"Little Vera"

[Elena Gapova]

A very belated reaction, of course:

"Little Vera" "deserves" a screening in a Slavic (gender, soial issues, or
perestroika etc) course, if not for its artistic merits (or maybe for them,
too), then for the social "bang" it produced. It can be seen as "cultural
evidence" to many social anxieties of the time; it articulated, for the
first time, many of the issues that had been "undercurrent" for years: it
clearly "separated" sex from reproduction (these had been separated for
decades in real life, in how people behaved, but saying this publicly was
not comme il faut, as "there was no sex in the Soviet Union").
It exposed the ruling mood of the perstroika: the society is in crisis,
smth. needs to be done. And the fact that this general social and political
anxiety found its articulation in the issues of sexuality (as in the US in
the 1970s) is of the utmost importance.
e.g.

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