Lars T. Lih. Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2006, 867 p.

The title of the book Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context suggests that the book is dedicated entirely to Vladimir Lenin and his book What Is to Be Done? written in 1901-1902. And it is partially true. But not entirely. In reality, this volume offers a complete picture of one of the most dramatic periods in the history of Russia and–broader–Europe–the years which led to the October Revolution that “shook the world,” according to John Reed.What Is to Be Done? has been considered by numerous scholars and socialist ideologists as the founding document of the Russian Bolsheviks establishing the notion of the party of a new type. By examining and retranslating this book, Lars T. Lih confronts and clarifies persistent misunderstandings regarding Lenin’s views and philosophy on the concept of “the party of a new type” and the place What Is to Be Done? occupies in the history of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia. If according to Antoine Berman every translation is–or should be–born out of the translator’s project, this is Lars T. Lih’s project, which he explains as follows: In this context the expression “Lenin Rediscovered” (my emphasis–T.S.) does not seem overly ambitious, because Lih really helps his readers to discover the Lenin they do not know. Lenin’s works have been translated and retranslated, examined and re-examined, interpreted and re-interpreted numerous times over the last 100 years. However, this new translation offers an unprecedented amount of contextual research on the period, the history of the Russian and European socialist movements, and the development of Lenin’s beliefs. Socialist ideologists and even scholars have had a tendency to quote Lenin without presenting the immediate or indirect context of the given citation–and that often changed the whole meaning of Lenin’s postulates. Lih, on the contrary, insists on a meticulous examination of the contextual evidence and therefore dedicates a significantly larger part of his book to explaining the historical, social, and political context What Is to Be Done? was written in. Antoine Berman argued that “traduire exige des lectures vastes et diversifiées. Un traducteur ignorant–qui ne lit pas de la sorte–est un traducteur déficient. On traduit avec des livres.” Lars Lih is an excellent example of a knowledgeable translator whose expertise in the subject of his research and not only in the source and the target languages becomes obvious from the first pages of the book. The author uses a great variety of source material–archives, memoirs, pamphlets, both in Russian and German, in order to prepare his target reader for a better understanding of Lenin’s book. Now, we all know that Lenin wrote his works in Russian, so why do I mention German? Because one of the central ideas of this book is that Lenin was insisting on creating a party which would–to a certain extent–follow the model of the German Social Democratic Party, or as Lih calls it, “Erfurtian” Party after the program adopted by the German Social Democratic Party at a congress at Erfurt in 1891. Not accidentally, this historical analysis precedes the actual translation of What Is to Be Done? and is in fact four times longer than Lenin’s text itself. Lih wants his target audience to be well-equipped for a complete comprehension of the message Lenin really intended to convey by his book. Lih is not only an interpreter, a mediator between Lenin and his epoch on the one side and the contemporary audience and our time on the other, he is also an educator who skillfully combines fluency text with one of the models of translation proposed by Friedrich Schleiermacher, where the translator moves …