Recall that Maklakov named a happy family life as “the crown” of Tolstoy’s enjoyment of worldly blessings; yet we really have no clue why he didn’t seriously seek out that blessing for himself.
The relationship with Lucy Bresser involved at least a momentary brush with marriage. It began with Maklakov’s providing legal representation in some dispute in which Bresser seems to have been involved as a relative of a party. Her first (preserved) letter to him starts as follows:
I am writing this not to the dear companion of a night’s journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow but rather to the unknown lawyer who sat with me in the Buffet of the Palais de Justice—whom I had the honor & intense satisfaction of thanking—of thanking for his efforts & success by a kiss.36
The breathless style continues for about four hundred pages over nearly a decade, with punctuation rarely taking any form other than a dash. Lucy was married to a Cyril Bresser, so any marriage to Maklakov would have required a divorce. Evidently Cyril wasn’t ready to agree to one, so “apparently we shall have to find someone to swear that we were together—the difficulty is to make Cyril sue me for divorce.”37 The social stigma involved is suggested by Lucy’s mother’s reaction: “My mother calls me a prostitute & that I ought to be shot—if only someone would do it.”38 Maklakov (as quoted back to him in her letters, our only source) responded rather captiously to the need to show guilt under English law: Lucy quotes his rhetorical question: “Qu’est ce qui empêche de devenir coupable?” and in English, “What’s easier than to become guilty?”39
More troubling, Maklakov seems to have reversed his position on marriage over the brief interval between June 8 and June 14, 1910. Bresser lays it out: “[O]n the 8th of June you reply to my question of divorce ‘Ai-je l’intention de t’épouser.’ Ah, il ne m’est plus difficile de le dire. Je le désire, je le veux de tout mon âme.” [“Do I intend to marry you. It’s no longer difficult to say. I want to, I want to with all my soul.”] Then “on the 14th your first letter of doubt arrived—what has happened between 8th & 14th?”40 If Maklakov ever offered a real answer, her letters don’t reflect it back. In a sense, the question is why he ever proclaimed his wish to marry her. He seems not to have been the marrying kind (or, more precisely, the remarrying kind), and her letters suggest a flightiness, even to the point of incoherence, that boded ill for the long term.
The relationship, though featuring many a rendezvous that filled Lucy with delight, was persistently troubled by her dependency. Her letters are filled with requests for money. He met many such requests, but not all—or not completely. We don’t know the exact words Maklakov used to resist the claims, but she clearly read them as suggesting that she was a kept woman. She saw the financial aid differently: his desire to be able to be with her at times that fitted his schedule necessarily impeded her freedom to pursue her stage career. She regarded his financial help as no more than compensation for that impediment.
Alexandra Kollontai, a Menshevik who evolved into a Bolshevik, could hardly have been more different. Like Maklakov, she was an impressive orator, stirring audiences with revolutionary fervor. Like Maklakov, she was named to diplomatic posts (in Norway, Mexico, and Sweden), holding the rank of ambassador after 1943; she had the advantage over Maklakov in that, unlike the Provisional Government, the government that appointed her remained in office. She was an articulate advocate of “free love,” or at least “comradely love,” and she lived in accord with her precepts. Her novel, Red Love, is a lightly concealed tract in favor of free love (or perhaps more precisely, against any feelings of sexual jealousy) and against what she saw as the triumph in the early Soviet state of commercial and managerial greed over pure communist ideals. The heroine’s husband is generally seen as modeled on the lover with whom she had the most intense and extended relationship, a worker named Pavel Dybenko; Red Love’s heroine is named Vasilisa—in homage to Vasily Maklakov?
The two seem to have gotten on very well politically. One letter reflects Kollontai’s reading of a series of Maklakov’s speeches in the Duma: “The first speech on the peasant question was very powerful, exact and successful. The later ones less satisfying.”41 Curiously, at the height of the Stalinist bloodletting in 1937, she wrote to a friend expressing a positively Maklakovian skepticism about Russia’s readiness for popular rule: “Historically, Russia, with her numberless uncultured, undisciplined masses, is not mature enough for democracy.”42
Like Maklakov, Kollontai wasn’t fully at home in her political party, though perhaps she was more vocal in her dissent. After the October Revolution she helped found a “Workers’ Opposition,” aimed at fighting bureaucratic encroachment on worker control in industry. Her (and others’) ardor in the project helped precipitate a Communist clampdown on intra-party expressions of dis-agreement: in 1921 the party adopted resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition and claiming the right to expel members for “factionalism.”43 As was true of Maklakov, she had a deep skepticism about her party’s leadership. In 1922 she told Ignazio Silone, an Italian Communist who later left the party, “If you should read in the papers that Lenin has had me arrested for stealing the Kremlin’s silverware, it will mean simply that I have not been in full agreement with him on some problem of agricultural or industrial policy.”44 Despite all this, she was the rare Old Bolshevik to die of natural causes (so far as appears), a little shy of her 80th birthday and just a year before Stalin’s death.
The two also shared a distaste for party partisanship—a distaste different from, but in keeping with their dislike of intra-party discipline. In 1914 a Bolshevik member of the Duma, Roman Malinovskii, was exposed as a double agent. The Bolsheviks were deeply embarrassed, and their Menshevik rivals piled on with criticism. Kollontai, then still a Menshevik, expressed her disgust to Maklakov. “The dirt we try to throw on Malinovskii above all makes us dirty.”45
Consistently with her views on romance, she rather playfully teases Maklakov at his suggestion that she might be jealous. “Have you forgotten that that intolerable, though perhaps interesting feeling, has completely atrophied in me?” Then she teases him further about rumors of the “intimate side” of Maklakov, rumors that there was some pretty Jewish girl that he had had to marry.46 The idea that someone moving in sophisticated Russian circles in the early twentieth century would “have” to marry someone seems a bit outlandish, but perhaps the rumor mills had generated such a story. Despite Kollontai’s amusement at the thought of her possibly being jealous, she sounds a touch possessive. She is plainly eager to see Maklakov whenever their paths might potentially cross, giving details as to how to reach her, and is openly disappointed when he goes through Paris and fails to get in touch with her at a time when he knows she is there. She says she does not want to lose him, and that she has not lost faith in him.47 The correspondence suggests there may be something simplistic in a purported total denial of jealousy: how is the line drawn between that and love’s natural eagerness to be with the loved one (and presumably not in a mob scene)? This may be why Red Love reads more like a tract than a novel.
Kollontai’s letters, especially one of them, devote a good deal of space to an analysis of their relationship. A letter sent in July 1914, on the eve of World War I, suggests she found in him an almost mesmerizing charm coupled with a frustrating remoteness:
When we parted yesterday, . . . it was as if a melody had been interrupted, not allowed to play to the end. And today yesterday does not disappear, thoughts about proof-correcting [she was a busy writer as well as a revolutionary] flee to yesterday, look for something, there’s not regret that the melody was interrupted, not sadness, there remains rather a smile, a small smile at us both. Isn’t it funny that we’re so similar? . . .
Our interest in each other is surprisingly intellectual! It isn’t boring—to the contrary! All the same—nothing in the heart trembles, is on fire. And it’s funny that each of us pushes himself to move to feelings. Together—we’re easy, not
