Evolutionary Socialism
Extracts from the Preface to the Last German Edition
Section summary
A short extract from Bernstein’s German preface of January 1902, written in Berlin, listing the book’s translations and disowning the unauthorised Russian editions, including one printed in London by the Russian Free Press Fund.
The Voraussetzungen des Socialismus has appeared in German as well as in French and Russian—the last in three editions, namely, one in London, one in Moscow, and one in St. Petersburg. Translations into Czech and Spanish are in preparation I am told. The French translation has been produced with my consent and has been provided with a special preface from me; on the other hand complete Russian editions have been brought out without my knowledge. This is sufficiently explicable in the Moscow and St. Petersburg editions, and so are certain “scientific” paraphrases of the text. It seems to me less comprehensible that the editors of the third edition published in London by the Russian Free Press Fund did not arrange before the completion of the translation to find the author who was living in the same town, to place him in a position to carry out any necessary corrections, omissions, or additions, as well as to obtain his permission for those omissions which they themselves found it well to make. As this did not happen I am driven to the necessity of declaring that I can take just as little responsibility for the London edition as for the other two.