written to Inessa, and Volume 43 contains 69 letters written to her if my calculations do not deceive me! Letters that appear in Volume 43 are very short compared to letters included in Volume 35 and some are postcards. (I recall how I carried home 45 volumes of Lenin, weighing more than 50 kilos with great difficulty, from the People\u2019s Publishing House, then at Kumaran Ratnam Mawatha, Slave House).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the letters Lenin had written to Inessa he addressed her as Dear Friend\u201d, sometimes writing greetings in English and many expressions and some phrases in French or English. These letters were sent to her from Cracow, Paris, Brussels, Poronin, Berne, Sorenberg (Switzerland), Flums and Zurich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the 92 letters Lenin wrote to Inessa there is no single reference to music, let alone Beethoven.  On literature there is only one reference, 35\/67 (June 5, 1914) that is, about the new novel she had sent to him written by Vladimir Kirilllovich  Vinnichenko , a Ukrainian writer, a bourgeois nationalist who later became a traitor : There\u2019s balderdash and stupidity!\u201d This pretentious crass idiot Vinnichenko, in self-administration has \u2026\u2026compiled a collection that is nothing but horrors \u2013 a kind of two-penny dreadful. Brrr\u2026. Muck, nonsense, pity I spent so much time reading it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have not seen the film mentioned by SA. But I have read Catherine Merridale\u2019s Lenin on the Train\u201d, which describes Lenin, who was exiled in Zurich arriving at Petrograd\u2019s Finland Station,  with  12 others including Inessa in a sealed railway carriage in a week-long trans-European railway journey (from Zurich ( Switzerland), via Germany, Sweden (crossing to Sweden by ferry) and Finland; three whole days while crossing Germany they could not buy a meal. I think the film director has taken a few creative liberties, adding a bit of movie fantasy to make two Bolsheviks humming the tune from the Appassionata!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SA gives four letter numbers and the dates these letters were written, as they appear in the Collected Works, (43\/337  April 11, 1914, sent from Cracow; 43\/ 539 January 13, 1917 sent from Zurich; 43\/ 541 January 15, 1917 sent from Zurich; 35\/84 sent from Berne on 17 January 1915) keeping the readers in dark and suspense. But each of these letters too in my assessment are political in nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now our problem is how to publish our analysis of these 92 letters in a newspaper article.  All the letters written by Lenin are totally political in their content, not excluding letters written to Inessa. There are few references which can be described as (i) personal (in 14 letters: that her children are coming to spend the summer with them; advising her to visit new and old friends; asking her to go to the South for sunshine; to go on skiing on the mountains as it is very good for health; Learn the trick; It\u2019s good in the mountains in winter! It\u2019s delightful and smells of Russia\u201d; (nothing strange in this as Lenin had said the same thing to Olga in a letter send to her); Nadya\u2019s illness and her recovery; Nadya intends to write to her); (ii) intimacy and friendliness (in 4 letters: asking her to make a trip somewhere to have a change; not to take his occasional advice in a bad sense\u201d); and (iii) preparing to go back to Russia (in 9 letters). But all these matters appear intertwined with the main political discourse or as postscripts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these letters Lenin describes what took place at conferences and meetings, about publications, translations, weaknesses and anti-party activities of some leaders; praising her for her excellent command of French, her translations and the work she had carried out at meetings. He regrets what she had written about free love\u201d in a pamphlet (fortunately not published) and her interpretation of it. He rejects what she had listed as not freedom of love\u201d and asks her if she refutes these, she must show that these interpretations are wrong, indicate which are wrong, replace them by others, if incomplete add those which are missing and whether they are not divided into proletarian and bourgeois demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Majority of his letters were intended to correct her misconceptions about slogans such as The Working Men have no country\u201d, defence of the fatherland\u201d; an ideological battle goes on to clear her wrong interpretations of Engels, her political mistakes\u201d and theoretical oddities\u201d. In my opinion you are falling into abstraction and unhistoricalness\u201d. To identify, even compare the international situations of 1891 and 1914 is the height of unhistoricalness\u201d. Indicating her political mistakes, he criticizes her for not assessing what is going on politically. Everything depends on the system of political relations before the war and during the war\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I conclude this essay quoting a part of a letter written by Lenin on 1 April 1914 (35\/62): he begs her pardon for a comment he had made in a previous letter: with this we come to know that Lenin had used the words Holy Virgin\u201d. Please don\u2019t be angry, it was because I\u2019m fond of you, because we are friends, but I can\u2019t help being angry when I see something that recalls the Holy Virgin\u201d. We don\u2019t know whether it was a slip of the pen\u201d or he was referring to the virtues of Holy Mary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krupskaya mentions a visit Lenin and she paid after Inessa\u2019s death, to see their young friend Varya Armand (Inessa\u2019s daughter), who lived in a commune for art school students\u201d. Later she (Varvara Alexandrovna Armand), studied at the Higher Art Technical Studios.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sena Thoradeniya Courtesy Island Inessa and Lenin Revolution, Romance, Femininity and Music\u201d: A response Having read about Inessa Armand in the sixties, who was laid to rest in Kremlin Wall Necropolis in the Red Square Moscow in 1920, the first woman revolutionary to receive this honour, I never thought that she would reappear in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sena-thoradeniya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}