In 1936, the editorial board of Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, intending to include in the next volume the article "Russian Responses to the Paris Commune", asked one of the oldest participants of the revolutionary movement in Russia, V. N. Figner, to answer a kind of questionnaire about the influence of the Paris Commune on the revolutionaries of the 70s-80s of the XIX century. The questionnaire consisted of nine questions, including the following: what influence did the Commune have on Russian revolutionaries abroad and in Russia, what influence did it have on participants in the trials of 193 and 10; was the book "The French Civil War of 1871" by Karl Marx read in Russia?

V. N. Figner (she was then 84 years old), answering questions from the editorial board, did not limit themselves to personal memories. In addition to scrupulously collecting everything that her memory of the events of 65 years ago preserved, V. N. Figner invited 16 of her friends to answer the questionnaire "Literary Heritage". 13 of them responded to the request. In the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of the USSR, in a folder entitled "Essays and notes by V. Figner on the Paris Commune", she has prepared an essay on the influence of the Commune on the revolutionary movement in Russia and drafts. In simple student notebooks and on separate sheets, V. N. Figner made many sketches. Here are her personal memoirs, a retelling of letters sent in response to her request, a list of articles and notes about the Commune that appeared in the 70s - 80s of the XIX century in the Russian foreign legal and illegal revolutionary press in Russia, an outline of an essay and a sketch of a meeting with a member of the Commune E. L. Dmitrieva. Here are two bibliographic references compiled by F. I. Vityazev at the request of V. N. Figner - about what P. L. Lavrov wrote about the Paris Commune, and about the Russian editions of K. Marx's" Civil War in France". The same folder contains letters from G. N. Dobruskina, M. I. Drey, L. Kupriyanova, I. I. Popov, N. I. Rakitnikov, E. D. Subbotina-Kozlovskaya, M. F. Frolenko, G. F. Chernyavskaya-Bokhanoaskaia, M. P. Shebalin, A.V. Yakimova with answers to the questionnaire "Literary Heritage".

V. N. Figner and her correspondents recall first of all the deep impression that the Paris Commune made on them. V. N. Figner herself wrote:: "The Commune undoubtedly had an emotional impact on the Russian revolutionary youth: the tragic history of the Commune, sunk in the blood of 25,000 proletarians who fell on the streets of Paris, executed by court sentences, exiled to Caledonia, where they were to perish, all these victims of the Versailles government and the bourgeoisie could not fail to produce an impression impressions on revolutionary-minded youth. Before that, she read in

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now the revolution was happening in real life " firsthand, in front of everyone. The commune was writing a new page in the martyrology of the working class ... " 1. M. F. Frolenko emphasized in his letter that the Commune had "an enormous influence on the decision on the necessity of revolutionary actions, on the participation of every decent, thinking person in them." 2
Interesting information about the ways in which the revolutionaries of the 70s - 80s of the XIX century received information about events in France. "No books about the Commune were passed through," wrote V. N. Figner, "no memoirs of communists were penetrated, and just as according to Darwin's story, birds carry plant seeds along with the ground when flying from country to country, so the concept of revolution, of the Commune was transferred in the minds of people who visited the West" 3 . Everyone wanted to know about the Commune, recalls V. N. Figner, everyone talked about it and used any source to get information about the events in Paris. Letters from abroad, conversations with people who came from there - these were the first sources of this information. There were almost no books about the Commune. According to the testimony of the Eighties revolutionary M. P. Shebalin, in 1877-1878, the youth in the gymnasium circle of Kamyanets-Podolsk therefore even read "Le livre noire de la Commune"translated into Russian. 4 N. I. Rakitnikov and V. N. Figner herself recalled that the best book about the Commune was considered to be the work of bourgeois historians. Langalais and P. Corrier "The History of the March 18 Revolution", but it was also a bibliographic rarity at that time5 . Many of the respondents V. N. Figner recalled that they had read" The Civil War in France " by Karl Marx, and later-the book by P. L. Lavrov "The Paris Commune on March 18, 1871". This work enjoyed great success among Russian revolutionaries. "On a happy occasion," as V. N. Figner writes, she still has two letters written in 1880 to N. A. Morozov in Switzerland. "Try to send at least a few copies of the Commune," one of them said. - You will even do me a personal favor with this, since I need two copies without fail... Lavrov's" Commune " leads to Paphos, but only 2 copies... all over St. Petersburg in hot demand " 6 .

In the 70s, the Paris Commune was the subject of study in self-education groups of young people, and later in workers ' circles. A.V. Yakimova, a member of the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, recalled that she first heard about the Commune in the summer of 1871 in Vyatka. N. A. Charushin, a graduate of the local gymnasium and a student of the Institute of Technology, came from St. Petersburg for a vacation. At a meeting of students of the diocesan school and high school girls, which took place in the apartment of the class lady A.D. Kuvshinskaya (later a member of the Tchaikovsky circle), he spoke about the Western European labor movement and, in particular, about the Commune. A.V. Yakimova also recalled that in 1873 in Vyatka, the exiled student M. P. Borodin led a self-education circle among girls and told them about the Commune .7
E. D. Subbotina-Kozlovskaya, a participant in the trials of the 50s and 193s, wrote in her response to the questionnaire that in 1874 in Moscow, while engaged in propaganda among the workers, she introduced them to the Western European labor movement and, in particular, talked to them about the Commune. She had just arrived from Geneva, where she had met with the Parisian participants P. Brousse and Montels, whose stories made a strong impression on the young revolutionary .8 G. N. Dobruskina, who in 1884 conducted work among the workers of Rostov-on-Don, also told them about the Paris Commune. She recalled that the workers were outraged by the brutality of the Versaillese and that they were most interested in the question of why the Commune was defeated .9 A member of Narodnaya Volya, I. I. Popov, recalled that in the 80s of the XIX century, workers ' circles talked a lot about the Paris Commune, read and reviewed various materials about it. In 1883 or at the beginning of

1 TsGALI, f. 1185, op. 1, units hr. 129, ll. 25-26.

2 Ibid., l. 77.

3 Ibid., l. 11.

4 Ibid., l. 10. This publication was generally hostile to the Commune.

5 This book was published in Russia in 1872 in an abridged translation. In 1873, the Tchaikovsky circle prepared a complete translation, but the censorship forbade its publication, and printed copies of the book were destroyed (see L. M. Dobrovolsky. The Paris Commune in Russian banned publications of the 70s. "A book about a book". L. 1932, pp. 286-289).

6 TsGALI, f. 1185, op. 1, ed. hr. 129, l. 115.

7 Ibid., unit hr. 851, ll. 6-6 vol.

8 Ibid., units hr. 129, ll. 145-145 vol.

9 Ibid., ed. hr. 402, l. 3 vol.

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In 1884, he attended a report by P. A. Latyshev (a member of D. Blagoev's Marxist group) about the Commune 10 .

Preparing the material for the "Literary Legacy", V. N. Figner made a plan-synopsis consisting of twelve points 11: "1. She first heard about the Paris Commune in Zurich as a student in 1872. 2 The influence of the M. P. Sachkin Library. 3. Collections in the library for the benefit of strikers, to help exiled communists, draw attention to the social movement in the Paris Commune. 4. Reading books on the revolutionary movement and the Paris Commune. Study of the socialist movement. 5. It is characteristic that Circle 12 did not include the study of the Paris Commune in its program. Why? 6. They believed that France is a classic country of revolutions and the Paris Commune is one of its episodes. 7. The first book I read about the Paris Commune is "Le livre rouge de la ustice rurale" 13 . A huge impression of martyrdom 14 . 8. Visit to the sections of the International School in Neuchatel. 9. Personal acquaintance with communards. Elise Reclu in Berlin 15 . 10. In 1874, she attended two congresses of the International in Geneva - the social-democratic Congress and the anarchist Congress. 11. Meeting with Dmitrieva in Russia in 1876 12. Simon-Meyer - in Shlisselburg".

In paragraph 11 of this plan, V. N. Figner recalls a meeting with a member of the Commune, E. L. Dmitrieva, who was personally acquainted with Karl Marx. "In front of me was a tall, slender young woman in a black, well-tailored dress. With thick dark hair pulled back in a bun, and regular, rather large features of a fresh face... Her portrait at the age of 19-20 years, with a little defined face, which is now in front of me in the "Annals of Marxism", does not convey her at all at the age of 25-26 years, when I saw her, " wrote V. N. Figner. Then she talked about her conversation with E. L. Dmitrieva. "In her opinion, there is no ground in Russia for socialist propaganda, which is now being carried out by the revolutionary youth in Russia. Under modern economic conditions, in the complete absence of developed industry and a class of industrial workers in Russia, revolutionary propaganda cannot find supporters and only leads to the death of propagandists... In the proletariat, socialism will find supporters, and propaganda will go well, " E. Dmitrieva said. "For me, all this was unheard of as a narodnitsa," 17 recalls V. N. Figner.

The last point of her plan, V. N. Figner recalls the following episode, which is described in her book "Imprinted Labor". Once, in a difficult moment in Shlisselburg, a staunch revolutionary was overcome with despair. When an unknown neighbor asked her what she was doing, V. N. Figner replied:"I think about my mother and... I cry." Her neighbor turned on her with unaccustomed harshness. He asked her if she had read Simon-Meyer's memoirs. "He gave me an example of this Simon-Meyer, one of the thousands of communards," 18 recalled V. N. Figner. The selflessness and steadfastness of the heroes of the Commune were the source from which the Russian revolutionaries drew their courage.

The unpublished notes of V. N. Figner and her comrades are another evidence of the influence of the Paris Commune on Russian revolutionaries.

S. V. Obolenskaya

10 Ibid., units hr. 129, ll. 144-144 vol.

11 Ibid., ll. 134-134 vol.

12 Here we are talking, apparently, about the Zurich circle "fritsch" - a student group engaged in self-education. In her autobiography, V. N. Figner wrote that the program of the circle included studying the history of revolutions, "from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Paris Commune" (Encyclopedia Granat, vol. 40, p. 465).

13 This refers to a book by J. Guesde, published anonymously at that time.

14 In the autobiography mentioned above, V. N. Figner wrote:: "I must say that it was not only a sense of social justice that moved me to take the side of the revolution and socialism, but perhaps especially the brutality of the ruling class' suppression of revolutionary movements."

15 In one of the rough drafts, V. N. Figner recalled that once in Bern she met a member of the Commune, the famous scientist Elise Reclu (TsGALI, f. 1185, op. 1, ed. chr. 129, l. 98).

16 TsGALI, f. 1185, op. 1, unit hr. 129, ll. 102-102 vol.

17 Ibid., ll. 103-103 vol.

18 V. N. Figner. The Memoirs of S. Simon-Meyer were published in Russia in 1881 under the title "Notes of the exiled convict Simon-Meyer".

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