Making Soviet melodrama contemporary: conveying ‘emotional information’ in the era of Stagnation

Abstract

This article examines Stagnation-era Soviet melodrama. With the re-emergence of the generic category of ‘melodrama’ for the Soviet film industry by the 1960s, critics began re-examining the USSR's own engagement with the form, thus establishing a normalized space for the genre by the mid-1970s. Goskino needed to compete with imported melodramas and demanded that Soviet film-makers work directly in this hitherto forbidden genre. This article explores changes in Soviet melodrama at a moment when it became acceptable in criticism and a generic category for transmitting ‘emotional information’. Through an analysis of critical debates I argue that, in making the genre ‘contemporary’, authorities in the culture industry had to differentiate late-Soviet melodrama both from its ‘bourgeois essence’ and from 1920s debates about the genre. Popular melodramas emerged from, and coincided with, these debates, including The Step-Mother (1973) and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979), which foregrounded the family as the site of affective discourse, even as they constrained the function of the heroic master narrative. Films like The Step-Mother did so without confronting the political exigencies of the Brezhnev era. Such Stagnation-era melodramas provide texts for examining how notions of private and public were re-imagined on the eve of perestroika.