Kollontai 150: Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai

by Alexandra Kollontai

New

Genres: Nonfiction

114 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2022

About the author

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Russian: Александра Михайловна Коллонтай — née Domontovich, Домонтович was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1923, Kollontai was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, one of the first women to hold such a post (Diana Abgar was earlier).

Reviews

[Manggala Bagaskoro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not rating Kollontai's ideas. I'm rating the translation Marjin Kiri provides this book.

[rui · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

i really like her critique of bourgeois feminism and her effort to formulate a form of proletarian emancipation that takes women’s material conditions into account. she rejects equality as a political goal. without a material basis, she sees it as dangerous because it ignores the biological and social realities women experience (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding). by overlooking these, policies that only pursue “equality” can end up becoming a form of symbolic and practical violence, placing the same demands on women as on men without acknowledging the additional burdens they carry. for her, it’s about giving people what they actually need to participate equally, while recognizing their different starting points and conditions.

the book is short but very dense, containing four key writings by kollontai, ranging from the early women’s movement to her broader values and worldview. my favorite part was reading about the history of the women’s movement in russia and the tensions between proletarian and bourgeois feminists. the first wave of the women’s movement in russia was indeed led by upper-class and raznochintsy women. their main goals were access to education, higher education, and entry into professions. many feminist organizations at the time focused heavily on charitable work, seeing their role as helping the less fortunate. but kollontai argued that philanthropy was an insult. it treated the symptoms of poverty while ignoring its root cause (capitalism) and reinforced the power of the giver over the receiver. this critique later became the official line of the russian social democrats (both bolsheviks and mensheviks) in distinguishing themselves from “bourgeois feminists”.

and lastly, her ideas about love are really important. love and marriage are not just private matters, but social institutions shaped by class struggle and economic needs. from the blunt honesty of feudalism to the subtle hypocrisy of capitalism, sexual morality has always served material functions, regulating property, inheritance, and labor. as long as people remain tied to the need to pass down capital, love will never be free from class interests.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very precious book to me. It took five months to arrive after my order. It is published by LeftWord books, based in New Delhi. It is probably print on demand. It is probably part of un/popular culture now...

But it is fabulous.

This book explores 'emancipation through work.' It commemorates Kollontai's 150th birthday. The essays have been published in other fora. But the framing essays by Julia Camara, Atiliana da Silva Vicente Brunetto and Andrea Francine Batista are outstanding.

This is a moving collection. It is so emotionally engaging because Kollontai investigates love, intimacy, sex and how the personal - indeed - becomes political.

These are fine translations, and carefully gathered and considered essays.

Excellent. Moving. Powerful.

[Comrade Zupa Ogórkowa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cute, essential readings of one of the OG proletarian feminists.

[Aryanne De Ocampo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introductory essay from Julia Cámara is also particularly enlightening and useful in framing a reader's lens in revisiting Kollontai's work today.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Make Way For Winged Eros" is 5 stars.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this freely available eBook -- produced as a collaboration between multiple publishing houses -- come out just as I had been thinking about reading some of Kollontai's work. I'm currently reading What Is to Be Done?, which considers what love looks like with gender equality and without patriarchal/bourgeois social expectations. This novel was particularly influential for Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the century, and indeed Kollontai references this work in her essay Winged Eros, included in this collection:

Under the rule of bourgeois ideology and the capitalist way of life, the complexity of love creates a series of complex and insoluble problems. By the end of the nineteenth century the many-sidedness of love had become a favourite theme for writers with a psychological bent. Love for two or even three has interested and perplexed many of the more thoughtful representatives of bourgeois culture. In the sixties of the last century our Russian thinker and writer Alexander Herzen tried to uncover this complexity of the inner world and the duality of emotion in his novel Who Is Guilty?, and Cheryshevsky tackled the same questions in his novel What is to be Done?, Poetic geniuses such as Goethe and Byron, and bold pioneers in the sphere of relations between the sexes such as George Sand, have tried to come to terms with these issues in their own lives; the author of Who Is Guilty? also knew of the problems from his own experience, as did many other great thinkers, poets and public figures. And at this present moment many “small” people are weighed down by the difficulties of love and vainly seek for solutions within the framework of bourgeois thought. But the key to the solution is in the hands of the proletariat. Only the ideology and the life-style of the new, labouring humanity can unravel this complex problem of emotion.

I enjoyed that essay a lot, as well as the first essay by Julia Cámara, which gave great context into Kollontai's work, as well as into how to consider and contextualize the writing of the "classics."

One of Kollontai’s most important innovations is precisely this: having identified love as a social construct half a century before feminism began to say the same about gender. It was not until the most recent elaborations of the feminist movement and the critique of the ‘romantic love’ model that we find something similar to what Kollontai did a hundred years ago and, even so, it does so with much weaker political connotations and implications. Her proposal is not based on thinking about what each of our separate relationships should be like (individual ethical criteria), but on the type of interpersonal ties and bonds that we need to build a classless, fairer, happier and fulfilled society.

The other essays dealt more with advocating for women's interests from within a socialist movement, and were also interesting. Kollontai has a reputation for having been a great orator, and I think that shines through in her writing.