V. I.

Lenin

85

To:   INESSA ARMAND

Dear Friend, I apologise for my delay in replying: I wanted to do it yesterday, but
was prevented, and I had no time to sit down and write.

As regards your plan for the pamphlet, my opinion was that “the demand
for freedom of love” was unclear and—independently of your will and your
wish (I emphasised this when I said that what mattered was the objective,
class relations, and not your subjective wishes)—would, in present social
conditions, turn out to be a bourgeois, not a proletarian demand.

You do not agree.

Very well. Let us look at the thing again.

In order to make the unclear clear, I enumerated approximately ten
possible (and, in conditions of class discord, inevitable)
different interpretations, and in doing so re marked that interpretations
1--7, in my opinion, would be typical or characteristic of proletarian
women, and 8–10 of bourgeois women.

If you are to refute this, you have to show (1) that these
interpretations are wrong (and then replace them by others, or indicate
which are wrong), or (2) incomplete (then you should add those which are
missing), or (3) are not divided into proletarian and bourgeois in that
way.

You don’t do either one, or the other, or the third.

You don’t touch on points 1–7 at all. Does this mean that you admit
them to be true (on the whole)? (What you write about the prostitution of
proletarian women and their dependence: “impossibility of saying no” fully comes under points
1--7. No difference at all can be detected between us here.)

Nor do you deny that this is a proletarian interpretation.

There remain points 8–10.

These you “don’t quite understand” and “object” to:
“I don’t understand how it is possible ” (that is what you have
written!) “to identify ” (!!??) “freedom of love with” point
10....

So it appears that I am “identifying”, while you have undertaken to refute and demolish me ?

How so?

Bourgeois women understand by freedom of love points
8--10—that is my thesis.

Do you deny this? Will you say what bourgeois ladies understand by freedom of love?

You don’t say that. Do not literature and life really prove
that that is just how bourgeois women understand it? They prove it
completely! You tacitly admit this.

And if that is so, the point is their class position, and it is hardly
possible and almost naïve to “refute” them .

What you must do is separate from them clearly, contrast with them, the proletarian point of view. One must take
into account the objective fact that otherwise they will snatch
the appropriate passages from your pamphlet, interpret them in their own
way, make your pamphlet into water pouring on their mill, distort your
ideas in the workers’ eyes, “ confuse ” the workers (sowing in
their minds the fear that you may be bringing them alien
ideas). And in their hands are a host of newspapers, etc.

While you, completely forgetting the objective and class point of view,
go over to the “offensive” against me , as though I am “identifying” freedom of love with points 8–10.... Marvellous, really
marvellous....

“ Even a fleeting passion and intimacy” are “more poetic and
cleaner” than “kisses without love” of a (vulgar and shallow) married
couple. That is what you write. And that is what you intend to write in
your pamphlet. Very good.

Is the contrast logical? Kisses without love between a vulgar couple
are dirty . I agree. To them one should contrast ... what?... One
would think: kisses with love? While you contrast them with “fleeting” (why fleeting?) “passion” (why not
love?)—so, logically, it turns out that kisses without Love (fleeting)
are contrasted with kisses without love by married people.... Strange. For
a popular pamphlet, would it not be better to contrast philistine-intellectual-peasant (I think they’re in my point 6 or point 5)
vulgar and dirty marriage without love to proletarian civil marriage with
love (adding, if you absolutely insist , that fleeting intimacy and
passion, too, may be dirty and may be clean). What you have arrived at is,
not the contrast of class types , but something like an
“incident”, which of course is possible. But is it a question of
particular incidents? If you take the theme of an incident, an individual
case of dirty kisses in marriage and pure ones in a fleeting intimacy, that
is a theme to be worked out in a novel (because there the whole
essence is in the individual circumstances, the analysis
of the characters and psychology of particular types). But in a pamphlet?

You understood my idea very well about the unsuitable quotation from
Key, [2] when you said it is “stupid” to appear in the role of
“professors of love”. Quite so. Well, and what about the role of
professors of fleeting, etc.?

Really, I don’t want to engage in polemics at all. I would willingly
throw aside this letter and postpone matters until we can talk about
it. But I want the pamphlet to be a good one, so that no one
could tear out of it phrases which would cause you unpleasantness
(sometimes one single phrase is enough to be the spoonful of tar
in a barrel of honey), could misinterpret you. I am sure that
here, too, you wrote “without wishing it”, and the only reason why I am
sending you this letter is that you may examine the plan in greater detail
as a result of the letters than you would after a talk—and the plan, you
know, is a very important thing.

Have you not some French socialist friend? Translate my points 1–10 to
her (as though it were from English), together with your remarks about
“fleeting”, etc., and watch her, listen to her as attentively as
possible: a little experiment as to what outside people will say,
what their impressions will be, what they will expect of the pamphlet.

I shake you by the hand, and wish you fewer headaches and to get better
soon.

V. U.

P.S. About
Baugy [3] I don’t know.... Possibly my friend [1] promised too much.... But what? I don’t know. The thing has been postponed,
i.e., the conflict has been postponed, not eliminated. We shall
have to fight and fight!! Shall we succeed in dissuading them? What is your
opinion?