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

[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.

[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.