The seeming eternal fictional love stories always represent historically grounded discourses of love and articulate various social and cultural contradictions, concerning issues of intimacy and sexuality, through peculiar aesthetic forms. The topic of love in the world’s classics has always been surrounded by the aura of transgression, but what is being transgressed is current legal, social, religious, and cultural norms and power relationships (including gender and class constraints). For Soviet culture ‘love’ has been a particularly vulnerable social issue, because it was charged with the possibility of transgressing into the private life, which might have caused the dropping out of the collectivist project of social reconstruction; love was considered to be a class-based feeling, that should be controlled by the state and submitted to the political duty; and since love and sex were almost entirely separated from each other in the public discourse it was incredibly difficult to find proper words to speak of this. Not surprisingly then, that Soviet cinema tells us very unusual ‘love stories”, encoding the cultural constraints in very peculiar visual narratives.

In my presentation, dedicated to representation of love and sexuality in Soviet cinema of the 1960s, I am going to discuss a set of interrelated questions: what is peculiar about the concept of Love inherent to the communist ideals of social order; how the conflict between the utopian ideologemes of Soviet power and the private life of individuals was articulated in the Thaw cinema, which was deeply saturated with the ‘utopian impulse’ and yet repudiated the incorporeal nobleness of Idea; how the ‘unspeakable’ senses, the »structures of feelings« were rendered in visual form and how Soviet cinema of the 1960s participated in the process of ‘l’éducation sentimentale’ of its audience. For a ‘close reading’ I will be using mostly films produced between 1956 and 1967, which explicitly dealt with the reinterpretation of the history of Revolution and Civil War. I hope also to discuss some conceptual and methodological issues concerning cinema as a source for the history of emotions.

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