HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Valdemaras Klumbys, Tomas Vaiseta. The Little O: The Culture of Sexuality in Soviet Lithuania (Mažasis o: seksualumo kultūra sovietų Lietuvoje), Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2022, 399 pp.

Historians Valdemaras Klumbys and Tomas Vaiseta undertake a historical research study into the culture of sexuality in Soviet Lithuania, analysing the range of visual and discursive norms of sexuality and its practice operating during the entire period of Soviet occupation (1944–1990). This monograph examines these norms in a threefold way: through publicly published images, sex education and texts on the topics of sexuality, and society’s everyday sexual behaviour. Drawing on press, diaries, memoirs, archives and interviews from the time, historians demonstrate how discourses around sexuality changed, however slowly, as well as when and how talk of sex life and the issue of women’s sexual dissatisfaction (the little o) emerged. In Soviet culture, everything to do with sexuality was downplayed and overshadowed by talk of love and family. (It is no coincidence that the full unabridged legendary phrase reads as follows: ‘In the USSR there is no sex, but there is love.’) Beginning their study with the dictatorship of love inherent in the Soviet system, the historians show that while it succeeded in suppressing the incipient sexual revolution (the big O), this suppression eventually turned into a sexual civil war.

Valdemaras Klumbys is a historian who works at the Lithuanian Institute of History and teaches at Vilnius University. For two decades he has been researching the social and cultural history of resistance during the Soviet period and Soviet Lithuania. He is the author of the monograph “Stovėję po medžiu? Lietuvių inteligentijos elgesio strategijos sovietmečiu” (Standing Under a Tree? Behavioural Strategies of the Lithuanian Intelligentsia in the Soviet Era, 2021).

Tomas Vaiseta is a writer, historian and lecturer at Vilnius University. Author of a collection of short stories and two novels. For fifteen years, he has been researching the history of everyday life, psychiatry, memory, and sexuality in Soviet Lithuania, and is the author of the monographs “Nuobodulio visuomenė” (The Society of Boredom, 2014) and “Vasarnamis” (Summerhouse, 2018).

Awards

2022: The Best Non-fiction Book of the Year (Lithuania)

2022: Journalism and Documentary Book of the Year (Lithuania)

Contact for rights: eimante@baltoslankos.lt