You ask me, my young comrade, what place proletarian ideology gives to love. It troubles you that working youth at present seem "more taken up with love and all the questions attached to it" than with the great tasks facing the workers' republic. If that is so — and at this distance it is hard for me to judge — then let us look for the explanation of it, and we shall find it easier to answer your first question too: what place does love occupy in the ideology of the working class?
I. Love as a socio-psychological factor
Soviet Russia has plainly entered a new phase of the civil war. The revolutionary front has shifted to the struggle between two ideologies, two cultures, the bourgeois and the proletarian. The incompatibility of these two ideologies grows plainer by the day, and the opposition between two fundamentally different cultures grows sharper.
Along with the victory of communist principles and ideals in politics and economics, a revolution must come in the outlook, the feelings, the whole inner life of working humanity. Already a new attitude is taking shape towards life, towards society, towards labour, towards art, towards the "rules of life" — that is, morality. And relations between the sexes form part of those rules. The revolution on the spiritual front completes the great shift in human thinking brought about by five years of the workers' republic.
But the sharper the struggle between the two ideologies, and the more territory it takes in, the more inevitably humanity is confronted by new "riddles of life" — problems to which only the ideology of the working class can give a satisfactory answer.
Among these problems is the one you raise: the riddle of love, the question of relations between the sexes. It is a riddle as old as human society itself. At different stages of its historical development humanity has approached its solution differently. The riddle remains; the keys change. And the keys depend on the epoch, on the class, on the "spirit of the age" — on culture.
Until recently, here in Russia, in the years of intense civil war and the struggle against economic ruin, this riddle occupied very few people. Other feelings, other more urgent passions and experiences had possession of working humanity. Who in those years would have taken love's griefs and torments seriously, when eyeless death stood at everyone's shoulder, and the question was which would win — the revolution, and with it progress, or the counter-revolution, and with it reaction? Before the terrible face of that great rebel, the revolution, tender-winged Eros, the god of love, had to vanish in fright from the surface of life. There was neither time nor strength of soul to spare for love's "joys and torments". Such is the law by which the socio-emotional energy of humanity is conserved: the sum of that energy is always directed upon the chief and nearest aim of the historical moment. For a time the master of the situation was the simple, natural voice of nature — the biological instinct of reproduction, the attraction of two sexual beings. Men and women came together and parted easily, far more easily and more simply than before. They came together without great emotion and parted without tears or pain.
Our love was without gladness,
our parting will be without grief.
Prostitution, it is true, was disappearing; but there was a marked increase in free intercourse between the sexes, without mutual obligations, driven by the bare instinct of reproduction unadorned by any experience of love. The fact alarmed some people. In reality relations between the sexes could not have taken any other shape in those years. Either a marriage went on resting on a firm and tested feeling of comradeship, on friendship of many years, made firmer still by the gravity of the moment; or else a sexual union arose in passing, in the middle of the work, to satisfy a purely biological need which both sides hurried to be rid of, so that it should not interfere with the main thing, the essential thing — the work of the revolution.
The naked instinct of reproduction, the attraction that arises easily and passes quickly, without bonds of heart and mind — wingless Eros — consumes less spiritual strength than the demanding winged Eros, that love woven out of the finest web of every kind of emotion of heart and mind. Wingless Eros breeds no sleepless nights, does not soften the will, does not tangle the cold working of the intellect. A class of fighters, at a moment when the summoning bell of revolution rang without ceasing over working humanity, could not fall under the power of winged Eros. In those days it would have been inexpedient to squander the emotional strength of the members of a fighting collective on secondary experiences of the heart that served the revolution in no direct way. Individual love, the love that lies at the base of pair marriage and is directed upon one man or one woman, demands an enormous expenditure of emotional energy. And the builder of the new life, the working class, had an interest in spending economically not only its material wealth but the emotional and spiritual energy of each of its members, saving it for the common tasks of the collective. That is why it happened of its own accord that, at the moment of sharpest revolutionary struggle, the place of the all-consuming winged Eros was taken by the undemanding instinct of reproduction — by wingless Eros.
But now the picture is changing. The Soviet republic, and with it all working humanity, is entering a period of relative and temporary calm. The complicated work begins of taking in what has been won, achieved, created, and of putting it into practice. The proletariat, as builder of the new forms of life, must be able to draw its lesson from every social and spiritual phenomenon, to understand it, to grasp it and make it subject to itself, to turn that phenomenon into one more weapon in the class's self-defence. Only then, having mastered not merely the laws by which material wealth is created but the laws governing the movements of the heart, will the proletariat be able to stand armed to the teeth against the decrepit bourgeois world. Only then will working humanity manage to come out victorious not only on the military and the labour fronts but on the spiritual and cultural one.
Now that the revolution in Russia has prevailed and consolidated itself, now that the atmosphere of revolutionary battle no longer swallows a person whole and entire, tender-winged Eros, driven for a time into the thorn-bushes of neglect, is beginning once more to assert his rights. He frowns at the emboldened wingless Eros, at the instinct of reproduction unadorned by love's enchantments. Wingless Eros has ceased to satisfy the demands of the heart. A surplus of emotional energy accumulates, which people today, even in the working class, do not yet know how to apply to the spiritual and emotional life of the collective. That surplus energy of the soul seeks its outlet in the experience of love. The many-stringed lyre of the bright-winged little god of love drowns out the single-stringed voice of wingless Eros. Women and men now not only "come together", not only form a fleeting attachment to still the sexual instinct, as most often happened in the years of the revolution; they are beginning once again to live through love affairs, to know all the torments of love and all the winged happiness of mutual falling-in-love.
There is unmistakably a shift in the life of the Soviet republic towards a growth of emotional and spiritual demands, a reaching after knowledge, an enthusiasm for questions of science, for art, for the theatre. This shift towards taking possession of the spiritual riches of humanity, in the setting of the Soviet republic, inevitably takes in love as well. An interest is waking in the psychology of sex, in the riddle of love. Everyone touches this side of life to some degree. With astonishment one notices, in the hands of responsible officials who in past years read nothing but the leading articles of Pravda, minutes and reports — little volumes of fiction in which winged Eros is sung...
What is this? Reaction? A symptom that revolutionary creativity has begun to decline? Nothing of the kind. It is time to have done with the hypocrisy of bourgeois thinking. It is time to recognise openly that love is not only a commanding force of nature, a biological force, but a social factor as well. Love is by its essence a deeply social emotion. At every stage of human development, in various forms and kinds, love has entered as a necessary component into the spiritual culture of the given society. Even the bourgeoisie, while declaring love "a private matter", in fact knew perfectly well how to use moral norms to direct love into the channel that secured its class interests.
All the more must the ideology of the working class take account of the significance of love as a factor which can be directed — like any other psycho-social phenomenon — to the benefit of the collective. That love is not a "private" affair at all, not the business only of two loving hearts, that love contains a binding principle valuable to the collective, may be seen from this: that at every stage of its historical development humanity has established norms, rules, determining under what conditions and when love is "lawful" — that is, answers the interests of the given collective — and when it is "sinful", criminal, that is, runs counter to the tasks of the given society.
II. A historical note
From the very earliest stages of its social existence, humanity began to regulate not only sexual intercourse but love itself.
Under the clan system, morality raised to the highest virtue the love determined by blood kinship. In those times the clan and the tribe would have looked with disapproval on a woman who sacrificed herself for a beloved husband, and would on the contrary have counted the feelings of a brother's or a sister's attachment a virtue. Antigone, as the ancient Greeks told it, risks her life to bury the bodies of her fallen brothers, and this makes her a heroine in the eyes of her contemporaries. Modern bourgeois society would regard such an act on the part of a sister — not a wife — merely as an oddity.
In the age when the tribal principle prevailed and the first rudiments of statehood were being formed, the form of love that commanded the greatest reverence was friendship between two men of the same tribe. In those centuries it was of the utmost importance to a weak social collective, only just emerged from the stage of blood-kinship, to clamp its members together with bonds of the heart and spirit. The experience best suited to that purpose was not love between the sexes but love-as-friendship. The interests of the collective of that time required the growth and accumulation in humanity of emotional bonds not between the married pair but between fellow tribesmen, the organisers and defenders of the tribe and the state — men, of course; friendship between women was not spoken of in those days, since it was not a factor in social life. The love of friendship was sung and set above the love of husband and wife. Castor and Pollux were famed not for their services to their country but for their fidelity to one another and their unshakeable friendship. Friendship, or the show of it, made a husband who loved his wife yield her to the marriage bed of a beloved friend or of a guest with whom friendship had to be established.
Friendship, fidelity to a friend unto the grave, was numbered in the ancient world among the civic virtues. Love in the modern sense of the word played no part and drew almost no attention from the poets or dramatists of the time. The ruling ideology of that age placed love among the narrowly personal experiences with which society did not concern itself; marriage was built then on considerations of reason, not of love. Love was allotted a place only alongside other amusements; it was a luxury a citizen might permit himself once he had discharged all his duties towards the state. The "art of loving", a quality prized by bourgeois ideology so long as love does not step outside the bounds of bourgeois morality, was not taken into account by the ancient pagan world in reckoning a person's virtues and qualities. In antiquity only the feeling of friendship was valued. A man who performed great deeds and risked himself for a friend was honoured as a hero, and his act was placed squarely among the moral virtues. A man who risked himself for a beloved woman, on the contrary, drew only censure, even contempt. Of the love of Paris for the beautiful Helen, which brought on the Trojan War, the old stories speak as of a delusion whose consequence was universal misfortune.
The morality of the ancient world did not hold up as an example worthy of imitation even that love which inspires great deeds, as happened later under feudalism. The ancient world saw in friendship alone the emotion that bound fellow tribesmen together and gave greater stability to a social organism still weak. On the later steps of culture, by contrast, friendship ceases to count as a moral virtue. In bourgeois society, built on the principles of individualism and of furious competition and rivalry, there was no place for friendship as a moral factor. The age of capitalism regards friendship as a manifestation of sentimentality and as a weakness of spirit, unnecessary and harmful to the class tasks of the bourgeoisie.
Friendship becomes an object of mockery. Castor and Pollux in the New York or the City of London of today would raise no more than an indulgent smile. Nor did feudal society recognise friendship as a quality to be cultivated and encouraged in people.
Feudal rule rested on the strict observance of the interests of the noble family and the lineage. Virtues were defined less by the mutual relations of the members of that society than by the obligations of a member of the lineage towards the lineage and its traditions. Marriage was determined wholly by the interests of the family, and a young man — a girl had no will in the matter at all — who chose a wife contrary to those interests was severely condemned. In feudal times it was not permitted to set personal feeling, personal attraction, above the interests of the lineage; whoever did so was a sinner. In the understanding of feudal society, love and marriage were not required to coincide at all.
Nevertheless it was precisely in the feudal centuries that love between the sexes was by no means driven out; on the contrary, for the first time in human history it obtained a certain right of citizenship. At first sight it seems strange that love should have won recognition in exactly those centuries of the harshest asceticism, of coarse and cruel manners, of violence and the rule of seizure. But if one looks more closely at the causes that brought about the recognition of love as a socially lawful and even desirable phenomenon, it becomes clear what determined that recognition.
Love, in certain cases and in certain circumstances, can act as a motive force driving a person in love to a series of acts of which he would be incapable in another, less heightened and exalted state of soul. Chivalry, meanwhile, demanded of each of its members high and purely personal qualities in the business of war: fearlessness, courage, endurance and the rest. Battles in those centuries were decided less by the organisation of an army than by the individual qualities of those who fought in it. A knight in love with an unattainable lady of his heart performed miracles of bravery more readily, won single combats more readily, gave up his life more readily in the name of the fair lady. What drove the knight in love was the wish to distinguish himself, and so to win his beloved's favour.
Chivalric ideology took note of this, and having recognised love as a state of mind highly useful to the class tasks of the feudal estate, nonetheless set that feeling within definite bounds. The love of husband and wife was not valued or sung in those centuries; it was not what held together the family that lived in the knightly castles and the Russian boyars' chambers. Love was honoured as a social factor only where it was a matter of a knight in love with another man's wife, a love that drove him to feats of arms and other knightly deeds. The less attainable the woman, the more persistently the knight had to seek her favour, and the more he had to develop in himself the virtues and qualities prized in his estate: fearlessness, endurance, persistence, daring.
For their lady of the heart the knights usually chose precisely the least attainable woman: the wife of their overlord, often the queen. Only such spiritual love, unslaked in the flesh, spurring the knight to valorous deeds and making him work miracles of bravery, was held worthy of imitation and raised to a virtue. The knights almost never chose a maiden as the object of their adoration. However unattainably high above the knight a girl might stand on the feudal ladder, a knight's love for a maiden might lead to marriage, and with marriage the psychological motor that drove knights to great deeds inevitably disappeared. This feudal morality would not allow. Hence the combination of the ideal of asceticism, of sexual abstinence, with the raising of being-in-love to a moral virtue. In their zeal to purify love of everything fleshly and sinful, to turn love into an abstract feeling wholly severed from its biological base, the knights went to the most grotesque extremes: they chose as lady of the heart a woman they had never seen, or enrolled themselves as lovers of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. There was nowhere further to go.
Feudal ideology saw in love, in being-in-love, above all a stimulus strengthening the qualities knights required: spiritual love, the knight's adoration of his lady of the heart, served the interests of the knightly estate, and this determined the view of love in the age when feudalism flourished. A knight who would not have hesitated for a moment to shut his wife in a convent or even put her to death for infidelity of the flesh, for adultery, was greatly flattered if another knight chose his wife as lady of his heart, and did nothing to prevent her acquiring cicisbei — "spiritual friends" — among men.
But while it sang and exalted spiritual love, chivalric feudal morality by no means required that love should reign in lawful marriage or in any other intercourse of the sexes. Love was one thing, marriage another. Feudal ideology kept the two notions apart.1 They were joined only later, by the morality of the bourgeois class as it rose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That is why, in the Middle Ages, alongside an exalted refinement in the experience of love we meet such unimaginable coarseness of manners in relations between the sexes. Sexual intercourse outside marriage, and equally within the most lawful marriage, deprived of the spiritualising and adorning principle of love, turned into an act of the barest physiology.
The Church outwardly and hypocritically thundered against debauchery, but in praising "spiritual love" in words it in fact led towards a crudely animal intercourse of the sexes. The knight who never parted with his lady's emblem, who composed the tenderest verses in her honour and risked his life to win a single smile from her, would quite calmly rape a girl of the town estate, or order his steward to drive the handsomest peasant women up to the castle for his pleasure. The knights' wives, for their part, lost no opportunity of tasting the pleasures of the flesh in secret from their husbands with troubadours and pages, not refusing their caresses even to a servant who took their fancy, for all the contempt a feudal lady felt for the household staff.
With the weakening of feudalism and the growth of new conditions of life dictated by the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie, a new moral ideal of relations between the sexes gradually took shape. Casting aside the ideal of spiritual love, the bourgeoisie came forward in defence of the trampled rights of the body, putting into the very notion of love a simultaneous union of the physical and the spiritual principle. By bourgeois morality, marriage and love are on no account to be separated as the knightly estate separated them; on the contrary, marriage ought to be determined by the mutual attraction of those who marry. In practice, of course, the bourgeoisie itself constantly overstepped this moral commandment in the name of calculation, but the very recognition of love as the basis of marriage had deep class grounds.
Under the feudal order the family was held together by the imperious traditions of the noble family and the lineage. Marriage was in fact indissoluble; over the married pair weighed the commands of the Church, the unlimited authority of the head of the lineage, the power of family tradition, the will of the overlord.
The bourgeois family took shape in other conditions; its basis was not the joint possession of clan wealth but the accumulation of capital. The family was then the living keeper of wealth; but for accumulation to proceed faster it was important to the bourgeois class that the goods won by the hands of the husband and father should be spent thriftily, sensibly, with calculation — in other words, that the wife should be not only a good housekeeper but a real helper and companion to her husband.
With the establishment of capitalist relations and the bourgeois order, only that family could be secure in which, alongside economic calculation, there existed the cooperation of all its members, all of them interested in the act of accumulating wealth. And that cooperation could be the fuller the more bonds of heart and feeling tied the spouses to each other and the children to their parents.
The new economic life of those times, from the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, gives birth to a new ideology as well. The notions of love and of marriage are gradually transformed. The religious reformer Luther, and with him all the thinkers and men of action of the centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation, understood very well and took account of the social force in love. Recognising that the firmness of the family — that economic unit which serves as the foundation of the bourgeois order — required a bond of feeling between its members, the revolutionary ideologists of the rising bourgeoisie put forward a new moral ideal of love: a love uniting two principles, the fleshly and the spiritual. Taking up arms against the celibacy of the clergy, the reformers of that time mercilessly ridiculed the "spiritual love" of the knights, which kept the knight in love in a permanent state of amorous striving with no hope of slaking his bodily desires. The ideologists of the bourgeoisie, the men of the Reformation, recognised the lawfulness of the healthy demands of the body. The feudal world had divided love into the bare sexual act — intercourse in marriage, or with concubines — and "exalted", spiritual love, the knight's infatuation with his lady of the heart. The moral ideal of the bourgeois class included in the notion of love both a healthy bodily attraction of the sexes and an attachment of the heart. The feudal ideal separated love from marriage. The bourgeoisie bound the two notions together, making marriage and love into terms of one meaning. Of course the bourgeoisie constantly departed in practice from its own ideal; but whereas under feudalism the question of mutual inclination did not so much as arise in the striking of a marriage bargain, bourgeois morality demanded that even where a marriage was made by calculation, the spouses should hypocritically keep up the appearance of mutual love.
Survivals of feudal traditions and views of marriage and love have come down to our own time, passing through the centuries and living on beside the morality of the bourgeois class. Members of crowned families and the high aristocracy around them are guided by these views to this day. In that milieu it is thought laughable and awkward for a marriage to be made from mutual inclination. Young princes and princesses are still obliged to submit to the dead commands of family tradition and political calculation, joining their lives for ever to someone they do not love. History knows many dramas like that of the unhappy son of Louis XV, who went to the altar for his second marriage with the tears for his dearly loved dead wife not yet dry.
A like subordination of marriage to the considerations of lineage and household exists among the peasantry. The peasant family, unlike the family of the urban industrial bourgeoisie, is first of all a unit of labour and economy. Economic interest and calculation clamp and bind the peasant family so firmly that bonds of the heart play a secondary part. Among the craftsmen of the Middle Ages there was likewise no question of love in the making of a marriage. Under the guild system of crafts the family was also a unit of production and rested on a working, economic principle. The ideal of love in marriage begins to appear in the bourgeois class only when the family is gradually transformed from a unit of production into a unit of consumption, and at the same time serves as the keeper of accumulated capital.
But while it came forward in defence of the right of two loving hearts to make a union even against the traditions of the family, while it mocked spiritual love and asceticism and proclaimed love the basis of marriage, bourgeois morality nonetheless set love within very narrow bounds. Love is lawful only in marriage. Love outside lawful marriage is immoral. Such an ideal was dictated, of course, often enough by economic considerations: by the wish to prevent the dispersal of capital among children born outside the marriage. The whole morality of the bourgeoisie was founded on the drive to assist the concentration of capital. The ideal of love was the married pair jointly exerting themselves to raise the wellbeing and the wealth of a family cell set apart from society. Where the interests of the family and of society collided, bourgeois morality decided in the interests of the family. Consider its indulgence — not the law's indulgence but precisely that of bourgeois morality — towards deserters, or the moral acquittal of the shareholder who ruins his fellow shareholders for his family's sake. With the utilitarianism proper to it, the bourgeoisie sought to turn even love to profitable use, making that feeling and that experience into a ferment of marriage, a means of clamping the family together.
Naturally love did not fit within the bounds allotted to it by bourgeois ideology. Conflicts of love arose, bred and multiplied, and found their reflection in a new kind of literature: the novel, that form of imaginative writing born of the bourgeois class. Again and again love overflowed the narrow channel allotted to it in lawfully married relations, pouring out now in free unions, now in the form of the adultery that bourgeois morality condemns and bourgeois practice carries on.
The bourgeois ideal of love does not answer the needs of the most numerous layer of the population, the working class. Neither does it correspond to the life of the labouring intelligentsia. Hence, in the countries of highly developed capitalism, this interest in the problems of sex and of love, this search for a key to the solution of a riddle centuries old and full of torment: how are relations between the sexes to be built so that those relations, while raising the sum of happiness, should not run counter to the interests of the collective?
III. Love-comradeship
The new working, communist society is built on the principle of comradeship, of solidarity. But what is solidarity? It is not only an awareness of common interests but a bond of the spirit established between the members of a working collective. A social order built on solidarity and cooperation requires, however, that the society in question should possess a highly developed capacity for love — that is, the ability of people to feel sympathetic feelings. Without such feelings solidarity cannot be firm. That is why proletarian ideology strives to cultivate and strengthen in every member of the working class a feeling of responsiveness to the sufferings and needs of a fellow member of the class, a sensitive understanding of another's wants, a deep and searching awareness of one's connection with the other members of the collective. And all these sympathetic feelings — sensitivity, sympathy, responsiveness — flow from one common source: the capacity to love, to love not in the narrow sexual sense but in the broad meaning of the word.
Love is an emotion of the heart, binding and therefore organising in character. That love binds powerfully the bourgeoisie understood perfectly well and took into account. That is why, in its drive to make the family secure, bourgeois ideology raised conjugal love to a moral virtue; to be a good family man was, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, a large and valuable quality in a person.
The proletariat for its part cannot fail to take account of the psycho-social role which the feeling of love, both in the broad sense of the word and in relations between the sexes, can and must play in strengthening bonds — not in the sphere of family and marital relations but in the development of collectivist solidarity.
What then is the working class's ideal of love? What feelings and experiences does proletarian ideology place at the foundation of relations between the sexes?
We have already traced together, my young friend, how every epoch has its own ideal of love, how every class strives in its own interests to put its own content into the moral notion of love. Every stage of culture, bringing with it richer spiritual and emotional experience, repaints the tender hues of Eros's wings in its own particular colour. Following the successive stages of economic and social development, the content put into the notion of love was transformed too; shades of experience entering into love grew stronger, or on the contrary died away.
Out of the simple biological instinct — the drive to reproduce, common to every species from the highest animals to the lowest that are divided into sexes — love, over the millennia of human society's existence, grew complicated, accumulating ever new inner experience.2 From a biological phenomenon love became a psycho-social factor.
Under the action of economic and social forces the biological instinct of reproduction, which determined relations between the sexes at the early stages of humanity's development, underwent a transformation in two diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand the healthy sexual instinct — the attraction of two sexes to each other for reproduction — degenerated, under the pressure of deformed social and economic relations and especially under the rule of capitalism, into unhealthy lust. The sexual act turned into an end in itself, into a way of procuring oneself one more surplus pleasure, into a lust sharpened by excess, by perversions, by harmful goading of the flesh. A man comes together with a woman not because a healthy sexual attraction has drawn him irresistibly to that particular woman; on the contrary, the man seeks out a woman while feeling as yet no sexual need at all, in order that closeness to her should call up sexual attraction and so furnish him with the pleasure of the sexual act itself. Prostitution is built on this. If closeness to a woman fails to produce the expected arousal, people sated with sexual excess resort to perversions of every kind.
This is a deviation of the biological instinct that lies at the base of love between the sexes towards unhealthy lust, carrying the instinct far away from its original source.
On the other hand, over the millennia of humanity's social life and the succession of cultures, the bodily attraction of the two sexes has accumulated a whole deposit of experiences of heart and spirit. Love in its present form is a very complex condition of the soul, long since broken away from its original source, the biological instinct of reproduction, and often in sharp contradiction with it. Love is a conglomerate, a complex compound of friendship, passion, maternal tenderness, infatuation, concord of spirit, pity, reverence, habit and many, many other shades of feeling and experience. With such a complexity of shades it grows harder to establish a direct connection between the voice of nature — wingless Eros, the bodily attraction of sex — and winged Eros, the attraction of the body mingled with emotions of the heart. Love-as-friendship, in which there is not an atom of physical attraction; spiritual love for a cause, for an idea; the impersonal love of the collective — all these are phenomena testifying how far love has broken away from its biological base, how far it has become spiritualised.
But that is not all. Often a glaring contradiction arises between love’s different manifestations, and a struggle begins. Love for a beloved work — not simply for work, but for a beloved work — will not sit alongside love for the chosen one of the heart.3 Love for the collective struggles with the feeling of love for a husband, a wife, children. Love-as-friendship contradicts love-as-passion felt at the same time. In one case concord of spirit predominates in love; in another, love is built on a concord of the body.
Love has become many-sided and many-stringed. What people today live through in the emotions of love — people in whom the cultural phases of thousands of years have brought up and sharpened the various shades of love — cannot possibly be contained in a word so general and therefore so inexact as love.4
The many-sidedness of love, under the rule of bourgeois ideology and of bourgeois-capitalist life, creates a series of insoluble dramas of the heart. From the end of the nineteenth century the many-sidedness of love became a favourite theme of psychological writers. Love for two, even for three, occupied and troubled many thoughtful representatives of bourgeois culture by its enigmatic quality. As early as the 1860s our Russian thinker and publicist Herzen tried to lay bare this complexity of the soul, this splitting of feeling, in his novel Who Is to Blame? Chernyshevsky approached the same problem in his social tale What Is to Be Done? The greatest Scandinavian writers — Hamsun, Ibsen, Bjørnson,5 Geijerstam — dwell often on the doubleness of feeling, on the splitting of love. The French novelists of the last century return to it more than once; Romain Rolland, close to communism in spirit, writes of it, and so does Maeterlinck, who is far from us.6 Such geniuses of poetry as Goethe and Byron, such bold pioneers in relations between the sexes as George Sand, tried to resolve this complex problem, this riddle of love, in their own lives; the author of Who Is to Blame?, Herzen, knew it in his own experience, and so did many, many other great thinkers, poets and public figures. Under the weight of the riddle of double love the shoulders of many people who are not great still bend today, seeking a key to its solution in vain within the limits of bourgeois thinking. And yet the key is in the hands of the proletariat. Only the ideology and the life of the new working humanity can untangle this complex problem of feeling.
We are speaking here of the doubleness of love, of the complexities of winged Eros, but such doubleness must not be confused with sexual relations without Eros between one man and many women, or one woman and many men. Polygamy in which feeling takes no part may bring with it a number of unfavourable and harmful consequences — early exhaustion of the organism, increased chances of venereal disease in present conditions, and so on — but such connections, however tangled they may be, do not yet create dramas of the heart. Dramas and conflicts begin where love is present in its diverse shades and manifestations. One man a woman loves with the heights of her soul; her thoughts, aspirations and desires are in concord with his. To another she is drawn irresistibly by the force of bodily kinship. Towards one woman a man feels a careful tenderness, a solicitous pity; in another he finds support and understanding for the best strivings of his self. To which of the two should he give the fullness of Eros? And why should he tear and cripple his soul, when the fullness of being is given only by the presence of both bonds of the heart?
Under the bourgeois order such a splitting of soul and feeling brings inevitable suffering in its train. For thousands of years a culture built on the institution of property has brought people up in the conviction that the feeling of love too must have the principle of property as its base. Bourgeois ideology taught, and hammered into people's heads, that love, and mutual love at that, gives a right to possess the heart of the loved one wholly and undividedly. Such an ideal, such exclusiveness in love, flowed naturally from the established form of pair marriage and from the bourgeois ideal of an all-consuming love between two spouses. But can such an ideal answer the interests of the working class? Is it not on the contrary important and desirable, from the standpoint of proletarian ideology, that people's feelings should become richer and more many-stringed? Is not the many-stringedness of the soul and the many-sidedness of the spirit precisely the thing that eases the growth and the cultivation of that complex, interwoven net of bonds of the spirit by which the social and working collective is held together? The more such threads are drawn from soul to soul, from heart to heart, from mind to mind, the more firmly is the spirit of solidarity implanted, and the more easily is the working class's ideal of comradeship and unity realised.
Exclusiveness in love, like being all-consumed by love, cannot be the ideal of love determining relations between the sexes from the standpoint of proletarian ideology. On the contrary, the proletariat, taking account of the many-sidedness and many-stringedness of winged Eros, does not fall into indescribable horror and moral indignation at the discovery, after the fashion of the hypocritical morality of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the proletariat strives to direct this phenomenon — the result of complex social causes — into a channel answering its class tasks at the moment of struggle and at the moment of building communist society.
The many-sidedness of love does not in itself contradict the interests of the proletariat. On the contrary, it eases the triumph of that ideal of love in mutual relations between the sexes which is already taking shape and crystallising in the depths of the working class: namely, love-comradeship — a love between equals built on the same footing as the solidarity of comrades in a common cause.
Humanity in the clan period imagined love in the form of kindred attachment, the love of sisters and brothers, love for parents. The pagan culture of antiquity placed love-as-friendship above all else. The feudal world raised to an ideal the spiritual infatuation of the knight, a love torn away from marriage and unconnected with the slaking of the flesh. The ideal of love in bourgeois morality was the love of the lawfully married pair.
The working class's ideal of love, flowing from the working cooperation and the solidarity of spirit and will of the members of the working class, men and women alike, naturally differs in form and content from the notion of love held in other cultural epochs. But what is love-comradeship? Does it mean that the stern ideology of the working class, worked out in the fighting atmosphere of the struggle for the workers' dictatorship, is preparing to drive tender-winged, trembling Eros mercilessly out of the mutual intercourse of the sexes? Nothing of the kind. The ideology of the working class not only does not abolish winged Eros; it clears the way to a recognition of love's value as a psycho-social force.
The hypocritical morality of bourgeois culture plucked the feathers mercilessly from the bright, many-coloured wings of Eros, obliging Eros to visit only the lawfully wedded pair. Outside marriage, bourgeois ideology allotted a place only to a plucked, wingless Eros — a momentary sexual attraction in the form of bought caresses, prostitution, or stolen ones, adultery.
The morality of the working class, so far as it has already crystallised, by contrast plainly casts aside the outward form into which the loving intercourse of the sexes is poured. For the class tasks of the working class it matters not at all whether love takes the form of a lasting and formalised union or is expressed in a passing connection. The ideology of the working class sets no formal limits to love. But the ideology of the working class already now takes a thoughtful view of the content of love, of the shades of feeling and experience that bind the two sexes. And in this sense the ideology of the working class will pursue wingless Eros — lust, the one-sided satisfaction of the flesh through prostitution, the turning of the sexual act into an end in itself among the class of light pleasures — far more strictly and mercilessly than bourgeois morality ever did. Wingless Eros runs counter to the interests of the working class. In the first place it inevitably brings excess in its train, and therefore bodily exhaustion, which lowers the stock of working energy in humanity. In the second place it impoverishes the soul, hindering the development and strengthening of emotional bonds and sympathetic feelings. In the third place it usually rests on inequality of rights in the mutual relations of the sexes, on the dependence of woman upon man, on male self-satisfaction and insensitivity, which undoubtedly acts to lower the development of the feeling of comradeship. The presence of winged Eros acts in exactly the opposite way.
At the base of winged Eros there lies, to be sure, the same attraction of sex to sex as in wingless Eros; but the difference is that in a person experiencing love for another person there awaken and show themselves precisely those qualities of soul which are needed by the builders of a new culture: sensitivity, responsiveness, the wish to help another. Bourgeois ideology demanded that a person display all these qualities only towards the chosen one of the heart, towards one single human being. Proletarian ideology values above all that these qualities should be awakened and cultivated in a person, and should show themselves not only towards the one chosen by the heart but towards all the members of the collective. It matters just as little to the proletariat which shades and facets predominate in winged Eros: the tender tones of infatuation, the hot colours of passion, or community and concord of spirit. Only one thing matters: that in all these shades there should enter into love those elements of heart and spirit which serve the development and consolidation of the feeling of comradeship.
Recognition of mutual rights and the ability to reckon with the personality of another even in love; steadfast mutual support; sensitive participation and attentive responsiveness to each other's wants, together with community of interests or aspirations — such is the ideal of love-comradeship forged by proletarian ideology in place of the dying ideal of the all-consuming and all-excluding conjugal love of bourgeois culture.
Love-comradeship is the ideal the proletariat needs in the responsible and difficult period of the struggle for its dictatorship and the establishment of that dictatorship. But there is no doubt that in a communist society once achieved, love — winged Eros — will appear in another form, transfigured and wholly unfamiliar to us. By that time the bonds of sympathy between all the members of the new society will have grown and strengthened, the capacity for love will have risen, and love-solidarity will be such a motive force as competition and self-love were for the bourgeois order. Collectivism of spirit and will will defeat individualist self-sufficiency. The cold of spiritual loneliness, from which people under bourgeois culture often sought salvation in love and marriage, will vanish; manifold threads will grow up, interweaving people with one another in a bond of the spirit. People's feelings will change towards greater sociality, and the inequality between the sexes, and any dependence whatever of woman upon man, will disappear without trace, lost in the memory of past ages.
In this new society, collectivist in spirit and in feeling, against a background of joyful unity and comradely intercourse among all the members of the working, creative collective, Eros will occupy an honourable place as an experience multiplying human joy. What will this new, transfigured Eros be? The boldest fantasy is powerless to take in his likeness. But one thing is clear: the more firmly the new humanity is welded by the strong bonds of solidarity, the higher its bond of the spirit in every sphere of life, of creation, of intercourse, the less room will remain for love in the present-day sense of the word. Love today always sins in this: that in absorbing the thoughts and feelings of the loving hearts it at the same time isolates the loving pair, setting them apart from the collective. Such a setting apart of the loving pair, such a moral isolation from the collective in which the interests, tasks and strivings of all the members are interwoven in a dense net, will become not only unnecessary but psychologically impossible. In this new world the recognised, normal and desirable form of intercourse between the sexes will probably rest on a healthy, free, natural attraction of the sexes, without perversions or excess — on a transfigured Eros.
But for the present we stand at the turning point between two cultures. And in this transitional period, bound up with hot engagements between two worlds on every front, the ideological front included, the proletariat has an interest in easing by every means the swiftest accumulation of reserves of sympathetic feeling. In this period the moral ideal determining intercourse between the sexes is not the bare instinct of sex but the many-sided experiences of love-comradeship of man and woman alike. To answer the emerging demands of the new proletarian morality, these experiences must rest on three fundamental principles:
1. Equality in mutual relations, without the male self-satisfaction and the slavish dissolving of her own personality in love on the woman's part.
2. Mutual recognition of the rights of the other, without any pretension to possess the heart and soul of the other undividedly — that sense of property nurtured by bourgeois culture.
3. Comradely sensitivity, the ability to listen to and understand the workings of the soul of a close and loved person; bourgeois culture demanded this sensitivity in love only from the woman.
But while proclaiming the rights of winged Eros, the ideology of the working class at the same time subordinates the love of the members of the working collective for one another to a more commanding feeling: love-duty towards the collective. However great the love binding the two sexes, however many bonds of the spirit tie them to one another, bonds of the same kind with the whole collective must be firmer still and more numerous, more organic still. Bourgeois morality demanded: everything for the loved one. The morality of the proletariat prescribes: everything for the collective.
But I hear your question, my young friend. Very well, let it be so. Let loving intercourse on the ground of a strengthened spirit of comradeship become the ideal of the working class. But will not this ideal, this new moral measure of love, lay a heavy hand on the experience of love once again? Will it not crush and cripple the tender wings of timorous Eros? Having freed love from the fetters of bourgeois morality, are we not binding it in new chains?
Yes, my young friend, you are right. The ideology of the proletariat, in casting aside bourgeois morality in love and marriage, nonetheless inevitably works out its own class morality, its own new rules of intercourse between the sexes, which answer more closely to the tasks of the working class; it brings up the feelings of the members of its class in a certain direction, and by that very fact lays certain chains on feeling too. So far as love as nurtured by bourgeois culture is concerned, the proletariat will undoubtedly pluck many a little feather from the wings of the Eros of the bourgeois formation. But to regret that the working class will set its stamp on relations between the sexes as well, in order to bring love into correspondence with its task, is to be unable to look into the future. It is clear that in place of the old feathers in the wings of Eros the ideology of the rising class will be able to grow new ones, of a beauty, strength and brightness not yet seen. Do not forget, my young friend, that love inevitably changes and is transfigured together with the change in humanity's cultural and economic base.
If in loving intercourse the blind, demanding, all-consuming passion weakens; if the sense of property and the selfish wish to secure the loved one for ever die away; if male self-satisfaction disappears, and with it the criminal renunciation of her own self on the woman's part — then other valuable elements in love will develop in their place. Respect for the personality of the other will grow stronger, the ability to reckon with another's ways; a mutual sensitivity of heart will develop; the striving will grow to show love not only in kisses and embraces but in a fusion of action, a unity of will, a common creative work.
The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros out of social intercourse but to re-arm his quiver with arrows of a new formation, to bring up love between the sexes in the spirit of the greatest new psychic force: comradely solidarity.
Now, my young friend, I hope it will be clear to you that the heightened interest in questions of love among working youth is no symptom of decline. Now you will be able yourself to find the place that love ought to occupy, not only in the ideology of the proletariat but in the living intercourse of working youth.
Notes
- In the twelfth century, on the initiative of knights' wives and of knights whose conduct had often come into conflict with the ruling morality, there began to be held so-called courts of love, in which noble ladies acted as judges. At one such court, asked whether true love could exist in lawful marriage, the court of love handed down a ruling to the effect that love cannot extend its rights over two people joined in matrimony: two lovers, compelled by no consideration or necessity, give each other everything freely, whereas spouses, being bound by a household, are obliged to submit to each other's will and for that reason alone to refuse each other nothing. The ruling, dated the third day of May 1174, was the seventh handed down. ↩
- Another natural and biological source of love is the instinct of motherhood, the woman's care for her young. Interweaving and crossing with one another, the two instincts created a natural base for the development, through social intercourse, of the complex experiences of love. ↩
- A conflict far from rare, especially among women in the present transitional epoch. ↩
- The new humanity will have to find new words as well, to express the manifold shades of feeling which are conveyed only in a crude form by such states of soul as love, passion, infatuation, being-in-love, friendship. All the numerous half-tones, the whole complex pattern of the soul produced by the crossing of all these diverse feelings, are not conveyed at all by these ossified notions and vague definitions. ↩
- Lame Hulda. ↩
- Aglavaine and Sélysette. ↩