Kapital. Kritika politicheskoi ekonomii.

£17,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The first translation of Das Kapital to appear in any language, and arguably the most important – bound with the exceedingly scarce original front and rear printed wrappers. In one of the great ironies of modern printing history, the censors permitted the publication of Das Kapital in Imperial Russia, dismissing the book as a “colossal mass of abstruse, somewhat obscure politico-economic argumentation”, and concluding confidently “that in Russia few will read it and even fewer will understand it” (quoted in Resis, p. 221). The Russian translation was the initiative of the Russian socialist economist Nikolai Danielson (1844-1918). Danielson had read Das Kapital in the original German shortly after its publication, “and the work made so strong an impression on him that he immediately undertook to bring the book to the Russian reading public” (Resis, p. 223). The project would initiate a life-long correspondence between Danielson and Marx, with Danielson helping Marx source essential Russian material to aid Marx’s research, and Danielson would also later produce Russian translations of the posthumously published second and third volumes of Das Kapital. The first task was to find a willing publisher in Russia and Danielson eventually settled on the radical publisher Nikolai Petrovich Poliakov (1843-1905), who agreed to back the project on the condition that Danielson find an able translator. Ironically, it was not Marx’s Das Kapital that would bring Poliakov’s publishing career t

• Year: 1872

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