Typescript, with autograph revisions, of Trotsky, Prince of Pamphleteers, a review of Trotsky’s The Defence of Terrorism. A Reply to Kar Kautsky, 4 November 1921

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Typescript, with autograph revisions, of Trotsky, Prince of Pamphleteers, a review of Trotsky’s The Defence of Terrorism. A Reply to Kar Kautsky, 4 November 1921
13 pages, 200 x 250mm, with extensive cancellations, corrections, and additions in Shaw’s hand and headed with ‘Copyright: The New York American 1921’. Provenance: Sotheby's, 24 & 25 July 1978, lot 455.

‘Whatever his terrified bourgeois critics may think or say of Trotsky as Archcommunist-Terrorist, they must admit that when he takes his pen in his hand, he is a Nailer’. Referring to Trotsky, ‘Making all allowances for the effervescence of his success – such a success as Marx never experienced – in cracking Koltchak, Denikin and Wrangel like three fusty nuts, and frightening Europe as nobody else since the Kaiser has frightened it, the gaiety of his controversial style must come from a genuine gaiety of heart’. The manuscript continues, ‘No wonder our politicians feel the earth shaking under them when such unheard of innovations are perpetrated by men who are actually in power with armies at their command. What is more, the earth is shaking; and if we are not careful it will gape and swallow up our sham civilisation’.

Shaw wrote numerous book reviews throughout his lifetime, the present review being published 7 January 1922.