ISBN 978-5-0065-2980-9 (т. 3)

      ISBN 978-5-0060-0978-3

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      PREFACE

      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.

      With Gorky we will begin our final story of The Paths of Russian Love. In it we will also need to resort to a more comparative view of the trajectories of love from those corners of the international love triangle we outlined at the beginning of our trilogy, so let us recall them briefly here.

      In the West, the transformations of love relations in the twentieth century were no less radical. Generated by new-fangled philosophical theories and spontaneous social movements, up to the famous radical sexual revolution of the 60—70s and the «pink», hybrid war for gender equality, they migrated into the XXI century, where there are still occasional flashes of media battles with disparate representatives of conservative forces. Now the eyes of enthusiastic technocrats, amplified by the finances of those interested in prolonging human life and earthly pleasures, are turned to the tantalizing advances in human empowerment through genetic engineering, robotization, and artificial intelligence. The contours of the new technosubject are still blurred, and love lives on in the wreckage of twentieth-century meanings.

      French intellectuals in the last century have done a tremendous job of exploring the modern subject, building on the legacy of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Jean-Paul Sartre and his wife Simone de Beauvoir concluded that the love relationship, although filled with the joy of individual freedom, is internally contradictory – illusory, conflictual, and largely associated with self-deception, leading the subject away from his true purpose in life (authentic existence). Rejecting the determinism of psychoanalysis, which dominated the understanding of human nature, they argued that the individual independently chooses himself or herself in various spheres of life, including «through erotic experience». At the same time, however, they noted the special intensity of erotic experiences, in which «people feel most acutely the duality of their nature; in erotic experience they feel themselves both flesh and spirit; both the Other and the subject.»

      Michel Foucault saw the European history of sexuality as a human endeavor to discover the truth about the nature of romantic desire and exposed the precariousness of «absolute values» as the ideological foundations of moral norms imposed by power structures to maintain social hierarchy. He saw «sexual experience or abstinence» as one of a long history of practices performed by people «on their bodies and souls, thoughts, behavior, and way of life, in order to transform themselves to achieve a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.»

      It is worth noting, however, that these rather unpretentious and skeptical views on love by French thinkers clearly did not correspond to the exceptional character of provocative, sometimes bizarre and invariably dizzying personal love stories. Just as Nietzschean love romanticism in the works of Maxim Gorky did not fully reflect the ornate intricacy of his love preferences.

      Across the ocean, Foucault’s ideas about the history of sexuality and the practices of human self-care were greeted enthusiastically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but quickly dissolved into a global mass of imported novelties, their own insights into the nature of love and the techniques of romantic relationships emerging from the surface of psychoanalysis deeply embedded in all social pores of American society.

      All three soils of love’s germination at the turn of the twentieth century have not escaped the suffocating embrace of postmodernism, the mighty equalizer of great and primitive ideas that has seized the banner of the champion of individual freedom. It has now become pointless, alone, with a partner, or with like-minded people, to seek or defend the truth found in love matters. All models of love are studied in detail, known and outlined in popular books on self-improvement. Everyone is free to choose the one he likes, and if it does not fit, then change, and more than once. There is no need to defend this or that choice of intimate life, even the most exotic one – tolerance in the West has already become ubiquitous, and sometimes it is even abused. It would seem that the end of the sexual history of mankind has come?

      Alas! Even the naked eye can see that people in the majority continue to search for their special and truly genuine love. If it does not succeed in their personal destiny, they follow with intense curiosity the love stories of celebrities or heroes of television series. This «inherent human thirst» and inexhaustible spontaneous practice of love continues to be watched by keen minds, and here and there new conceptions of love emerge, seeking to encompass its entire multidimensional and frighteningly ramified flow. We dare to assume that one of the newest interpretations of love, proposed by British philosophy professor Simon May in 2019 and published under the title Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, which we will present in the last chapter of our book, will soon be imported to the United States, where in twenty years it will become the mainstream1 of love relationships in the country – the trendsetter of fashions and mores of the modern free world.

      Unless in Russia will not happen…

      However, let’s take everything in order and get acquainted with Maxim Gorky’s first love and his Old Lady Izergil.

      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

      The French diplomat and literary critic Count Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé in his book Maxim Gorky, published in 1902, speaks of Gorky as a talent that surfaced «from the bottom of the people», the curiosity about whom is connected with the «primordial power of the people» manifested in his works. If this is true, then perhaps Gorky has managed to say something truly new, undistorted, and grounded about Russian love. But the meticulous critic sees no novelty in the vivid characters portrayed by Gorky – Makar Chudra,