p Dear friend,

p I apologise for the delay in replying: I wanted to write yesterday, but was detained and there was no time to sit down to a letter.

p Regarding your plan for the pamphlet, I found that "the demand for "free love" was not clear, and-quite apart from any will or desire on your part (I stressed this, saying: it is a question of objective, class relations and not of your subjective desires)-would in the present social situation be a bourgeois and not a proletarian demand.

p You do not agree.

p All right. Let us examine the matter once more.

p To make clear what was unclear, I listed approximately a dozen possible (and inevitable in conditions of class differences) different interpretations, and pointed out that in my opinion interpretations 1-7 will be typical or characteristic of proletarian women and 8-10 of bourgeois women.

p If this is to be refuted, it has to be shown (1) that these interpretations are incorrect (then put others in their place or indicate the incorrect ones) or (2) incomplete (then add what is lacking) or (3) are not correctly divided into proletarian and bourgeois.

p You do neither the first, nor the second, nor the third.

p You do not touch on points 1-7 at all. This means you recognise them (in general) as correct? (What you write about the prostitution of proletarian women and their dependence: "the impossibility of saying no" fits perfectly under points 1-7. It is impossible to see any disagreement between us here.)

p Neither do you dispute the fact that this is a proletarian interpretation.

p There remain points 8-10.

p These you "do not quite understand" and so you “argue”: "I do not understand how it is possible (that is how it is written!) to identify (!!??) free love with" point 10—-

p It follows that I "am identifying" and you were about to berate and rout me?

p How is this? What is this?

p Bourgeois women mean by free love points 8-10-that is my thesis.

p Do you refute this? Tell me what do bourgeois ladies mean by free love?

p You do not say. Does not literature and life prove that bourgeois women mean just that? They prove it absolutely ! You tacitly admit this.

p And since that is the case, it is a matter here of their class position, and “refuting” them is hardly possible and might hardly be anything but naive.

p It is necessary to isolate the proletarian standpoint from them and to counterpose it to them. It is necessary to take into account the objective fact that otherwise they will extract the passages that suit them from your pamphlet, interpret them in their own way, make your pamphlet bring grist to their mill, distort your ideas before the workers, “confuse” the workers (by arousing in them the 49 apprehension that you are putting alien ideas before them). And they have at their disposal a host of newspapers, etc.

p And you, completely forgetting the objective and class point of view, launch an “attack” on me, as if I “identify” free love with points 8-10.. . . It’s funny, really very funny.. ..

p “Even a fleeting passion and liaison" is "more poetic and cleaner" than the "loveless kisses" of (vulgar and philistine) married couples. That is what you write. And that is what you intend to write in your pamphlet. Fine.

p Is this comparison logical? Loveless kisses of philistine married couples are unclean. Agreed. They should be counterposed ... to what? It would seem: kisses with love? But you counterpose to them a “fleeting” (why fleeting?) “passion” (why not love?). It would appear, logically, that loveless (fleeting) kisses are counterposed to the loveless kisses of married couples.... It’s strange.

Would it not be better for a popular pamphlet to counterpose the philistine, unclean, loveless marriage of a petty-bourgeois-intellectual-peasant kind (apparently, my point 6 or point 5) to proletarian, civil marriage with love (with the addition, if you absolutely insist, that a fleeting liaison-passion can also be unclean or it can be clean). What you have here is not counterposing class types, but something in the nature of a "special case", which, of course, is possible. But is it a matter of special cases? If you take the theme: the special, individual case of unclean kisses in marriage and clean kisses in a fleeting liaisonthen this theme should be dealt with in a novel (for here the whole crux of the matter is the individual situation, the analysis of the characters and psychology of given types). But in a pamphlet?

p You have understood very well my idea about the unsuitable quotation from Ellen Key,  [52•*  when you said that it is “stupid” to appear in the role of "professors of love". Precisely. Well, and what about the role of .professors of fleeting.. ., etc.?

p Honestly, I don’t at all want a polemic. I would readily throw away this letter of mine and put off the matter until we could talk together. But I should like the pamphlet to be a good one, so that no one could extract from it phrases unpleasant for you (sometimes a single phrase is enough to act as a spoonful of tar.. .) or could misinterpret you. I am sure that here too you wrote "against your will", and I am sending you this letter only because I think that letters better than conversations will prompt you to examine the plan more thoroughly, for after all the plan is a very important thing.

p Do you happen to know a French woman socialist? Translate for her (as if from English) my points 1-10 and your remarks about "fleeting...", etc., watch her reaction and listen carefully to what she says: a little experiment to see what other people will say, what their impressions are and what they expect from the pamphlet.

p I shake hands and wish you fewer headaches and a speedy recovery.

p V. U.

Written in Berne, January 24, 1915