Lunacharsky on Lenin: reading, writing... and cats

Lenin (without cat)

This blog is named after Anatoly Lunacharsky, who ran the education ministry in Russia's revolutionary government after 1917. At our recent May Day event in Newcastle I bought his book 'Revolutionary Silhouettes' from a left-wing bookstall. I've previously read some of it online, but having the book is much better.

The book, published in English in 1967 but written in 1919, is a series of profiles of Russian revolutionaries. The chapters on Lenin and Trotsky are worth reading. Here's a bit of Lunacharsky on Lenin, plus an appropriate video clip:

'In his private life, too, Lenin loves the sort of fun which is unassuming, direct, simple and rumbustious. His favourites are children and cats; sometimes he can play with them for hours on end.

Lenin also brings the same wholesome, life-enhancing quality to his work. I cannot say from personal experience that Lenin is hard-working; as it happens I have never seen him immersed in a book or bent over his desk. He writes his articles without the least effort and in a single draft free of all mistakes or revisions. He can do this at any moment of the day, usually in the morning after getting up, but he can do it equally well in the evening when he has returned from an exhausting day, or at any other time.

Recently his reading, with the possible exception of a short interval spent abroad during the period of reaction, has been fragmentary rather than extensive, but from every book, from every single page that he reads Lenin draws something new, stores away some essential idea which he will later employ as a weapon. He is not particularly stimulated by ideas that are cognate with his own thought, but rather by those that conflict with his. The ardent polemicist is always alive in him.'




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