Zaria: sotsial'-demokraticheskii nauchno-politicheskii zhurnal. Nos. 1, 2-3 & 4 [all published]

£3,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

All four issues of the extremely scarce Russian revolutionary Marxist journal Zarya (Dawn), containing the first appearance in print of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov’s pseudonym ‘Lenin’ – the most famous of the 160 pseudonyms he used throughout his life. The journal was produced by the same Editorial Board as the clandestine Russian revolutionary newspaper Iskra (The Spark), the principals of which were Lenin and Georgi Plekhanov. Zarya was intended as a companion publication to Iskra, containing more substantial theoretical works on social and economic subjects to compliment the function of Iskra as official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Zarya was printed legally in Stuttgart by J.H.W. Dietz, the same publisher as Lenin’s incendiary political pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902). The first issue appeared in April 1901, with the second and third issues following as one volume in December 1901, while the fourth and final number appeared in August 1902. The ‘Lenin’ article in question appears across pages 259-302 of issues 2-3 under the title ‘Gg. “kritiki” v agrarnom voprose’ (’The “Critics” on the Agrarian Question. First Essay’) and is signed ‘N. Lenin’. “No one is quite sure what if anything the ‘N’ signified, although some mistakenly assume it stood for ‘Nikolai’. Similarly, it is uncertain where he came up with ‘Lenin’ as a surname though it is often believed it was named after the Lena river in Siberia” (Henderson, The Spark That Lit the Revolutio

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