Sri Aurobindo

The Harmony of Virtue

Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910)

Note on this e-publication

During the history of publication of Sri Aurobindo’s works, their texts were modified here and there — sometimes by elementary misprints, but more often because of the hard work of editors, who:

(1) discovered and encrypted unprinted manuscripts or their parts (this was a best part of what they could do);

(2) corrected previous misprints or unsound modifications (a sound part of their work);

(3) corrected Sri Aurobondo’s factual or grammatical inexactnesses or mistakes or grammatical characteristics (i.e. s / z) (what would be appropriate only in footnotes, but not in the text itself);

(4) made innumerable “improvements” of the texts, when original words were replaced by more “appropriate” ones; articles changed most freely; the tenses of verbs and the singular and plural of nouns were often modified (and all these “improvements” deform in some degree — even if in hardly notable — the meaning, intonation, nuance, manner, style and therefore are inadmissible; and, after all, we need Sri Aurobindo’s words, not editor’s);

(5) combined  (using sometimes invented insertions or modifying texts) different texts (or some parts of them) as if it were one solid work (this also deforms meaning and context of originals and often brings strange feeling when one style or tone is strangely jumped to another. It would be too licentious even in someone’s work based on Sri Aurobindo’s writings, but it is absolutely inadmissible in a book pretended to be a collection of HIS works);

(6) cut off parts of the texts (especially of the letters) under pretext that they are not of “general interest” — although, rather, to fit the remains to a subject of a book or its section (and this is the most disgusting spoilage and uncorrectable and grievous loss).

So now we have Sri Aurobondo’s works with varied places — when one of variants, perhaps, is authentic, while other — not quite. May be some day we will see realy Complite Works of Sri Aurobindo without prenominate defects. But now, what can we do, when we have not originals at hand to check alternatives against them?

(1) Sometimes we can correct situation No 5 — i.e. separate different texts, joined together.

(2) Sometimes we can correct situation No 6 — whenever we find full version, we can provide fragment of the text by footnote with full version or even replace this fragment by full version.

(3) We can evince most of the cases of situations Nos  3 and 4. For this purpose we compared the texts of different editions and provide differing places with appropriate footnotes in our files. (By the way, this symbol by symbol comparison allowed us also to avoid misprints of scanning and OCR procedures.) And when this comparison does not make us sure which variant is authentic, we, at least, become aware of the fact and details of such variations.

To distinguish numerous footnotes of this kind we used special style: (1) colour of numbers of footnotes are dark red; (2) when cursor is placed over differing piece, its background is changed to light red (also it allows readers to compare easily differing place in a text with a pop-up hint that contains alternative variant).

During this comparison, to avoid overloading of the texts by footnotes, we ignored differences of register, punctuation, paragraphs, variants of languages or transliterations of the same word (for example, in one edition the word is printed in English transliteration, in another – in Devanagari), sometimes — variants of proper names (especially solid or separate spelling). Also we did not made any footnotes in cases of distinct misprints — just corrected them.

In the footnotes of every file we added a link to another edition of current work (if it exists).

In the Contents above, opposite every work (to the right) we indicated compared edition:

¹ The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.- ISBN 81-7058-496-5

² The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 12.- Essays Divine and Human.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997.- 519 p.

³ The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 5.- Translations.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1999.- 628 p.

⁴ The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 13.- Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Shorter Works. 1910 – 1950.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998.- 604 p.

^N The work was not compared with other editions. They were just checked against another scans to correct misprints of scanning and OCR procedures.