Alexandra Kollontai is an unusually colorful figure: the daughter of a tsarist general, the first female minister in history, one of the best diplomats of the newborn Land of Soviets and an ardent supporter of free love, she expressed the feelings and passions that overwhelmed many of her contemporaries more clearly than others.
Alexandra Kollontai is an unusually colorful figure: the daughter of a tsarist general, the first female minister in history, one of the best diplomats of the newborn Land of Soviets and an ardent supporter of free love, she expressed the feelings and passions that overwhelmed many of her contemporaries more clearly than others. Her prose, for the first time in several decades so fully published in our country, is primarily a monument to the era: the stories of the heroines of Kollontai (the current book includes seven novels and short stories, as well as a letter to working youth) are inseparable from the terrible and, in its own way, great post-revolutionary period. However, the challenges they face are strikingly modern: how to balance private life and hard work? Should one sacrifice one’s calling in the name of great love? And although the answers to these eternal questions that Kollontai gives are dictated primarily by the norms of «proletarian morality», many of them allow us to take a fresh look at seemingly completely obvious things.
ABC Classics, 384 p.