BOOKS
485
This sense of the celestial pantomime which form enacts on the
imagination's stage has already disturbed some reviewers. This is not a
book which will appeal to a literalist of any kind, whether made
uneasy by matters of belief that cannot be written off as questions of
ideology and conceptual convention, or by the kind of reader trained to
deal with poetry as stylistics, and for whom the figures which Lawler
loves can never be figurative but only literal-never emblems, but at
most ingenious arabesques.
JOHN HOLLANDER
LOVE AND POLITICS
COMRADE AND LOVER: ROSA LUXEMBERG'S LETTERS TO LEO
JOGICHES. Edlled by Elzblela Ellinger.
MIT Press. $12.50.
"Alas. I'm no Jungfrau ... I'm just an ordinary killen."
-Rosa Luxemburg, 1898
Can this be Rosa Luxemburg-the Polish-Jewish revolu–
tionary who cofounded one political party (the Social Democratic
Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, 1893), led another (the
German Social Democratic Party), and inspired a third (the German
Communist Party), and who died the victim of a sensational political
assassination in 1919-this coaxing and clinging woman clucking
diminutives at her lover? Despite the astonishment at first picking up
Elibieta Ettinger's selection of Rosa 's letters to her first and greatest
love, fellow revolutionary Leo Jogiches, one is forced to say yes; yet
there is an optical illusion.
First, the letters contained in
Comrade and Lover,
written from
1893 to 1914, constitute only a tenth of the letters from Rosa to Leo-a
somewhat enigmatic figure whose letters to her have not been
preserved-and a fraction of her vast correspondence. Second, they
have been chosen ih order to reveal the personal rather than the
political, or at least the political on ly insofar as it illuminates the
individual and the sentimental. That Rosa Luxemburg had a heart,
and a great one, there is no doubt. That she carried on with Leo
