Kapital. Kritika Politicke Ekonomije od Karla Marksa. Popularno Izdanje. Priredio Julian Borhart.

TRANSLATED BY TITO’S CELLMATE

First edition in Serbian. 8vo. 198, [4] pp. Original purple printed wrappers, edges untrimmed (early ownership inscription in red ink to title page and page 57, 4.7cm portion to head of title page re-margined with no loss of text, think strip of paper reinforcement to top edge of second to last leaf, final leaf reinforced with paper backing obscuring the terminal blank; rebacked with the original spine laid down, some sympathetic paper reinforcement to extremities of front and rear covers). Beograd, Izdavacka Knjizarnica Gece Kona.

An important precursor to the first full-length Serbian translation of Das Kapital, often mistakenly referred to as the first full Serbian translation of the first volume, but in fact a translation of Julian Borchardt’s ‘Gemeinverständliche Ausgabe’ or ‘Popular Edition’. Originally published in Berlin in 1919, Borchardt’s ‘Popular Edition’ was a collection of excerpts from all three volumes of Kapital, with a preface by Borchardt, but no further explanatory notes.

The translation was undertaken by the Serbian and Yugoslav communist Moša Pijade (1890-1957), the foremost Marxist theoretician of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ, Komunisticka partija Jugoslavije) and one of the closest collaborators of the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito. Born to a well-known Sephardic Jewish family in Belgrade, Pijade was a leading figure in post-war Communist Yugoslavia and played an important role in the Tito–Stalin split of 1948, but also contributed to the dissemination of Marxist thought during the interwar years in the ‘first’ Yugoslavia through his work translating and publishing Marxist material. The KPJ was outlawed in 1921 and in 1925, the year after the publication of the present translation, Pijade was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for his revolutionary activities and for illegally editing and printing a Communist newspaper. Pijade was transferred to the notorious Lepoglava prison in 1930, where he became Tito’s cellmate, tutoring his junior revolutionary in Marxist orthodoxy.

Various earlier attempts to translate Marx’s great work into Serbian had made, including the publication of several short excerpts printed in newspapers and other periodicals in 1872, 1877, and 1888 respectively. The first book-length attempt appeared in Geneva in 1900, a translation of the famous Gabriel Deville abridgement by Drag. T. Vladisavljevic – a publication of utmost rarity.

Pijade would go on to produce the first full Serbo-Croatian translation of Das Kapital while he was still imprisoned in Lepoglava in collaboration with his fellow inmate Rodoljub Colakovic (1900-1983). The manuscript of the first volume was smuggled out of Lepoglava and published in Belgrade in 1933. Pijade completed the translation of the second and third volumes independently, which were published in 1934 and 1948 respectively.

Pijade’s earlier translation of Borchardt’s ‘Popular Edition’, presented here, was published by the Jewish bookseller Géza Kohn (1873-1941) who operated the largest publishing house in Yugoslavia from 1901 until the Nazi occupation in 1941 whereupon he was a victim of the Holocaust.  

Rare. OCLC list only one copy, held by the University of Pittsburgh.

Stock Code: 243265