Alexandra Kollontai and revolutionary fiction

Abstract

Years ago when I first took a course in psychology, I acquired the notion that in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, the analyst does not so much provide solutions as direct the patient in a process of self-examination, the assumption being that once the problems are clearly defined from their earliest roots to the present, the patient can take action to resolve them. In my mind this notion has remained inseparably linked not only with a profound belief in the power of the individual will to effect change but also with years ‘on the couch’. Women’s literature, we might say, has been ‘on the couch’ for several lifetimes. This is not to belittle the efforts of women writers in the past; their struggle to examine the situation of women marked a tremendous step forward because it introduced possibilities that had been mostly absent from the lives of fictional women characters-the possibilities of change and growth. Historically, says Ellen Morgan, the bildungsroman was a male affair because women were viewed as static rather than dynamic, their femaleness essential rather than existential: