Word: alyosha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pope is a hard kidnap to follow. Hijacking the Kremlin is about the only plot outrageous enough-and that is precisely what a band of Russian dissidents sets out to do in David Lippincott's Salt Mine (Viking; 333 pages; $10.95). Led by the mysterious Alyosha Gregarin and funded by the World Jewish Alliance, amateurs of every faith and skill capture the Kremlin's Oruzheinaya Palata, taking hostage some 50 tourists and the sacred corpse of Lenin. Author Lippincott, who admits to having had "some intelligence connections," knows his Moscow and the schizoid style of its new aristocracy...
...suspense with satire. The book's grim five-day siege is softened throughout by memorable set-pieces. At one vodka-high point, captive Russian tourists and a bunch of Yale alumni swap song for song, while American wives instruct their captors in the Hustle. In another, bone-weary Alyosha beds a beautiful Intourist guide in Czarina Elizabeth I's Petersburg sled. Outside, in tune to the jouncing springs, a group of toasting Russians rhythmically applauds the lovers' vigor. For such flamboyant scenes and scenery, the saline Salt Mine deserves an ovation...
...sixth novel Read has traveled abroad and into history for a theme, attempting to write what could be thought of as his Brothers Karamazov, Polish-style. Stefan Kornowski−saint, sinner, intellectual−is Alyosha-Dmitri-Ivan all in one. The son of a ruined count, he moves into a shabby Warsaw apartment when the family country home is lost in the late 1920s. But while his sister, 17, goes to work in a jeweler's shop, Stefan, 15, manages the ultimate Dostoyevskian luxury: "Playing the role of the sort of person he ought to be." He dabbles...
Gregori Chukhrai, who directed the film, emphasizes the individual suffering of all the characters, gives a tragic portrait of a whole people whose lives are disrupted by war. Alyosha, whose naive heroism and perpetual optimism are particularly pathetic in light of his impending death, is an example of wasted potential. He is a man who is only beginning to realize his capacity for friendship, and for love...
Chukhrai does not hesitate to create sentimental scenes: Shura and Alyosha waving to each other as his train pulls away, Alyosha's mother running breathless and perspiring from her work in the fields to greet him. But somehow, in this context, anything less than sentimentality would be unsatisfactory. War has torn a society apart, and for a few brief moments its victims are struggling to recapture a past forever lost, or discover experiences never known. Absent is the business-as-usual optimism of most American films about the Second World War. There is a sense in Ballad of a Soldier...