KROPOTKIN P.A. (1842-1921), AUTOGRAPH Autograph letter signed ‘Pierre Kropotkin’ addressed to his ‘Cher confrère’. Viola, Bromley, Kent, May 14, 1896
Lot 917
1 2001 500
4 pp. on a double leaf, in-8. 18 x 11.5 cm. In French.
Letter about the works he wishes to have published. He promises to send a few manuscripts for the exhibition. (…) ‘There is one that my wife is particularly fond of: the Russian manuscript of my work on the glacial formations of Finland (…), which I wrote in its entirety while confined to a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg in 1874-5. It is a fine manuscript of about 450 folios. Can we be absolutely sure that it will not go astray?’ He asks whether he should send the manuscript to his correspondent or to Mr Paul Gallimard, and encloses a list of the manuscripts he proposes to send. ‘One of them is a first draft, partly illegible, of the lecture on Anarchy that I was prevented from delivering in Paris. But it seems that it is drafts of this sort that enthusiasts value most’ (…). In a postscript he also notes that he has two manuscripts by Bakunin which are very dear to him: the programme of the Society for the International Revolution and a section of ‘God and the State’.
P.A. Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, geographer and geomorphologist, a researcher of the tectonic structure of Siberia and Central Asia and of the Ice Age. A well-known historian, philosopher and publicist, he was the creator of the ideology of anarcho-communism and one of the most influential theorists of anarchism.



