Alexandra Kollontai.
I Want to Be Free

A collection of memoirs and articles by Alexandra Kollontai, the creator of the image of the “new woman.”

I Want to Be Free brings together key articles and excerpts from the memoirs of the revolutionary and later Soviet stateswoman and diplomat Alexandra Kollontai. Kollontai’s works addressed questions such as the socio-economic liberation of women, the revision of gender relations, the image of the “new woman, ” and the political significance of the private sphere. A century later, Kollontai’s legacy remains relevant and serves as valuable material in contemporary gender studies.

Look around you, look sharply, reflect, and you will convince yourself: the new woman is certainly there—she exists. You already know her, you are already accustomed to meeting her in life and, indeed, on all rungs of the social ladder, from women workers up to young women adepts of the sciences, from modest clerks to the most famous representatives of the liberal arts.

– Alexandra Kollontai, excerpt from the article “The New Morality and the Working Class, ” 1919

The publication Alexandra Kollontai. I Want to Be Free was timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Alexandra Kollontai’s birth. The foreword to the collection was co-authored by Sasha Talaver, a researcher of Soviet gender politics and a doctoral student at Central European University in Vienna, and Maria Nesterenko, a philologist and researcher of women’s literature in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century.