The Russian collected works that paired Lassalle’s writings with Eduard Bernstein’s portrait essay
A Russian-Language Collection of Lassalle’s Writings
Sochineniia — the Russian word for “Works” — is a Russian-language collection of the writings of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), issued in St. Petersburg in 1905 by the press of N. Glagolev. Catalog records describe a second, corrected and enlarged edition (2. ispr. i dop. izd.), printed in volumes and furnished with a portrait of the author. Library entries credit the volume jointly to Lassalle and to Eduard Bernstein, reflecting the fact that the edition is not Lassalle’s text alone but a composite: his collected writings together with a substantial accompanying study by another hand.
Bernstein’s Essay as the Edition’s Companion
What gives this particular collection its character is the appended essay by Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), titled Ferdinand Lassalle, His Life and Significance for the Working Class. Cataloguing treats this piece as a related work bound with, or appended to, the Lassalle collection, and its title sets out its two concerns plainly: an account of Lassalle’s life, and an argument about what his career and writing meant for the labouring class. For a reader approaching the volume, Bernstein’s essay functions as the interpretive frame — the biography and assessment that accompanies the primary texts rather than standing apart from them. The pairing places Lassalle’s own writing alongside the judgement of a later figure in the German Social Democratic tradition, so that the volume presents its subject both in his own words and through the eyes of a subsequent admirer and critic.
A Portrait and a Presentation
The physical description recorded for the edition — volumes accompanied by a portrait — indicates that this was conceived as a presentation edition rather than a bare working text: the reader is given the author’s likeness alongside his writings and a biographical essay devoted to his historical importance. The fact that the collection reached a second, corrected and expanded printing suggests that the format found a readership and was thought worth revising and enlarging rather than merely reissuing. The Russian-language publication of Lassalle’s works in St. Petersburg places the volume within the broad Russian interest in German socialist and labour thought of the period, and it presents Lassalle to Russian readers not as an isolated theorist but as a figure whose significance is argued for explicitly, in a commissioned-style biographical study attached to his own collected writings.
The Online Books Page lists a link to page images at HathiTrust, noting that access is US-only. It describes its own entry as an uncurated book entry from its extended bookshelves, readable online now but without a stable link; the entry advises against bookmarking that page and states that a request can be made to add the book to the curated collection with stable links. It also directs users to look for editions at a library or elsewhere.
Princeton University Library Catalog records the format as Book and gives the OCLC number 78250633. Its holdings entry places a copy in ReCAP – Remote Storage under the call number Soc 920.9.11 and carries an action note, “Committed to retain in perpetuity — ReCAP Shared Collection (HUL),” along with an RCP notation “H – S.” In its Related work(s) field, the record lists Bernstein’s Ferdinand Lassalʹ, ego zhiznʹ i znachenie dlia rabochago klassa.
