The quote from Mikhail Kuzmin in the title is, at first glance, completely inapplicable to Soviet intimate culture. She precisely demanded something more than love, reducing the feeling itself to an infinitesimal value. Socialist realism in its classical version reduced the love plot to a minimalist scheme. The love plot in a novel or film was assigned primarily an accompanying role, and its typology did not differ in variety. Longing passion, irrationality, eroticism, all the attributes of “tender feelings” were practically absent in its Soviet version, so foreign observers often refused to consider this strange passion as love .