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PREFACE
I
From the bottom of the people. Unnatural feelings. Legends of cruel love. Alien worlds. Feverish thoughts. Woman’s tender word. Sense of the real self. Romantic soul. Ultimate suffering. Innermost desire. Litmus test of love. Real woman. Study of love. Nightmares of doppelgangers
II
Justified risk. Fast love. Broads in the past. Woman’s freedom. Disturbing yellow flowers. Struggle for love. Substitution of one’s nature. Heaviest vice. Liberation by love. Uncommon mercy
III
Madness of love. Under the power of a woman. Grammar of love. Picture of first love. Disappearance of time. Compassionate tenderness. Scales of love. Undercurrents. Assemblage of personality. Intolerability of eternal inseparability. Mean-spirited insult. Return to authenticity. Self-deception of love. Compass of love
IV
Quenching a long-standing thirst. How to awaken love? Compulsion to love. Materialization of sensual ideas. Healing of the emptied mind. Sharpness of human audacity. Golden keys of hearts. Shards of porcelain love. From divine love to revolutionary love
V
Crazy summer. System of dramas. Demon in love. Pulse of romanticism. Pool of the universe. Primary foundations. Visibility of the present. Barrier of spiritual development. Firstness of first love. Second birth. Grand novel. Great love. General molding of the world. Many sins. Weight of a guilty conscience. Lines of immortality
VI
Kitchen of a scandalous novel. Chill of inspiration. Perilous Magic of nymphets. Island of enchanted time. Union of the intentional and the accidental. Doubling of reality. Great bright sin. Redemption of love
VII
All ages are submissive. Bringing back the past. Dazed love. Long affliction. Who is to blame? Essence of things. Happy marriage. Chaos of a beautiful world. Unforgiveness and all-forgiveness. Saddest loss. Mysterious strife of two souls
VIII
Modern subject. Fork in the road of love. Unified principles of morality. Complete man. The secret of true love. Lessons of confession. Cure for love. Love, know your place. Era of subjectivity. Born from nothingness. Shifting the object of love
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX
ILLUSION OF LOVE’S SYMMETRY
TESTIMONY OF LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ
CONFESSIONS OF NATALIE HERZEN
DEFENSE OF ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAY
ALL ARE FREE
In the third part of the book The Paths of Russian Love we will try to find out what new for the understanding of love was given by the seventy-year experiment in the implantation of romantic relationships on the new social soil created in the Land of Soviets. Three vectors of Russian love (romantic, rational and deep), which we found in its Golden – XIX – century, at the turn of the XX century in the Silver Age converged in one key point: an incredibly charged search for ideas, forces and energies for the formation of a new man, able to live, love and create fully and happily. A vivid representative of the main cultural and philosophical current of the Silver Age, Zinaida Gippius believed that the labors of the Symbolists to find the keys to the mysteries of human nature were not in vain, that at the end of the «dark corridors», where they had to descend, «glimmered a white dot.» But the hard-won knowledge remained fragmented, difficult to convey, and accessible only to those «to whom it is time to hear.»
Looking at the deep gap between the Russian Empire and the Soviet country, we would do well to rely on some courageous guide to connect the cultural epochs of the country torn apart by revolution and civil war. It is not easy to find one. Those who, like Alexandra Kollontai, set the tone for radical transformations in love relationships, diverged sharply from both traditional family life and hypocritical bourgeois morality on the sexual issue. Others, like Mikhail Bulgakov, if they touched on this «secondary» issue compared to the class struggle, they resorted to fantastic plots and mythological images. The most suitable for this role is the world-famous writer Maxim Gorky, an indefatigable vagabond, fighter and toiler according to the symbolism of his ancestral surname Peshkov and a connoisseur of both the lowest and the highest social strata in their bitter underside hidden for the fearful eye, who was not deceived in the choice of his main literary pseudonym after a short stay as Yehudiel Khlamida.
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In this autobiographical story we can also find a third component of Gorky’s feelings of love – a «romantic dream» associated with the peculiarity of his nature, manifested in the unbearableness of human suffering, especially when it is associated with violence and insults, which «threw him out of life». For Gorky, this was an internal «litmus test», a tuning fork of kinship of souls. When he discovered deep-rooted spiritual callousness in his loved ones, something broke off in his own soul, and he became cold to them. He cites the case of how his first love exposed her inability to share compassion for a one-eyed old Jewish man who had been humiliatingly beaten by a policeman, imagining a picture of inhuman abuse painted with «anguish and anger» and concluding that her husband was too impressionable and had «bad nerves.» To this we can add that, according to the testimony of the daughter of Gorky’s second common-law wife, Maria Andreyeva, a sharp «divergence of political opinions» regarding the rejection of repression and bloody massacre of the Bolsheviks against their apparent and fictitious political enemies, was one of the reasons for the breakup of passionately begun, cemented by friendship and joint work sixteen-year relationship.
At the conclusion of the story Gorky, respectfully calling Olga Kamenskaya а glorious, «real woman», explains how this was expressed. A real woman of Gorky liked it when he, «barely touching the skin of her face with his fingers, smoothed out the slightly noticeable wrinkles under her lovely eyes»; «loved her body and, naked, standing in front of the mirror, admired»; was «restlessly cheerful by nature, witty, flexible, like a snake»; never once complained about the difficult conditions of life; «could sew beautifully» and dress up; was original in her interest in people, believing that «suddenly there is something stored there that is not visible to anyone, never shown, only I alone – and I am the first – will see it».
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