"PRI CHEM TUT TSVETAEVA?": THE SOUNDTRACK OF IRONIIA SUD'BY.

This article analyzes the soundtrack of the popular Soviet holiday film Ironiia sud'by: ili s legkim parom! (Irony of Fate: or Enjoy your Bath!, 1976, dir. El'dar Riazanov), the inclusion of Modernist poetry (by Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva) and poetry from the 1960s (by Yevgeny Evtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina) set to song in particular. The article aims to explore the apparent incongruity between "difficult" poetry and popular film. After introducing the film and its musical context in guitar poetry culture, I explore the mechanism I term "folklorization," by which this incongruity is not palpable. Drawing on theoretical insights into Russian Golden Age poetic culture, I argue that the film's soundtrack acts as an al'bom of twentiethcentury Russian poetry and that the late Soviet context of the film echoes the nineteenth-century salon in the pragmatic orientation of poetry. The article then provides two case studies of the poets featured on the soundtrack - Marina Tsvetaeva and Bella Akhmadulina - as illustrations of the mechanisms by which the soundtrack functions. In the case of Tsvetaeva's diptych and most notably "Khochu u zerkala, gde mut'" ("I want to find out from the murky mirror") from the Podruga ("Girlfriend") cycle, I examine how the inclusion of these poems in the film erases the poet's biographical queer identity and subsumes the poem-texts' resistance to patriarchal modes of writing into traditional gender roles. An analysis of Akhmadulina's "Po ulitse moei kotoryi god" ("Along my street every year") showcases the paradoxical nature of late Soviet intelligentsia's sense of community as well as its hermeticism. The conclusion extrapolates on the insights developed from these case studies, bringing them into the larger context of the late Soviet intelligentsia's self-conception and its broader sociocultural implications, considering the role of irony and double-coding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]