Make Way for Winged Eros

Can a revolution accommodate people who need tenderness as well as readiness for work and struggle? Alexandra Kollontai’s 1923 letter Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth (Дорогу крылатому Эросу! Письмо к трудящейся молодежи) responds to a young comrade troubled by attention to love rather than the republic’s great tasks. Kollontai does not remove affection from politics: she asks what feelings a political community should cultivate. The letter appeared in Molodaya Gvardiya, no. 3, 1923, pp. 111–124, as recorded in the Spanish edition’s bibliographic note.

The Russian text matters for more than its opposition to repressed desire. Kollontai challenges ownership between lovers while making love serve collective solidarity. Giving intimacy political weight also exposes it to another test: which feelings strengthen the common cause, and which consume its energies? Calling the letter simply a manifesto for free love would conceal this tension.

Wings do not mean leaving the body behind

Kollontai distinguishes wingless from winged Eros. The former names bodily attraction with few emotional attachments; the latter weaves attachment, imagination, friendship and responsiveness into desire. Wings do not represent pure spirit defeating the flesh. What she values is bodily desire joined to a richer emotional life, rather than a demand that women prove their virtue through desireless love.

She connects civil-war danger to emotional investment. When death, shortage and urgent tasks dominate life, brief encounters may seem more practicable than absorbing romances; relative calm brings a renewed need for complex attachments. This is her interpretation of how historical circumstances organize feeling, not a general law demonstrated through a survey. Her language of conserving social and psychological energy should not be mistaken for a measured psychological principle.

Kollontai treats love as a social relation shaped by property, obligation and political solidarity. Societies reward some attachments and disparage others, recruiting private feelings to sustain inheritance or common action. Desire’s bodily conditions do not make its social meanings and power relations unchanging. Women’s expected disappearance into love can consequently be questioned as an institutional demand.

How love learns possession

The second section moves through myth, literature and historical forms, comparing kinship, friendship, courtly love and bourgeois marriage. A knight’s spiritual devotion to a distant lady need not exclude domination over other women’s bodies. Separating soul from flesh does not produce equality. In the bourgeois household as she depicts it, marriage joins property to intimacy while partners are expected to direct their entire inner lives toward one exclusive object.

These examples compose a polemical historical schema, not a universal sequence traversed by every region and class. Mythological figures and literary plots illuminate moral ideals without proving how everyone actually lived. Their stronger use here is to interrupt an assumption: standards now treated as eternal have themselves been formed within particular social orders.

Possession extends beyond controlling where another person’s body goes. It can demand their whole inner life, subordinating friendship, intellectual affinity and attention to the couple. Kollontai considers different feelings for different people without prescribing multiple partners for everyone. Neither duration nor formal relationship status provides her sole criterion. Hierarchy, exclusivity and the absorption of another person’s life matter more than a respectable label.

Love-comradeship brings obligations too

Near the end she states three principles of love-comradeship, любовь-товарищество: equality rather than masculine self-assertion and feminine self-effacement; reciprocal recognition of rights without total possession of the heart; and comradely sensitivity to another person’s inner life. Comradeship can include erotic attraction, rather than turning lovers into sexually indifferent friends. Sensitivity must also be reciprocal, not another obligation for women to manage a partner’s feelings.

These principles give opposition to possession specific content. Acknowledging one’s own desire does not automatically establish equality: the other person’s autonomy must count too. Freeing relationship forms from a moral hierarchy does not itself authorize unilateral cancellation of agreements or make anyone’s body permanently available. Those are questions prompted by the equality principle, rather than a claim that the letter already supplies a complete contemporary ethics of consent.

Her ambition nevertheless exceeds mutual respect within a couple. Love should develop capacities for concern and connection that sustain wider working-class solidarity. She opposes lovers forming an enclosed world and explicitly subordinates personal love to larger collective responsibilities. Affection becomes more than a distraction from revolution, but its value is also measured through its political usefulness.

The young comrade consequently asks whether this new morality merely chains Eros again. Kollontai agrees, while expecting new restraints to produce more beautiful wings. That admission cannot be edited out of her argument. Who defines collective interests, or decides which intimacy wastes energy? Removing a master from the couple does not guarantee that the community will refrain from becoming a new judge.

The letter also retains historically specific naturalizing claims: reproductive instinct as the basis of sexuality, maternal instinct as a biological foundation, and judgments of sexual conduct through bodily depletion. These are not current medical findings. A theory that historicizes sexual morality can still leave reproduction, binary sex and motherhood insufficiently questioned. Its emancipatory force and its remaining norms need to be considered together.

Her 1920 Communism and the Family helps distinguish material provision from emotional ethics. Public kitchens, laundry and childcare would reduce dependence on marriage for survival; opposition to possession asks how people live together after gaining economic independence. The arguments complement one another while leaving a shared difficulty: can individuals help determine the rules of the collective that assumes responsibility for them?

Lemebel’s 1986 I Speak for My Difference asks a question from another history: whom does solidarity recognize when a movement first requires changes of voice, desire and bodily presentation? This comparison establishes no direct influence between the authors. Early Soviet ethics and a Chilean queer political address are different interventions. Together they sharpen a test of love-comradeship: can members also refuse the community’s definition of acceptable intimacy?

Du Bois’s The Damnation of Women offers another warning about usefulness. Black women’s labor and care sustain public life, yet recognition can demand continued sacrifice and purity. This comparison does not merge US racial history with Soviet revolutionary ethics. It asks whether a common cause recognizes a person’s refusal, rest and freedom not to contribute alongside the work it values.