The Dialectics of Desire: A Moscow Comedy, in Three Bodies and One Revolution, 1918 to 1921

About the book

The Dialectics of Desire is a story of three people who try to love one another without hierarchy, ownership, or permission, and of the city that slowly closes around them. Vera, Grigory, and Lyuba meet in a freezing anarchist hall in Moscow in the spring of 1918, escape the Cheka’s first major raid together, and soon share a single room on Prechistenka. There they attempt to live the principles they argue about: mutual aid without ledgers, free love without jealousy as law, and a private soviet of three that answers to no party. As War Communism tightens, as factory committees are absorbed, as Makhno’s army is used and then discarded, as the sailors of Kronstadt ask for free soviets and receive an answer across the ice, the room becomes both refuge and experiment. Philosophy is tested against laundry, hunger, shared bread, and the daily arithmetic of survival. The novel is sensual without spectacle, comedic without lightness, tragic without sentimentality. It follows the precise cost of keeping a small free space alive inside a revolution that has decided no space may remain free, and it does so without slogans and without pretending that honest love can indefinitely postpone the larger history waiting outside the door. No spoilers. The rest is for the reader.