Red Love (novel)

Red Love (Russian: Василиса Малыгина, Vasilisa Malygina) is a Russian novel in 1923 by Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent female Bolshevik theoretician. It was translated in 1927 into English and Japanese.^[1] The novel asks deep question about the dynamics between Soviet socialism and the romantic life of Bolshevik women. It was adapted into a German film in 1982.

In his book review, Samuel Perry commented that while not "much of a page-turner, but this did not stop Red Love from becoming a bestseller throughout East Asia [the Empire of Japan and Republic of China] and North America, and becoming more than an ubiquitous epithet for a much broader debate throughout the world about the familial, sexual and affective bonds that might - could and should - evolve under the economic alternative to capitalist modernity being put into practice for the first time in the Soviet Union."^[2]

In 2015, a compilation of scholar articles was published under the name Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century to commemorate the novel.^[3]