Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

636 NOTES
Lenin’s sister, A. I. Ulyanova-Elizarova, relates in her reminiscences
that while Vladimir Ilyich was working on his
book in prison “he decided to use the St. Petersburg libraries
in order to obtain material needed for the work he had planned
and that he knew he would not be able to get in exile. And so
in prison he made an intense study of a mass of source material,
and copied out numerous extracts. I dragged heaps of books
to him from the Free Economic Society library, from the Academy
of Sciences and from other scientific book repositories.”
Lenin also worked on the book while on his way to exile.
In a letter dated March 15, 1897, he wrote that while on the
way he had looked over some “books borrowed for a short while,”
and that he intended to send them back from Krasnoyarsk.
During a halt at Krasnoyarsk (en route for Shushenskoye village),
Lenin made a study of books and magazines that he found in
the rich private library of G. V. Yudin, a merchant, and also
in the local city library.
While in exile Lenin continued to work hard on The Development
of Capitalism in Russia. Since he did not possess the means
to buy large numbers of books, he wrote to his relatives asking
them to make arrangements to supply him from libraries in
the capital. “... It would very likely be more profitable for me
to spend money on postage and have many books than to spend
much more money on buying a few books.” (See present edition,
Vol. 37.) On Lenin’s instructions, his sister, M. I. Ulyanova,
copied out numerous extracts from various books in the
Rumyantsev Library in Moscow. Lenin received these extracts at
the end of May 1897. From the autumn of the same year, he received
the material he needed regularly and set to work on the new
sources, particularly on the numerous statistical abstracts. In
the spring of 1898, N. K. Krupskaya, who had secured a transfer
from her place of exile in Ufa to Shushenskoye, brought Lenin
many books.
During his three years’ work on The Development of Capitalism
in Russia, Lenin studied and made a critical analysis of
everything that had been written on Russian economics. In
this monograph mention is made of, and passages are quoted
from, over 500 different books, abstracts, research papers,
reviews and articles. The literature, however, actually studied and
used by Lenin, but not included among the sources he mentions,
was much more extensive. But even this list gives an idea
of the colossal amount of work involved in his study of the
development of Russian capitalism.
The draft of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was
completed in August 1898. In a letter dated October 11, 1898
Lenin wrote: “I have finished drafting my markets, and I have
begun to give them the finishing touches. The making of a fair
copy will go on simultaneously, so that I have thought of sending
it on in parts and of having it printed as it gets there in order to
avoid delay (I expect to send off the first lot in a month’s time
at the very latest); if they begin printing it in December, it might