Abstract
Based on an analysis of post-Soviet Russian cinema and TV productions, this article explores the new emotional culture in post-Soviet Russia and the ways in which it articulates the concept of love. The new emotional style develops through the adoption of popular psychologized therapeutic models and genres of the emotional culture of late capitalism. The article deciphers the encounter of different scenarios of love at the contemporary “therapeutic turn” in Russian culture. I argue that in Russia, the therapeutic script of love meets powerful cultural counterparts, either anchored in the Russian literary tradition, Soviet discursive culture, or constituted in the post-Soviet condition. I use Anna Karenina as a key Russian love scenario, and then refer to contemporary media productions that echo this canonical Russian-Soviet love model and represent its post-Soviet treatments. Some post-Soviet versions differ both from the vantage point of Russian psychological prose and from the global media narrative of therapeutic love. Engaging with the well-established model of “emotional capitalism”, I introduce its contemporary Russian post-Soviet alternative of “emotional socialism” and the moments in which the categories of emotional socialism pose a challenge to the “therapeutic”.
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Notes
The threefold character of love as a linguistic discursive concept, cognition or emotion, as well as social practice, is reflected in recent studies featuring distinct theoretical perspectives. Most of the psychological studies on love (Sternberg and Weis 2006) as well as some inquiries in cognitive and evolutional anthropology (De Monck 2011; Fisher 2006), and in the anthropology of moralities (Zigon 2013) stress love’s (near-) universal moral, cognitive, and even chemical, nature. Ethnographic inquiries in social history and sociological investigation of institutions reveal how different religions, ideologies, indigenous cosmologies, political regimes, and economic relations allow individuals to feel and think about love in a specific way, or, alternatively promote or prevent these feelings and thoughts (Ahearn 2001; Cole and Thomas 2009; Jankowiak 1995; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006; Illouz 1997; McLellan 2011; Mody 2008; Padilla et al. 2008; Povinelli 2006; Rebhun 1999; Swidler 2003; Yunxiang 2003).
The new emotional style is manifested in the presence of the ethos of the rational organization of the private sphere, of career building and of people’s intimate and emotional lives, in the new modes of talk on private life and interpersonal relationships (Lerner and Zbenovich 2013); its messages are cultivated by technologies of emotion management, reflected in various types of coaching and counseling (Matza 2012), self-help literature (Salemenniemi 2010; Salemenniemi and Vorona 2014), and apparently in new genres of media production (Lerner 2011; Matza 2009).
Vse budet khorosho, Poniat’-Prostit, Modnyi Prigovor, Davai pozhenimsia, Pust’ Govoriat, Priamoi Efir, Devchata, Mezhdu nami devochkami, Liubliu ne mogu, Zhizn’ kak Zhizn’.
Bez Svidetelei, Razvod, Kratkii Kurs Schastlivoi Zhizni, Zhenshchiny Balzakovskogo Vozrasta.
Anna Karenina, Sviaz’, Kak stat’ stervoi.
In spite of the very enthusiastic early phase that psychoanalysis enjoyed in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century (Etkind 1993), psychoanalysis and post-Freudian psychology never become a basis for cultural formation and social and interpersonal relations in Russia. The Soviet psychological tradition never adopted its psychotherapeutic practices (Bauer 1952; Joravsky 1978; Kozulin 1984; McLeish 1975; Wertsch 1981).
A central line of the original novel’s plot, which, of course, does not nearly exhaust its multi-layered content, departs from Anna Karenina, a woman married to a senior state official in St. Petersburg, when she visits her brother Stiva in Moscow. Her brother’s wife is about to leave him after an affair he has had with their children’s governess. Anna Karenina arrives to calm down the family strife. She stays in Moscow for a few days, during which time she happens to meet a young promising military officer, Count Vronsky. They are both overcome by love. Anna returns to St. Petersburg. Vronsky follows her. After a period of suffering and unfulfilled passion, the affair is exposed. Anna leaves with Vronsky. Her husband does not allow a divorce. Karenina loses her son and is socially ostracized, but gains happiness with the love of her life. However, after a period of happiness love fades away, and at the tragic end Anna throws herself under the wheels of a moving train.
An analysis of the dramatization of Anna Karenina at the central Moscow Art Theater in 1937, at the height of Stalinism, shows how a story of passion and infidelity in an aristocratic society can become the most Soviet and socialist-realist of performances through the wonders of reinterpretation. Anna’s tragedy was here presented as the tragedy of a Russian woman trampled upon by a possessive feudal regime and the hypocritical morals of the church. That interpretation of Anna Karenina was the sign of a turn towards conservative values, towards the classical heritage, and towards legitimizing Russian nationalism (Muza 2009). All Soviet cinema interpretations of the novel (1953, 1967 and 1974) together with a new visualization style include a new interpretation of the main characters and key events, with different emphases on the power of the individual or the collective, uncontrolled emotions or conscious choices (Makoveeva 2001).
An interview with Drubich by Pleshakova (2007). In Komsomol’skaia pravda, 26 April 2007.
Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s prose, which explores the interiority of the characters and the nature of their feelings, describes their reflexive work and thought and is therefore considered “explanatory psychological prose”, anticipates psychoanalytical theory and carries some of its important elements (Hooper 2001; Ginsburg 1999).
Paraphrasing Pushkin’s “friendship of nothing else to do”, Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles H. Johnston, 2, XIII, 13–14: “Friendship, as I must own to you \ blooms when there’s nothing else to do”.
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Lerner, J. The Changing Meanings of Russian Love: Emotional Socialism and Therapeutic Culture on the Post-Soviet Screen. Sexuality & Culture 19, 349–368 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-014-9261-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-014-9261-2