ABSTRACT
At first glance, Romeo and Juliet could offer little to post-revolutionary audiences who, at least theoretically, were more interested in class equality and free labour than in star-crossed lovers. However, by the mid-1930s the play came to be closely associated with the undertaking of defining and teaching a new kind of love for the new society – an optimistic, vigorous, and untainted emotion that supposedly distinguished Soviet subjects from their bourgeois counterparts. This essay traces the changing attitudes toward Romeo and Juliet from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing primarily on discussions in periodicals and literary adaptations. After the largely negative response of the 1920s, the play was embraced as an affective model for rejecting the outdated bourgeois world and embracing the socialist future. With the waning of ideological control in the 1960s and 1970s, Romeo and Juliet became a potential intertext for literary works exploring individual emotion and personal desire in opposition to the expectations of socialist realism.
