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Love of Worker Bees, three stories by Alexandra Kollontai (Virago, £2.50)
When the communist mother of Zhenya in "Three Generations' discovers that her daughter has been having sexual relations with men she "likes" but does not "love", she feels puzzled and hurt by this new, modern behaviour. "There's nothing — no love, no suffering, no remorse, nothing. Only a sort of icy self-confidence and an insistence on their right to seize happiness however and wherever they may find it." The irony is that she in her youth had two lovers, and had fought against her mother's belicf that she must choose between them and follow the one she really' loved.
The challenge to such romantic ideas of love that was thrown up during the revolutionary ferment in Russia is the underlying theme of these three stories. Kollontai's conception of love itself may still be on the romantic side — it is an overwhelming passion, two people obsessed with one another but she puts forward what are, for her time, some startlingly new suggestions about the place of love in human relationships. These include the suggestion that people can love more than one person, that people can have sex, or companionship in marriage, without love, and also that people should not live together when love and understanding has died. The impulse to sweep away hypocritical bourgeois standards was vital to the new morality of the carly '20s.
In her handling of this theme, Kollontai reveals herself as more of a political activist than a literary talent. The characters may seem wooden and the situations contrived, but they are firmly rooted in history, in the changing and confusing situation of women and in the pressing social and economic problems. For example, work is tremendously important to all the women, though this is frequently resented by the men, who wish to be 'providers" and also 'consumers" - of a comfortable, cican home and an attentive wife. Traditional views of women are used by the men as a weapon in arguments: "Look here, I'm absolutely fed up with these hysterical female outbursts of yours!" he said, finally losing his temper. *Females! All the same! Every single damned oneof you!"
The new, independent women, on the other hand, are able to refrain from using their traditional weapon against men — pregnancy. Zhenya, who is too busy to raise a child, arranges an abortion, while Vasilisa Malygina can look forward to bringing up her baby alone, with the help of a creche and her fellow workers. The mother in "Sisters" is, however, less lucky; the New Economic Policy (NEP) forces her creche to close and she eventually loses her job. When poor relations with her husband then force her to leave home, she has little choice other than prostitution. This last story is an anguished reminder of the vulnerability of women, particularly during economic troubles, and ends with a fighting response typical of suggest that early Marxist theory contains the Kollontai: 'It demanded an answer from us. action, work, struggle..."
The consequences of the NEP are also shown in the characters of the men, when previously sound militants are undermined by the requirements of business, and the attractions of a bourgeois life-style. It is perhaps a little idealistic that none of the women are affected in the same way. However, one important change in women's attitudes is brought out - the development of sisterhood. The woman in 'Sisters" is able to sympathise with and help the prostitute her husband has brought home, while Vasilisa Malygina resolves her personal crisis by writing a letter to her husband's mistress: *as one sister to another, I want you to be happy -.. We're not enemies, you and I. We never intended to cause each other so much pain."
Kollontai has no easy answers; nor are the problems new to socialist-feminists today. What the stories do offer us is an idea of what it felt like for women, living through the excitements and disappointments of those revolutionary years, and facing for the first time some of the dilemmas still with us today. One reviewer of Kollontai's stories in 1923 wondered why has Gosizdat brought out this pathetic rubbish.... it would be in place on a ladies fashion counter; it should not be allowed in any libraries'. Let's hope present-day socialists will have a different reaction!
BARBARA BROWN such are incompatible with Marxism as a theory