KESSEL (Joseph). [Makhno]. The Heir of Stenka Razine. Complete autograph manuscript, signed in fine, dated "Paris, 21 August 1934". 12 pages (13.5 x 21 cm) recto and the last handwritten page halfway down the verso, numbered. Complete manuscript, compact and without margins, with a few erasures and corrections, which was used for printing in the newspaper Marianne. Famous article opening with a Russian history and a long portrait of Stenka Razine, a Cossack who led the peasant uprising against the Tsarist government in 17th-century Russia. Kessel compares him to the band leader and patriot Nestor Makhno (1888-1934), the Ukrainian hero of the anarchist revolutionary movement, who had just died in Paris on 25 July in total destitution. Kessel, who had personally known the infernal Bolshevik, accused of anti-Semitism, had portrayed him in 1926 as cruel and bloodthirsty, in his famous story Makhno et sa juive (Éos). It was through the account of a witness that Kessel drew this new portrait in 1934. "Idol for some, symbol of terror for others, he had built himself a kind of pedestal on the corpses and booty piled up in a jumble". This manuscript is divided into two chapters (6 and 6 pages), corresponding to the two parts published in Emmanuel Berl's literary weekly Marianne on 22 and 29 August 1934. The first page bears the title Makhno in red pencil.