Adapting Diana of Belflor: The Dog in the Manger’s Soviet Adventures

Abstract:Before Pilar Miro’s famous filmic adaptation of The Dog in the Manger, Lope de Vega’s masterpiece had been successfully brought to the small screen in Soviet Russia. The Leningrad director Yan Frid’s 1977 musical comedy Sobaka na Sene (The Dog on the Hay), while almost unknown in the West, is considered a classic of Soviet cinema. This article explores the reasons behind the extraordinary popularity of this television film in relation to the Russian Lopean performance canon, as well as to the specific sociocultural conditions of the Stagnation era. I argue that, by prioritizing the issue of gender relations over the conflict of honor, Sobaka na sene managed to inscribe new cultural meanings in the story of the Countess of Belflor and her secretary and, therefore, to bring Lope’s play closer to the Soviet viewers of the late 1970s.