Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/37

 able to fructify it by some new elements and to adapt it to the new conditions of a new era fraught with the greatest consequences. How proud Marx would have been of Lenin, did he live to-day! Lenin never allowed Marx to be insulted by anybody. The Russian so-called "critics" of Marx in their literary exercises invariably came up against the impregnable fortress called Lenin, and would invariably suffer great damage from his guns. Lenin fully sustained his repuationreputation [sic] even when the philosophical views of Marx began to be subjected to "criticism."

In those days Comrade Lenin carried out a tremendous piece of creative work. Those days were marked by a sort of literary spoliation of the dead, by an unprecedented literary demoralization. Attempts were made to smuggle, under the flag of Marxism, the ideas of bourgeois philosophy into working-class audiences. Lenin spent two years in the Paris National Library, and carried out such a mass of work that even bourgeois professors who attempted to sneer at the philosophical studies of Lenin, themselves admitted that they could not understand how one man had contrived to read such a mass of books in the course of two years. How, indeed, could Lenin succeed in this domain when "we," who had studied at our fathers' expense, who had spent thirty years in our scientific careers, who had worn out so many arm-chairs, who had perused such truck-loads of books, had understood nothing at all in them?…

In those two years Comrade Lenin was able to write a serious work on philosophy, which in due course will occupy an honorable place in the history of the struggle for revolutionary Marxism. He fought as passionately for Communism in the most abstract domain of theory as he fights now in the field of practical politics. Perhaps but few among the Petrograd workers have read this philosophical work of Lenin, but know you all that