The solution to the profession of Hippolyta from the “Irony of Fate” was on the surface

The “original” Nadia Sheveleva was two years younger and spoke without errors

The evening of December 31 stirred up another wave of discussions about the characters of the film “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!”. If with the two main characters, a Russian teacher and a doctor, everything seems to be clear, then here professional affiliation Hippolyta intrigues the audience even 47 years after the premiere of the film. One of the users of social networks offered an unusual interpretation of his image – according to an attentive spectator, taking Ippolit for a civil servant, or even more so a KGB officer, is extremely wrong.

Most connoisseurs of The Irony of Fate usually think straightforwardly: they say, if a strict man in a suit and tie, without material problems and a sense of humor, but with his own car and access to French perfumes, it means either a party functionary or a trade worker. Recently, however, during regular disputes, a new theory has emerged that looks very much like the truth.

For the correct answer, the user of the social network offers to look into the original script of Emil Braginsky (it is published, there is no secret). The script is dated 1969 – almost six years before Eldar Ryazanov made the film – and adapted for a play, not a movie. There, a well-known monologue – the one in which Hippolyte scolds the bride who failed to find an unfamiliar man on her couch – grows there with a small but important detail: “Because you’re careless… shut up… you’re a badass… He couldn’t have appeared in my house or in my laboratory. It’s strange that you noticed him at all. Well, you never know, something is lying around there … “.

A laboratory materialized from somewhere – more precisely, it disappeared somewhere in Ryazanov’s film – obviously shedding light on the profession and place of work of Ippolit Georgievich. The failed fiancé of the teacher Nadezhda is a scientist, or, in modern terms, a manager from science: the head of the laboratory.

“It was not the most talented who most often got into the labs, but the most accurate, clear and collected. Hippolyta! For example, the one who proved himself in the Komsomol, and later – in the party work. Who without problems went to the defense of the candidate. Who … did not drink (and Ippolit ate for the first time in the last … twenty years). But really brainy men quite often … well, of course. Led a slightly immoral life. And – they obeyed the Hippolytas, who, out of caution, could cut down an important topic. Ippolit would hardly have allowed to take risks, and science is driven by risk, ”says one of the users of social networks.

Such a theory really explains a lot – both the tediousness characteristic of technologists, and the pedantry of a person who is used to organizing others, and intolerance of negligence, and good incomes and access to material goods, and even … the protracted “single position” that Hippolyte speaks of. The cornerstone for those who sought to enroll Ippolit in the party functionaries of the middle class or even in the Chekists was the absence of a wedding ring on his hand. “You yourself know how we like to promote the unmarried,” a remark of a young careerist is already from another movie of the late 1960s, “We’ll Live Until Monday,” but the essence is noticed correctly. Well, to those who were engaged in science, the attitude in this sense was much more loyal.

“In general, Ippolit – the head of the laboratory – is attractive, rich, generous and … terribly boring, dominating. For Nadia, ”they sum up in social networks.

By the way, the text of Braginsky’s original script removes another popular question – how, they say, a Russian language teacher could say that she forgot to “put on” a festive dress ?! She didn’t say this – in the script, the remark is written like this: “Oh, I didn’t wear a party dress…“. And, by the way, the playfully flirtatious “Hey, you can’t come here!” Hippolyte, who wants to watch the dressing woman, is not there. Probably, it was not the heroine who had problems with the rule about “put on-put on”, but the actress Valentina Talyzina, who voiced her – well, during editing, this mistake was either not noticed, or they decided not to redo it.

There is another funny nuance: if you believe the text of the script, then Nadia is 32 years old, and a couple of “extra” years were thrown at her during the film adaptation. What for? There are two reasonable answers. Firstly, to enhance the effect of hopelessness – as we remember, “Thirty-four”, uttered by the tragic voice of Talyzina, really sound like a sentence. Secondly, in the six years from writing the screenplay to the film adaptation (1969 versus 1975), the “red line” of the critical female age could well have shifted by a couple of years. Everything changes. Well, in the realities of today, the words “Last chance?” even a thirty-four-year-old woman sounds, to put it mildly, implausible.