Comrade and Lover: Letters to Leo Jogiches

Comrade and Lover Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo ]ogiches Comrade and Lover Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches Edited and translated by Elzbieta Ettinger PLUTO PRESS Thisedition published 1981 byPluto Press 11-21 NorthdownSt reet, London N 1 9BN Reprinted 1989 Frrstpublished 1979 byMIT Press Copyright©1979 MITPress Translated materialin this volume was selected the originalPolish ed.itioo, from R6ZilLuksemburg: edited byFeliks Lisrydo Leona]ogichesa-1jszki, Tych(KsiaikaiWiedza, 1968-1971). Photographscourtesy Centralne KC of Archiwum P2PR W.usaw, Poland ISBN 0 86104 347 2 Printed in GreatBritain by Billing& Sons Ltd , W:lrcester Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Luxemburg, Rosa, 1870-1919. Comrade and lover. Selected letters originaUy published under title: Roza Luksem- burg: Listy do Leona Jogichesa-Tyszki. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Communists-Correspondence. 2. Communists-Biography. 3. Jogiches, Leo, 1867-1917. 4. Luxemburg Rosa, 1870-1919. I. Jogiches, Leo, 1867-1919. II. Ettinger, Elzbieta. Ill. Title. HX276.L8433 1979 335.43'092'4 [B] 79-9327 ISBN 0-262-05021--8 (hard) 0-262-62037-5 (paper) Contents Editor's Note viii Introduction xiii The Letters The First Years : 1893-1 897 The Trial: 1898- 1 900 27 Together: 1 900-1 906 1 09 Unto Death ...: 1907-1914 161 Epilogue 189 Appendix: Historical Note 195 List of Letters 197 Index 201 To Maia Editor's Note Rosa Luxemburg wrote nearly a thousand letters to Leo jogiches, her lover and comrade. The letters were published in the original Polish in three volumes (Roza Luksemburg, Listy do Leona ]ogichesa-Tyszki, 1893-1914, Warsaw: Ksi�zka i Wiedza, 1968-1971), expertly edited and annotated by Pro fessor Feliks Tych. Professor Tych subsequently found and, in 1976, published some additional letters, two of which are included in this selection. Luxemburg was a prolific letter writer. She corresponded with her parents in Warsaw and with each of her four sib lings, with friends and comrades, and with socialists all over Europe. Almost all her letters are now available and many have been translated into English. However, this is the first English translation of her letters to Jogiches. In preparing this volume, I had several options: publishing all the letters; selecting letters dealing with Luxemburg's in volvement with the Socialist International, the Social De mocracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), and the German Social Dem ocratic Party (SPD); or concentrating on her personal rela tionship with Jogiches. While the first two would have pro vided students of the European, and especially the Polish, Russian, and German socialist movements, with a wealth of ix Editor's Note material, they would have left Luxemburg as she is at pres ent-faceless. The third choice would reveal a woman, hitherto un known, whose sex did not diminish her political stature and whose politics did not interfere with her private life. It would also expose the fragility of the concept that a woman cannot, without giving up love, realize her talent. Annotations presented another dilemma. Fortunately I was reminded by Elena Wilson of her husband Edmund's remark about a work "knee-deep or waist-deep or neck-deep in huge footnotes." I have kept them to a bare minimum. The only time when Luxemburg allowed herself to be herself was in her letters to )ogiches. To let their spontaneity be diminished by the weight of footnotes would have defeated my purpose. And finally the translation. If "traduttore-traditore" is true, it is peculiarly true for love letters written in Polish and rendered into English. That love has an international lan guage must be sadly denied by every translator. The Polish language of love with its wealth of tender, intimate words, and the possibility of creating words, inimitable words, pri vate, yet understandable to an outsider, cannot be adequately translated into English due to the differences in cultures and in the morphology of the two languages. In her letters to )ogiches, Luxemburg does not write, she speaks to him. Sometimes it is a monologue, sometimes a dialogue, that she carries on with herself or with him. This sets the letters apart from those she wrote others. The latter are fine specimens of epistolary art. Moving and witty, sharp and businesslike, their tone is modulated according to the recipient. This is not true of her letters to Jogiches. Techni cally she follows the pattern of spoken rather than written language; emotionally she knows no patterns, no inhibitions (even if she claims she does), no restraints (except for letters she wrote after she broke with him-then every word is carefully weighed and weighted). X Comrade and Lover Luxemburg was a woman of impatient temper and great passion. This is reflected in the tone of the letters more than in the words, in the rhythm more than in the language. It is the tone and the emotional cadence that I have attempted to preserve, even if it meant deviating from a merely "correct" translation of the text. I felt I should not be more "correct" than the author lest I risk losing what is most gripping in the letters-authenticity. I took liberties when a literal translation would have con tradicted her spirit. Sometimes I translated the same Polish word in different ways, not to make her language richer but to get closer to her truth; her "dear" may well be also "my dear," or "my love," or "my dear one," depending on her mood and on the mood of the letter. Lexically and etymo logicaUy the English "dear" and the Polish drogi are identical, yet contextually, and especially conventionally, there is a vast difference between them. The letters are often a continuation of Luxemburg-Jogiches conversations. They pick up where a conversation left off, and, as in a conversation, Luxemburg often jumps chaotically from one subject to another, leaves a thought hanging, a phrase disturbingly ambiguous. Whether it was ambiguous to Jogiches we will never know. Sometimes he demanded clarification, but given his idiosyncrasies, it did not neces sarily mean that he could not foUow her. Be that as it may, it would be presumptuous for me to "fill in" where she did not, to substitute an explication for a shortcut. Naturally the letters were not meant for publication. It would have of fended Luxemburg to see them published; it would have angered her to see them "elaborated." Another problem was posed by Luxemburg's mingling of different languages with Polish. She spoke German, Russian, and French, and was familiar with Yiddish, English, Italian, and Latin; her letters at times resemble a Go belin tapestry. She mingled the languages out of haste, sometimes throwing xi Editor's Note in an incorrect foreign word (an additional problem), at oth ers quoting an entire conversation in another tongue. With some exceptions, I decided to sacrifice this multilingual flavor for the sake of clarity and fluency. An inordinate number of footnotes and constant interruptions in the text did not seem to me a good substitute for the pungency of her letters. The letters, numbered by me, are arranged in four sections in chronological order, with occasional rearrangement for thematic continuity. Each section is preceded by a biograph ical note.The dates of the letters, mostly missing, were de termined by Professor Tych, the Polish editor, after long and meticulous research.A number of my footnotes are based on his findings. Any editorial deletion is indicated by ellipses in brackets: [ ...]. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Krystyna Pomorska, Ilona Kannel, Mieczyslaw Maneli, Aileen Ward, J. L. Talmon, Myra Brenner, and Bert Hartry. My special thanks go to Diana H. Green and Feliks Tych. The MIT Old Dominion Fellowship made the completion of the book possible. No couple on earth has the chance we have .. We will both work and our life will perfect.. be We will happy, we must. be Rosa Luxemburg to Leo }ogiches March 6, 1899 Introduction 1 Love and work, a union of minds and souls, was what Rosa Luxemburg dreamed of and struggled for during the fifteen years of her tempestuous affair with Leo jogiches. They be longed together, not because they willed it but because they could not unwill it. Their happy times together were bliss. Their battles were bloody. They parted, loving each other, defeated. From the beginning the relationship carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. They were infected with the same fever-independence and individuality-which was the carrier of their ultimate failure. The common cause, so cialism, which welded their lives together, failed to sustain Luxemburg's dream of a perfect union because each denied the other the freedom they both desired for mankind. They were drawn to socialism by the urge to remodel the world. Extended to their personal relationship, this urge was fatal. Luxemburg projected her ideal of a perfect international union of workers onto her union with jogiches, and neither stood the test of life. Blind to the complexities of human nature, she was determined to make both jogiches and man kind happy, but on her own terms. Compromise and tolerance she did not know. Nor did jogiches. Yet neither tired of inducing or seducing a conces- xiv Comrade and Lover sion from the other, perhaps to prove love, perhaps power. Surrender meant for each different things at different times, as did rebellion. Surrender could be equated with love, as rebellion with its lack, but it could also be a chance to dom inate by provoking guilt. Each made claims on the other's independence, though its preservation was crucial for both.

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