Melodrama, although conventionally associated with Hollywood, has been present on the Soviet screen from its earliest days. Especially since Soviet filmmakers began to privilege cinema’s emotional appeal in the Stalinist era, Soviet cinema has regarded melodrama as an essential tool for spreading ideological messages. However, these melodramatic films, despite claiming to create Soviet cinema’s own melodrama, struggled to resolve the conflict between the Soviet agenda, which requires human agency, and melodramatic tropes, whose pathos is fundamentally linked to a sense of human powerlessness: because of the pathos of ‘the inevitable’ required by melodrama and the audience's omniscient view of the narrative, the protagonists of melodrama are usually gripped by fate as passive victims. In this paper, I discuss how Grigorii Chukhrai’s film The Forty-first (1956) disrupts the necessary connection between the melodramatic mode and the protagonists’ passivity. 

A typical melodrama in terms of both narrative and narration, The Forty-first introduces a sense of impossibility into the diegetic environment and develops an element of inevitability through the protagonist’s total agency, effectively conveying the inseparability of her social belonging from her personal identity. Mariutka, the protagonist, is the opposite of a powerless victim and constantly exercises her subjectivity. Hence, the film subverts the incompatibility between the melodramatic genre and Soviet ideology while restoring an idealized socialist imagination.

The Forty-first’s emotional appeal, which encourages the audience to invest in the romantic narrative over the film’s revolutionary message, ultimately complicates its reception as an educative work of socialist ideology. This paper will argue, however, that despite the fact that the film’s message is open to varying interpretations, it remains, nonetheless, fundamentally consistent with socialist ideology in its construction of the Soviet subject.