The article “The Marx-Engels Correspondence” here published was the beginning of an extensive article that Lenin planned at the time of the publication of the German four-volume edition of the Marx-Engels Correspondence in September 1913. Lenin made a deep study of the correspondence; the Institute of Marxism-Leninism has in its possession a thick notebook (76 pages) in which Lenin summarised the letters and copied extracts from them.
Lenin intended to publish “The Marx-Engels Correspondence” in the magazine Prosveshcheniye in 1914, and an announcement to that effect was printed in Proletarskaya Pravda No. 7 on December 14, 1913; the article, however, remained unfinished and was first published inPravda on November 28, 1920, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Engels’s birth. On this occasion Lenin added a subtitle“Engels as One of the Founders of Communism” and provided a footnote to the title: “The beginning of an unfinished article written in 1913 or early 1914”.