Von Bagh was great at two things that go very well together: concepts and improvisation – he enjoyed working inside a framework that would allow him to react spontaneously to whatever happened right there and then. In the case of Päivä Karl Marxin haudalla this meant: Let’s spend the 100th anniversary of the great thinker’s demise by his grave and see what happens; if nobody travels to London’s Highgate cemetery to pay homage on that very special day: telling enough; and if masses of people show up: that will be meaningful as well. The latter happened: on March 14th 1983, von Bagh was able to talk with people from some 20+ nations about the meaning of Marx’s ideas and ideals, whether they have a future, and how that might look. One wonders what they would say now, thirty-two years later…