The Body in the Margins

Abstract

The Body in the Margins: Alexandra Kollontai's command performance, by Lindsay Goss, examines the 1971 English edition of Kollontai's Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman and editor Iring Fetscher's attempt to restore the words and passages the Russian revolutionary had chosen to excise prior to its initial publication in 1927. Moving between, on the one hand, a reading of the edited text's ambiguities and ambivalences—was it personal pride or party pressure that provoked specific alterations?—produced by Fetscher's opaque method of indicating excised passages and changed words, and, on the other, an imagining of the Autobiography’s theatrical embodiment, this article explores annotation as an editorial act capable of reconstituting the extra-textual body of a writer over and above her attempts to discipline that body into compliance with a desired or intended disembodied narrative. Annotation, by drawing our attention to the page's unstable temporality, foregrounds writing as a physical, durational activity that transfers the undecidability of performance on to and into the seemingly stable text. Taking into consideration the tendency for annotative practices to displace the historical context of a text's production in favour of the historical context of its annotation, Goss contends that Kollontai's Autobiography, in Fetscher's hands, usefully works against this stabilization and exposes its historiographical limits. The 1971 edition functions instead to unfix and revisit a critical historical moment on its own terms, revealing a performative negotiation of circumstance provoked by the vagaries of revolutionary time.