/lit/ - Literature

>>18132193
Would have been making anonymous announcements about the comming revolution every day

Trotsky's lost manuscript on masonry sounds /pol/ tier:

>It was during that period that I became interested in freemasonry. For several months, I avidly studied books on its history, books given to me by relatives and friends in Odessa.

>As the prison rules demanded that a prisoner give up his old exercise-book when he was given a new one, I got for my studies on freemasonry an exercise-book with a thousand numbered pages, and entered in it, in tiny characters, excerpts from many books, interspersed with my own reflections on freemasonry, as well as on the materialist conception of history. This took up the better part of a year. I edited each chapter carefully, copied it into a note-book which had been smuggled in to me, and then sent that out to friends in other cells to read. For contriving this, we had a complicated system which we called the "telephone." The person for whom the package was intended - that is, if his cell was not too far away-would attach a weight to a piece of string, and then, holding his hand as far as he could out of the window, would swing the weight in a circle. As previously arranged through tapping, I would stick my broom out so that the weight could swing around it. Then I would draw the broom in and tie the manuscript to the string. When the person to whom I wanted to send it was too far away, we managed it by a series of stages, which o f course made things more complicated.

>Toward the end of my stay in the Odessa prison, the fat exercise-book had become a veritable well of historical erudition and philosophic thought.

>After my second escape from Siberia, I tried to recover it, but in vain. Apparently it had been used to light fires or some such thing by the Swiss landlady who had been entrusted with the custody of the archives. I can't refrain here from conveying my reproaches to that worthy woman.