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The last time I wrote about books that have influenced me (a daunting topic, considering how many books I absolutely love and have read and reread) was in 2004. This was the post:
http://maeve66.livejournal.com/16360.html
But in that post, Alexandra Kollontai was an afterthought. I don't know how that's possible, really. Reading her novel The Love of Worker Bees was one of the formative feminist moments of my life, and that's saying something, because I resisted feminist politics for quite some time, weird reductionist orthodox marxist that I was, as a teenager.
What's bringing me to writing about her at the moment is partly running across that old entry, and partly finding a new icon (of her) that I like, see above, and partly having talked with a friend about her, and looking at Wikipedia and being pissed off that her entry is so short and doesn't discuss her writing. The assholes. Or, I guess, asshole, whoever wrote it. Maybe this will motivate me to learn how to suggest edits for Wikipedia? I do dearly love that people's encyclopedia.
Here's a link to that wanting Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
Anyway... when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a bunch of adult comrades from the oppositionist current in the Socialist Workers' Party that my parents belonged to, and that I was not allowed to join*-- a current that aligned itself with the Fourth International majority, thus a great deal less orthodox and less dogmatic -- led by Ernest Mandel, etc. ANYWAY (like any of that means anything to most people who chance to read my LJ), several comrades gave me her novel, The Love of Worker Bees, for my birthday. I've read her other major novel, A Great Love, which is purportedly a roman à clef about Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, too, but not as frequently.
The Love of Worker Bees was a deliberate attempt by Kollontai to write a novel that was accessible to the masses of Russian working women which could set out the problems of building a new society, and especially the gendered difficulties in doing that.
Her main character is a factory worker (I'm working from memory here, as I cannot find any of my three copies of this book) named Vasilisa, aka Vasya, Vasyuk (oh, I have sympathy with that nickname), etc. She's an active cadre in the Bolshevik Party, and a leader of her women's sections, and her companion is assigned somewhere else in the Soviet Union -- he turns out, if I'm not mistaken, to be a NEPman, and thus repellent to her. She's trying to set up a communal household where women will be able to collectivize the necessary childcare, etc. There are explorations of nonmonogamy, and of women's work, and of the whole notion that even in a revolutionary context, or maybe especially in one, the personal is political. I'd never encountered that idea before, and it still took several years before it sank in deep enough.
But the book's passionate -- and, ultimately, disappointed -- argument for socialist feminist vision was amazing to me. I really need to get another copy and reread it. And I wouldn't mind finding A Great Love, too. God, it's annoying that so many of my most important books are STILL in my father's house. His basement, anyway.
*that is, the majority current would not allow me to join the SWP (or the "youth" group, the YSA) because it was perfectly obvious that that would be double recruitment, as I would have instantly joined the minority/opposition current. Well, yes.
http://maeve66.livejournal.com/16360.html
But in that post, Alexandra Kollontai was an afterthought. I don't know how that's possible, really. Reading her novel The Love of Worker Bees was one of the formative feminist moments of my life, and that's saying something, because I resisted feminist politics for quite some time, weird reductionist orthodox marxist that I was, as a teenager.
What's bringing me to writing about her at the moment is partly running across that old entry, and partly finding a new icon (of her) that I like, see above, and partly having talked with a friend about her, and looking at Wikipedia and being pissed off that her entry is so short and doesn't discuss her writing. The assholes. Or, I guess, asshole, whoever wrote it. Maybe this will motivate me to learn how to suggest edits for Wikipedia? I do dearly love that people's encyclopedia.
Here's a link to that wanting Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
Anyway... when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a bunch of adult comrades from the oppositionist current in the Socialist Workers' Party that my parents belonged to, and that I was not allowed to join*-- a current that aligned itself with the Fourth International majority, thus a great deal less orthodox and less dogmatic -- led by Ernest Mandel, etc. ANYWAY (like any of that means anything to most people who chance to read my LJ), several comrades gave me her novel, The Love of Worker Bees, for my birthday. I've read her other major novel, A Great Love, which is purportedly a roman à clef about Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, too, but not as frequently.
The Love of Worker Bees was a deliberate attempt by Kollontai to write a novel that was accessible to the masses of Russian working women which could set out the problems of building a new society, and especially the gendered difficulties in doing that.
Her main character is a factory worker (I'm working from memory here, as I cannot find any of my three copies of this book) named Vasilisa, aka Vasya, Vasyuk (oh, I have sympathy with that nickname), etc. She's an active cadre in the Bolshevik Party, and a leader of her women's sections, and her companion is assigned somewhere else in the Soviet Union -- he turns out, if I'm not mistaken, to be a NEPman, and thus repellent to her. She's trying to set up a communal household where women will be able to collectivize the necessary childcare, etc. There are explorations of nonmonogamy, and of women's work, and of the whole notion that even in a revolutionary context, or maybe especially in one, the personal is political. I'd never encountered that idea before, and it still took several years before it sank in deep enough.
But the book's passionate -- and, ultimately, disappointed -- argument for socialist feminist vision was amazing to me. I really need to get another copy and reread it. And I wouldn't mind finding A Great Love, too. God, it's annoying that so many of my most important books are STILL in my father's house. His basement, anyway.
*that is, the majority current would not allow me to join the SWP (or the "youth" group, the YSA) because it was perfectly obvious that that would be double recruitment, as I would have instantly joined the minority/opposition current. Well, yes.
