The excerpt is from Trotsky’s biographical sketch of Frederick Engels, a cofounder with Karl Marx of the modern communist movement. It was written in 1935, on the 40th anniversary of Engels’s death.

The article is also a critical review of a collection of correspondence between Engels and Karl Kautsky published that same year.

Kautsky became a central leader of German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and of the Second International. With the outbreak of World War I, Kautsky advanced a pacifist course opposing both the right wing of the SPD, which supported its own capitalist class, and the Spartacists who advocated revolutionary action against the imperialist war. Following the 1918 German Revolution Kautsky served in the coalition government that prevented the revolution from going beyond bourgeois limits.

Kautsky was an opponent of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and wrote several books attacking it. He was answered by Trotsky in the book Terrorism and Communism in 1920 and by V. I. Lenin’s 1918 pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Copyright © 1977 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY  
Engels’s insight into military matters, based not only upon his extensive special knowledge but also upon his general capacity for a synthesized appraisal of conditions and forces, enabled him to publish in the London Pall-Mall Gazette, during the Franco-Prussian War, remarkable military articles, ascribed by fame to one of the highest military authorities of the time (the Messrs. “Authorities,” doubtless, surveyed themselves in the mirror not without considerable astonishment). In his intimate circle Engels was dubbed with the playful nickname of the “General.” This name is signed to a number of his letters to Kautsky.

Engels was not an orator, or it may be that he never had the occasion to become one. Towards “orators” he displayed even a shade of disrespect, holding, not without foundation, that they incline to turn ideas into banalities. But Kautsky recalls Engels as a remarkable conversationalist, endowed with an inexhaustible memory, remarkable wit, and precision of expression. Unfortunately, Kautsky himself is a mediocre observer, and no artist at all: in his own letters Engels stands out infinitely more clearly than in the commentaries and recollections of Kautsky.

Engels’s relations with people were foreign to all sentimentalism or illusions and permeated through and through with a penetrating simplicity and, therefore, were profoundly human. In his company around the evening table, where representatives of various countries and continents gathered, all contrast disappeared as if by magic between the polished radical duchess Schack and the not at all polished Russian nihilist Vera Zasulich. The rich personality of the host manifested itself in this happy capacity to lift himself and others above everything secondary and superficial, without departing in the least from either his views or even his habits.

One would seek in vain in this revolutionist for bohemian traits so prevalent among the radical intellectuals. Engels was intolerant of sloppiness and negligence both in small and big things. He loved precision of thought, precision in accounting, exactitude in expression and in print. When a German publisher attempted to alter his spelling, Engels demanded back several galleys for revision. He wrote, “I would no sooner allow anybody to foist his spelling on me than I would a wife.” This irate and at the same time jocose sentence almost brings Engels back to life again!

In addition to his native tongue, over which his mastery was that of a virtuoso, Engels wrote freely in English, French, and Italian; he read Spanish and almost all Slavic and Scandinavian languages. His knowledge of philosophy, economics, history, physics, philology, and military science would have sufficed for a goodly dozen of ordinary and extraordinary professors. But even apart from all this he possessed his main treasure: winged thought.

Engels’s optimism extended equally to political questions and to personal affairs. After each and every defeat he would immediately seek out those conditions which would prepare a new upsurge, and after every blow life dealt him he was able to pull himself together and look to the future. Such he remained to his dying day. There were times when he had to remain on his back for weeks in order to get over the effects of a rupture he suffered from a fall during one of the “gentry’s” riding to foxes. At times his aged eyes refused to function under artificial light, which one cannot do without even during daytime in the London fogs. But Engels never refers to his ailments except in passing, in order to explain some delay, and only in order to promise immediately thereupon that everything would shortly “proceed better,” and then the work will be resumed at full speed.

One of Marx’s letters has a reference to Engels’s habit of playfully winking during a conversation. This helpful “winking” passes through Engels’s entire correspondence. The man of duty and of profound attachments least of all resembles an ascetic. He was a lover of nature and of art in all its forms, he loved the company of clever and merry people, the presence of women, jokes, laughter, good dinners, good wine, and good tobacco. At times he was not averse to the belly-laughter of Rabelais, who readily looked for his inspiration below the navel.

Was he, perhaps, an epicurean? The secondary “boons of life” never held sway over this man. On the other hand, he was genuinely interested in the kinship customs of savages or in the enigmas of Irish philology, but always in indissoluble connection with the future destinies of mankind. If he permitted himself to joke trivially, it was only in the company of untrivial people. Underlying his humor, irony, and joy of living one always feels an ardent moral spirit—free of all rhetoric or posturing, deeply hidden, but all the more genuine for that, and ever ready for sacrifice. The man of commerce, the possessor of a mill, a hunter’s horse, and a wine cellar, was a revolutionary communist to the marrow of his bones.  
 
 
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