When a Communist Writes Gothic: Aleksandra Kollontai and the Politics of Disgust

Abstract

A YEAR BE F O RE THE October Revolution, Aleksandra Kollontai published lengthy treatise, Society and Maternity, in which she suggested ways in which the ideal of the future might make maternity less burdensome for workingclass women. Kollontai advocated an extensive program of governmental assistance to both pregnant and nursing women and called for the establishment of kindergartens and day-care centers as well as the institution of shorter workday. Maternity, she argued, had to be purged of that now transforms into 'cross' too heavy for women to bear. With thorough deliberateness, Kollontai wrote, society will have to everything onerous, excruciating, and connected with maternity; must leave woman only the smile of joy implicit in association with the healthy, normally developing, tender and helpless being to whom she has given birth (1916, 571, 576). In the context of Society and Maternity, the meaning of Kollontai's call for purge of maternity is clear: better nurseries, better working conditions for expectant and recently postpartum mothers. By the time she turned to writing fictional story about an expectant mother, however, Kollontai's demand that the state eliminate everything onerous, excruciating, and unpleasant in maternity had begun to look very different. Vasilisa Malygina, published in 1923, has generally been treated by scholars as a feminist novel because it emphasize[s] the twin concepts of female self-realization and sisterhood (Farnsworth 1980, 328). The work, however, has its problematic aspects; particularly disquieting is its