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Georg von Charasoff 13
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Georg von Charasoff 13 _____________________________________________________________________________ In one of her earlier letters she observed:
Today Charasoff let his girlfriend (a young female student – Jewish) come here from Zurich. She dined with us at the dinner-table and sat between Charasoff and Buek. The former I cannot stand at all. He really gets on my nerves. This brutal, worn face, this self-contentedness and megalomania are just disgusting. He eats, speaks, makes stupid jokes and talks nonsense – just horrible. An animal – or a rather vulgar person! (Kotschetkowa to Brupbacher, 17 June 1907, Brupbacher Papers MFC 37, Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv)
Kotschetkowa’s description of Charasoff’s girlfriend matches with the known facts about his later second wife, Marie Kriegshaber, so that we may assume that it is the same person. In the following months, Charasoff continued to work on his economic manuscripts on Marx’s theory of value and distribution, and eventually must have decided to publish his ideas in book form rather than as articles. He wrote the finishing sentences of the Preface to the first book, Karl Marx über die
page not numbered). 6 Charasoff’s Stay in Clarens and Lausanne In February 1909 Charasoff moved to Clarens, which was then a small village near Montreux (of which it now is a suburb) at Lake Geneva. He obtained a ‘permis de sejour’ (residence permission) for three years, but he left Clarens already on 26 August 1909 in order to take up residence in nearby Lausanne (Stadtarchiv Montreux, Meldeakten Charasoff-Kriegshaber). Throughout his stay he was accompanied by his three children and by Marie Kriegshaber. Clarens has a long tradition as a vacation and cure resort, with luxurious hotels, numerous guest-houses, and excellent restaurants. The little village on the ‘Swiss Riviera’ was particularly popular among Russian guests and was visited by artists and intellectuals like Leo Tolstoy, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Nabokov. 19 Igor Stravinsky first came to Clarens, like Charasoff, in spring 1909, and he returned there in autumn 1910 in order to settle down for an extended period of time. The house in which he lived in Clarens, and where he composed, among other things, ‘Le sacre du printemps’ and ‘Pulcinella’, is less than 100 metres up the road from Charasoff’s residence. This part of Lake Geneva was also a popular retreat for exiled revolutionaries from Tsarist Russia, and was visited by Pjotr Kropotkin, Michail Bakunin, Wladimir Illjitsch Lenin, Inessa Armand, Vera Figner and several others. In spring 1908 it appears to have been overcrowded with Russians, because Rosa Luxemburg, who regularly spent her spring vacation in the guest-house ‘La Colline’ in Baugy-sur-Clarens, wrote to Karl and Luise Kautsky in April 1908: ‘The entire guest-house, and all of Baugy, Vevey, Clarens, and Lausanne is full of Russians. We are the only ones here to speak some German’ (Kautsky Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; quoted from Huser 2003: 83). From Clarens, Charasoff sent two letters to Karl Kautsky, which have been preserved in the Kautsky archive. The first one, dated 18 February 1909, was an accompanying letter to a complimentary copy of his 1909 book, which he sent Kautsky together with ‘a short article in which I have developed the same ideas in a different and, as it seems to me, less popular, but for the adept of Marx’s theory Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 12:40 30 March 2016
14 History of Economics Review _____________________________________________________________________________ clearer form’. He added: ‘I would of course be delighted if you were to publish this article in your journal, but this must of course depend on your judgement’. Just one week later, on 25 February 1909, Charasoff responded to Kautsky’s rejection letter and return of the manuscript, which he had received the day before, in the following terms:
I readily admit that my assessment of Marxism may contain some imprecisions. Because I am not a Marxist in the conventional sense of the term, it is impossible for me to think myself into this doctrine, which is really alien to my way of thinking, however much I esteem Marx as a political economist and as a theoretician of the labour movement. … But that my construction should be fundamentally wrong I am not ready to concede so easily, and I therefore look forward to your promised statement of grounds, by letter or in print, with great interest. (Charasoff to Kautsky, 18 and 25 February 1909, Kautsky Papers, D VII 67-8, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam).
During his stay in Clarens Charasoff took residence in rue de la Gare 11 (now rue Gambetta), which is located right next to the train station, with direct connections to Montreux and Lausanne. Just up the hill within walking distance is the small village of Baugy-sur-Clarens, where several Russian exiles lived, including Nicolai Rubakin, whose famous library was thus at Charasoff’s disposal. 20 A further reason for Charasoff’s choice of Clarens as a temporary residence, apart from its natural beauty and its closeness to the Russian community in Baugy, may have been the fact that Léon Walras was living there (until his death in January 1910). Moreover, Lausanne was near and easily accessible, where in 1909 Vilfredo Pareto was still teaching. In view of Charasoff’s statement (in the Preface of his book of 1910) that he planned to write a third book on the critique of the marginalist approach to economic theory, the idea is close at hand that he may have tried to get in touch with Walras and Pareto – but so far no evidence has been found in support of this hypothesis. (It should also be noted that in spring 1909 Léon Walras was presumably already too ill for a serious scientific discussion.) In August 1909, Charasoff moved with his family from Clarens to Lausanne, and took up residence in Avenue de la Harpe 3, until the end of March 1910. There is no evidence for any connection with the University of Lausanne: Charasoff was neither enrolled as a regular student nor as an auditor. He also seems not to have used the University library, although this cannot be ascertained definitively, because the library loan documents are incomplete. 21 It seems most likely that Charasoff used his ‘sabbatical term’ in Clarens and Lausanne mainly for composing the book manuscript of his major economic work, Das System des Marxismus, the preface of which is dated ‘Lausanne, 24 December 1909’.
Some two months earlier, on 28 October 1909, Georg von Charasoff married Marie Kriegshaber (in some documents: Krigsgaber), who gave birth to a son, Sergius, on 11 March 1910 in Lausanne (Geburtseintrag, Stadtarchiv Lausanne). Marie Kriegshaber was born on 1 August 1882 in Kamenetz-Podolski/Proskurow (then Russia, now Ukraine). After receiving a high school education at the Jewish ‘Schitomir’ gymnasium for girls in her home town, Marie Kriegshaber studied medicine at the University of Berne from the winter term 1902-03 until the end of the winter term 1903-04. 22 In the summer term 1904 she transferred from Berne to Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 12:40 30 March 2016 Yüklə 0,75 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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