Authors

Discussion

As Soviet cinema was required to reflect official policy and thereby shape society, films made within the Soviet cinema industry could not overtly address the taboo theme of queer women’s desire through their narratives. This paper sets out to examine how Soviet cinema nonetheless makes lesbian desire legible. Employing a ‘subtexting’ methodology (Kabir 1998), it looks beyond the ostensibly heteronormative surface of Soviet cinema to show that lesbian desire is represented there. Engaging with the work of theorists and scholars of sexuality and cinema, including Adrienne Rich, Jackie Stacey, Teresa de Lauretis, Shameem Kabir, Patricia White, Clara Bradbury-Rance, and Lucille Cairns, the paper delineates how adolescence is explored as a site of lesbian desire in Soviet cinema by offering a close queer reading of Ilia Averbakh’s Other People's Letters (Chuzhie pisma, 1975, Lenfilm), made from a script by Natalia Riazantseva, in which sixteen-year-old Zina becomes infatuated with her teacher, Vera Ivanovna. Identifying the diegetic and extra-diegetic devices and the visual and narrative codes through which this desire is evoked, the paper also considers how the film’s depiction of queer women’s desire disrupts (i.e. queers) key tropes and conventions of the important Soviet ideological genre of the school film (shkolnyi film). It also makes brief reference to other Soviet films that allude to lesbian desire, thereby contributing to establishing a corpus of queer Soviet films.