Vol. 9 No. 11 · 4 June 1987
pages 12-13 | 3188 words
Rosa with Mimi
Edward Timms
- Rosa Luxemburg: A Life by Elzbieta Ettinger
Harrap, 286 pp, £10.95, April 1987, ISBN 0 245 54539 5
‘It is only by accident that I am whirling in the maelstrom of history,’ Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in September 1915; ‘actually I was born to tend geese.’ The subject of this absorbing biography is Luxemburg the goose-girl, the ‘hurt child’ who, according to Elzbieta Ettinger, lurked within the ‘famous revolutionary’. Drawing on previously unknown private letters, this book portrays Luxemburg as a socially insecure and emotionally vulnerable woman. The question left unresolved is how a person so frail and fallible could have become one of the most charismatic figures in the history of revolutionary Marxism.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 12 · 25 June 1987
From Mary Lewis
SIR: It really is time to stop attributing the so-called Catechism of a Revolutionary to Bakunin. Edward Timms’s review of Elzbieta Ettinger’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg (LRB, 4 June) includes a reference to a ‘revolutionary of the type described by Bakunin’, illustrated by an unattributed (and inaccurate) quotation from the first of the Rules which must guide the Revolutionary. In fact, this document was almost certainly written by Nechaev, probably in Switzerland though possibly in Russia early in 1869, before being smuggled back into Russia, where it was one of the items seized by the Police in raids on his circle later in 1869, and was first published in the official report of their trial in 1871. Bakunin had certainly read it, but there is no evidence that he had any hand in it. On the contrary, the best evidence is his letter of June 1870 breaking off relations with Nechaev, which contains a clear reference to ‘your catechism’ and a strong critique of its doctrine (Natalie Herzen’s copy of this letter survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale, being first published in French in 1966, in Russian in 1971 and in English in 1972). Anyway it follows the line, not of Bakunin in exile, but rather of authoritarian revolutionaries inside Russia such as Ishutin and Tkachev, and moreover Bakunin himself never followed its doctrine as Nechaev did. Bakunin got into quite enough trouble for what he did do, especially during his association with Nechaev. There is no longer any good reason to blame him for what he did not do.
Mary Lewis
Freedom Press, London El
Vol. 9 No. 13 · 9 July 1987
From Edward Timms
SIR In her biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Elzbieta Ettinger attributed the Catechism of a Revolutionary to Bakunin and Nechaev jointly. I am sorry that in my compressed account of her argument (LRB, 4 June) Nechaev’s name was omitted and I am grateful to Mary Lewis for her clarification.
Edward Timms
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
