Of Romance And Revolution

Socialists and communists initially created hopes of revolutionising romantic relations, but ended up controlling them

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

IN Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s short story Lost Letters Part I, when Mirek and Zdena are on their way home in a streetcar after making love for the first time, he finds her sitting on a corner bench in the jolting streetcar, “Her face sullen, closed, surprisingly old.” Asking about her silence, Mirek learns that she had not been satisfied with their lovemaking. She says he made love to her “like an intellectual”.

“In the political jargon of those days, the word ‘intellectual’ was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people,” Kundera wrote.

It was not clear to Mirek what exactly Zdena meant by making love like an intellectual. It was, perhaps, for the lack of a better language, that she used it to express her dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, it was probably an impact of the communist revolution that encouraged Czech women to freely express their sexual feelings.

As historian Kateřina Lišková points out, in the early years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, women were equal to men not only at work and according to the law, but also in expert discussions on sexuality and marriage. The party preached women’s equal right to orgasm. In the early 1950s, the government even embarked on nationwide research into the female orgasm.