Leningrad Textbook First?

[artydont]

@Ted1307 I propose that we (mainly you) start work on the Leningrad textbook first.

My email about starting with Gollobin should be enough to put anybody off starting from there - as was helpfully pointed out by a reader ;-)

I do believe starting from Leningrad textbook will be MUCH easier and deliver useful results faster.

Also encourages everybody to read shorter and easier work on Scientific Philosophy before longer work that badly needed an editor.

Both works will require renewal and improvement for much wider reading now, but preliminary to that is publishing them both in fully accessible form.

Starting from Leningrad textbook will get there faster as it is already much closer to being fully accessible.

It was once widely read and has been adequately republished in a form used by Print On Demand publishers for easily ordered paperback copies using the separate links below for the main (black and white) text and (high quality coloured) cover:

https://www.redstarpublishers.org/

Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, by M. Shirokov, 1941. $7. Cover. This 400 page book was prepared by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy and is a comprehensive exposition of dialectical and historical materialism.

eg Amazon advertizes for $32.72

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Createspace Independent Publishing Platform (28 June 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 330 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1490569006
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1490569000
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.75 x 21.59 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 199,212 in Books ([See Top 100 in Books](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_zg_ts_books))
    143 in [Socialism](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/books/4908616051/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books)
    174,194 in [Textbooks & Study Guides](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/books/4893872051/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books)

Customer Reviews: 4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 23 ratings 

I believe an almost "perfect" full text can be easily extracted from the first link above as it is a very well done searchable pdf

The VIAF Virtual International Authority File catalog entries include Russian originals.

Initial enhancements to produce completely accessible ebooks would be:

1. Simply proper linking both ways between ToC and actual section headings. Also available at side margins with correct display and goto for original printed page numbers in pdf readers.
2. That may already be sufficient to generate annotations that will be properly anchored and to be able to produce a "Companion" that easily "wraps itself" around either a pdf or epub version.
3. At that stage we could already contact the publisher to provide this update, without actually having sorted out how to do "Companions". Worth getting in touch with them early as they do lots of other useful stuff.
4. Then harder work linking all index entries to all footnotes via a proper bibliography in both directions between all three. This would overlap with understanding how to do Gollobin and other bibliographies for other philosophical works closely related and also for Maksakovsky.

There are a lot of complexities about how handling citations entries and the superscript note numbers pointing to them that will need to be sorted out before tackling Gollobin and I believe starting from Leningrad textbook will be an easier path that also benefits from looking at Gollobin's citations to track down those used in the Leningrad text.

BTW Also available are rough English translations of the earlier editions of the Leningrad textbook actually translated into Chinese and studied when working on Mao's philosophical works. eg

Aizenberg section on Negation of the Negation

"Materialistic dialectics". Part I, I. Shirokov, R. Yankovsky, 1932

The basic guidelines of the “Materialist Dialectic” remained the same as in “Dialectical Materialism”. However, in the development of these installations, the authors tried to raise the presentation of a number of problems to a great theoretical height, in particular, relying on the collective experience of scientific and pedagogical work in seminars and sections of the LOCA Institute of Philosophy.

This is in one of four uploads from Kamran Heiss. All 4 are useful, eg one includes the publisher's preface for a rougher translation that was not included in a later rough translation of Ai Siqi.

The 1932 text (including Aizenberg's section) is buried within Soviet Translations

I am especially keen on extracting the excerpts from classics that are used first in Leningrad textbook and other works from that tradition, including Gollobin into a database here that will be helpful as a Translation Memory for Chinese to English translators enhancing the existing very rough machine translation of Ai Siqi for publication.

I will write separate notes about all of that soon.

But this is a head's up and hope that "somebody else" eg @DavidMc1948 could quickly add a .docx (or preferably .odt or even better .md file) generated from above link to file txtbkMarxPhilwIndx.pdf

I will try fiddling with pandoc to do pdf --> html --> markdown --> eoub

That should just be a one line script that could become clicked on via a Zotero menu item.

But I suspect Dave's software is faster and simpler route at present and will remain so until we have developers on board.

[DavidMc1948]

Word version to start with txtbkMarxPhilwIndx.docx

[artydont]

Great!!!

1. At 15:03 David responded here with docx that confirms no problem.
2. At 18:12 Ted responded to the email that got sent by github due to his @mention with an enthusiastic "can do" email direct to me.

Using LibreOffice Writer the docx exports fine to pdf and epub and saves to odt.

The Lord works in mysterious ways

Gone to bed.