45 2
KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYasked him - for a royalty of 500 thalers - to prepare a second and cheaper
edition which he intended to issue in a dozen separate booklets. Marx
worked on it for eighteen months; and the last instalment did not appear
until June 1873 , mainly because of a long printers' strike in Leipzig. He
made substantial changes in the first chapter with which, as his daughter
Jenny said, 'he is himself pleased - which is rare'.-'^6 The first foreign
translation was the Russian one which appeared in March 1872. It was
begun by a young Populist called Lopatin who moved to London in the
summer of 1870 to work under Marx's direction in the British Museum
while taking English lessons from Eleanor. Lopatin did not complete the
translation (he returned to Russia on an unsuccessful mission to liberate
Chernyshevsky from prison). The work was taken over by Danielson, a
shy Populist scholar, who translated the book in the evenings on his
return from the bank where he worked for fifty years. There was some
fear that the Tsarist censors might ban the book but they found it so
'difficult and hardly comprehensible' that they concluded that 'few would
read it and still fewer understand it'.^27 Here they were wrong: the Russian
edition sold better than any other, and copies of it passed avidly from
hand to hand - sometimes inside the covers of the New Testament. Marx
did not even have time to rewrite the first chapter as he would have liked;
he wrote to Danielson complaining about the demands made on him by
the International: 'Certainly I shall one fine morning put a stop to all
this, but there are circumstances in which you are in duty bound to
occupy yourself with things much less attractive than theoretical study
and research.'^28
Even after the removal of the General Council to New York in 1872
Marx spent most of the following year tying up the loose ends in London.
Then in the autumn of 1873 he suffered a serious breakdown of health.
What little time he did have during the years 1873-7 5 was sPent working
on the French edition. As far back as 1867 there had been plans to
translate Capital into French and Elie Reclus (brother of the famous
anarchist geographer) had made a start, assisted by Marx's old mentor,
Moses Hess. He soon gave up, however, and it was not until 1871 (after
no fewer than five other translators had attempted the task) that Marx
opened negotiations with Roy, who had acquired a considerable reputation
as a translator of Feuerbach. Roy was a school teacher in Bordeaux;
mailing the various chapters and sections to and from London naturally
made for new delays, which were further increased by Roy's difficulty in
reading Marx's handwriting (he translated from the manuscript of the
second German edition). Marx was lucky to have been introduced (by
Lafargue) to an extremely energetic Parisian publisher, Maurice Lachatre,
who had recently been exiled to Switzerland. Marx welcomed Lachatre's