Sergei. He explains that he is on leave for only one day and again tries to arrange a tryst, only to have Vera resort to physical violence to fend him off when he attempts to force himself on her. Principal cast Natalya NegodaVera Andrey SokolovSergei Yuri NazarovKolya (Vera's father) Lyudmila ZaytsevaRita (Vera's mother) Alexandra TabakovaLenka Chistyakova (Vera's best friend) Alexander LenkovMikhail Petrovich Aleksandr Negreba (billed as Aleksandr Alekseyev-Nyegreba)Victor (Vera's brother) Andrei FominAndrey Interpretation Little Vera shocked the Soviets with its depiction of an ordinary Russian family in a dull industrial town. "Vera" means "faith" in Russian, but Vera's life is a life in a vacuum. The lack of physical and psychological space in her apartment and her consistent dependence on the men around her makes her an accurate figure of a young woman from a blue-collar Russian family that time. Natalya Negoda, who played Vera, talked about the character in an interview in 1989: "It's our tragedy to have so little faith. The Russian people used to be very religious; then, they lost their faith in God. At the same time, they lost faith in themselves, in their sense of life." Vera's parents, Kolya and Rita, are played by two stars of the Soviet era, whose typical roles as socialist realists are inverted in the film. Kolya is an unsuccessful and nondomineering father figure. He longs for love from his family rather pathetically, shouting "no one loves me" when he suffers a heart attack, and frets over Sergei for not drinking and not working, and later stabs him in a quarrel. Rita, Vera's mother, is depicted as distant and hostile to Vera. She does not offer Vera any maternal support, and at the family picnic scene by the sea, she shouts at Vera, "I never wanted to have you anyway." Every scene of the film seems to start on a congenial note but breaks down eventually. Vera starts her affair with Sergei passionately, but is unable to reconcile the eccentric Sergei with her family. In a conversation with Chistyakova after she is married, she says, "it's supposed to be the happiest time of my life. And I feel like howling." And the romance-loving, poetic Chistyakova, in turn, gets into a similar situation with the middle-aged Mikhail Petrovich, who keeps her from going to school. The film explores a limited reality of life, as characters have neither the hope nor the