Olga Klimova is a PhD candidate at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Specialist Degree in Cultural Studies from Belarusian State University in Minsk, Belarus, her MA in Popular Culture from Brock University in Canada, and an MA degree in Russian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Olga has taught a number of film and gender courses at the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University, and language, literature, and culture courses at the University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Department. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation on Soviet youth films under Brezhnev and doing research on Polish cinema.

This talk is based on Olga’s current dissertational project, which is dedicated to Aesopian language in youth films during the Brezhnev period. At the center of this project is the study of various cinematic and narrative strategies developed by Soviet filmmakers as mechanisms of circumventing ideological control over cultural production in the 1970s through the early 1980s. This talk focuses on allegories, temporal and historical shifts, ellipsis, citations, and other Aesopian devices in films by El'dar Riazanov, Georgii Daneliia, Grigorii Gorin, and Mark Zakharov.