Accumulating Negative Affects: The Diary of the Soviet Latvian Film Director Gunārs Piesis

This article comprehensively analyses Gunārs Piesis’s diary, providing a complete reconstruction of its content. Historical and literary discursive practices have been employed to examine the material. The central point of the argument is that the diary illuminates Piesis’s personality, his queer feelings, and mental health struggles, particularly his battle with depression, which had been previously dismissed as mere moodiness rather than a genuine disability. Furthermore, the diary confirms rumours surrounding Piesis’s homosexuality, an important part of his identity, which he tried to suppress and emancipate. The diary offers valuable insights into his personal history. It serves as a testament to the controlling and repressive mechanisms employed by the Soviet authorities during that time. These mechanisms significantly impacted Piesis’s sexual life and artistic freedom, and this article is the first to discover and analyse their effects.