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.
