Reading Journal 7

(In response to the second set of materials on Kollontai.)

Make way for Winged Eros

This particular reading I didn't have much to say on, because it seemed Kollontai didn't have that much to say, either. How can this be, across sixteen pages? Well, after setting up the question of the place of love in the new proletarian ideology, and giving a relatively uncontroversial interpretation (especially within a communist framework) of love's various functions throughout history, the picture she gives is not at all well filled-out. Granted, it's adorned with a lot of positive language (e.g. "unprecedented beauty, strength and radiance", p. 291), but all the paragraphs seemed to say the same thing without going into very much detail. The basic message was that love ought to turn from something limited to being expressed fully only within monogamy to something directed toward the collective. Practically this means caring for others and not isolating "loving pairs", but also not being sexually exclusive. I'm not sure what I can say about that besides the former being a healthy idea, as I've learned in life, and the latter being curious given Kollontai's denunciation of loveless sex ("wingless Eros") on the basis that it can entail "the early exhaustion of the organism, venereal diseases, etc." (p. 287) aside from not being fulfilling or useful to the collective. Perhaps the latter is the primary basis, but nonetheless, Kollontai doesn't seem to bother answering the question of how exactly all of these new "sexual relations will probably be based on free, healthy and natural attraction (without distortions and excesses) and on 'transformed Eros'," without the above-mentioned dangers, and without superhuman abilities to make sense of one's emotional and sexual attractions. She seems instead to sidestep this, placing her bets on an unknown love-comradeship: "What will be the nature of this transformed Eros? Not even the boldest fantasy is capable of providing the answer to this question." (p. 290) Whereas Kollontai believes that "surely the complexity of the human psyche and the many-sidedness of emotional experience should assist in the growth of the emotional and intellectual bonds between people," (p. 288) I think human culture has a long way to go before that complexity can start working for our benefit in the context of free sexual relations. I see our complexity as a limit, one that makes it much wiser to commit to one person than to try to take on the world. For me, this is precisely the reason that non-isolation of a couple is essential: only then can others healthily promote their relationship and help each of them to grow in loving the other, and only then can their relationship likewise be about the good of others besides themselves. So in many ways I agree with her aims, and her model of a particular male-female relationship given in three points on p. 291 is absolutely something to strive for, but it would much more healthily and with emotional manageability be done within the maintenance of sexual relationships and deep friendships being in two categories with only a one-person overlap.


The Lady With the Pet Dog

I have little context within which to evaluate Chekhov's story here, besides Kollontai's Winged Eros, even though it was written a number of years later. Before we get into that, there were a few elements that stood out to me, elements of both Dmitry and Anna Sergeyevna's perspectives that I identify with fairly strongly. With Dmitry it's the haziness of his existence that I experience pretty often, or at least have for the past few years, and probably before it too, but the haze brings with it selective or faulty memory too, as Dmitry notices on p. 423. At times I also feel somewhat like Anna Sergeyevna when she says, "I wanted something better. 'There must be a different soft of life,' I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live!" (p. 418) Although the rest of the context of that statement is where we differ, I still feel that element of her life in my own. It was odd to me to identify with both of them, since they're both very different characters. But other than this facet of engagement, the story was straightforward and only interrupted by the poetic prose on pp. 419f as highlighted by the handwritten note in our photocopy. The "movement towards perfection" mentioned therein, and the idea of such movement (or at least movement forward from what is) present in Kollontai's piece above, leave me to comment mostly just that the ending of Pet Dog seems to lament the hypocrisy of their relationship, or rather, everything but their relationship, and long with the two of them for some way that their "real" love might some how be able to be freely lived out. It feels tragic that movement towards this will "be most complicated and difficult" under these "intolerable fetters." (p. 433) Thus it would seem that Kollontai and Chekhov are aligned in wanting relationships to be more freely moved between, and allowing "love" (in its various meanings to the two of them) to be allowed to function well without being hindered by the social constructs of the time. Chekhov doesn't at all engage the economic motivation behind this as Kollontai does, just noting that Anna Sergeyevna's and Dmitry's estates both have money. Nor does it seem to mean anything similar to Kollontai's vision of being able to care deeply for the collective. In fact, how their relationship comes about suggests that it doesn't even end in line with Kollontai's three-point vision for male-female relationships: while he sincerely feels compassion towards her, her earlier repeated lament over losing his respect when they first begin their affair doesn't seem to resolve here. Perhaps, then, criticisms of Kollontai over her advocacy of "looseness," while not necessarily without legitimacy whatsoever, would be better lobbed at Chekhov; nonetheless, the general question of love remains.


Three Generations

Wow. Well, it seems I read these in a convenient order, with Kollontai's previous essay informing my interpretation of the story, and Chekhov in there for her reference to Chekhovian characters, although that was minor. Yet again I find it difficult to find much to say about the reading of any interest. On the surface, at least, it seems to just prove correct the objections in my interpretation of Winged Eros, that anything beyond monogamy is emotionally unmanageable, not to mention being necessarily complicated well beyond practicality. At the same time, though, Zhenya and Andrei's stance might seem to support Kollontai on this point, and confirm Olga's suspicions that she's just behind the times psychologically. Yet from my view the way all of the Eros relationships in the story end, and the grief they cause before they end, and the fact that they all come to an end, doesn't in my mind do much to promote the stable environment of mutual care among members of the collective for which Kollontai hopes. She might counter, however, that this ability, realized fully only by the third generation, of relationships to break more cleanly (Zhenya only hints at jealousy on the part of the man in the case of her breakups, but not as something she heeds) can at once allow sexual fulfillment as needed and yet allow for the movement of labour across the country as expediency dictates on behalf of the proletariat. It's the fundamental disagreement I have with Kollontai as described in the first part of my response above that seems to result in our differing interpretations of the same situation. Obviously she would not have written this story if she thought it flew in the face of what she believed about love's place in the world, so I think it's valid to interpret these three generations, as described, as a movement toward the aspirations found in her essay. But I still disagree with her; I don't think it helps women, or men, to relate to one another the way her characters do.

She does appear to honestly engage the more striking inconsistencies that arise in her characters' stories, but to me, even the explained conclusions are not viable. To do this, she has the narrator interject during Zhenya's story and has Zhenya reconcile the points in question. Why didn't she tell her mother immediately? "I didn't think it concerned her." (p. 207) This does make sense in her context, but how this is the type of sensitivity she wants people to have toward one another, I cannot see. To the question of how she could love her mother so much and yet put her through so much pain, she objects, "If I'd thought for one moment, if I'd known that Mother would take it this way . . . I would never have done it." (p. 209) To me, defining sensitivity in such a way as to exclude this thought from occurring to Zhenya--who loves her mother more than Lenin, who she would also die for--is to make it meaningless.

In a related thread about the nature of love, it may be that Kollontai has merely not fleshed this out in my mind, but it seems that her exclusion of the notion of self-sacrifice from love is the root of our disagreement. One might say, that's not true: the idea of dying for and of giving anything for the avoidance of pain for a loved one are both present even in Zhenya's talk. (p. 209) But the self-sacrifice I'm talking about it of one's life in the sense of its ongoing totality, a continuous renegotiation of oneself and subordination of one's interests and inclination for the true good of another. It feels as if she shies away from this kind of altruism because of how it has previously been an enabler of domination over the proletariat and especially over women; instead it must be channeled solely towards the collective. Fair enough, it has been abused; but so has any other form of trust of another human being, and communism certainly can't function without that. This isn't Kollontai's view; the narrator does wonder who is right. (p. 211) Yet, it still feels as if she tries to convey that everything does work out in this situation, that all she need do is convey to Olga that Zhenya really loves her and isn't coldly rational about everything. Hopefully our discussion in class will shed some light on all of this.