Almira Ousmanova

The so called eternal "love stories" always represent historically specific discourses of love and sexuality, articulating social and cultural contradictions through peculiar aesthetic forms. For Soviet culture love and intimacy have always been a particularly vulnerable social issues, as they were charged with the possibility of transgressing into the private life and, therefore, to the individual Desire, which might have caused the dropping out of the collectivist project of socialist engineering of the future.

Thus, in the framework of the given project I am going to explorea 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 regime and the individual aspirations was articulated in the Soviet cinema; how the 'unspeakable' senses, the "structures of feelings' were rendered in visual form and how Soviet cinema participated in the "sentimental education" of its public(s). In addition to this, the conceptual and methodological issues concerning cinema as a source for the history of emotions are to be explored.