Word: andrey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PETERSBURG (310 pp.)-Andrey Biely-Grove...
There is nothing like a ticking time bomb to supply fictional suspense, and perhaps no writer has ever used the device more successfully than Andrey Biely in St. Petersburg, originally published in Russia in 1913 and now translated into English for the first time. Biely (real name: Boris Bugaiev) died in 1934, a political pariah; like Boris Pasternak, he was a Russian who came to see that revolution often destroys more than it creates...
...music of the first part and the situations that it animated glowed with an almost Latin fervor. Andrey and Natasha (well sung by Morley Meredith and Helena Scott) faced each other across a garden ashiver with moonlight and poured out their yearnings in great warm gusts of melody; Natasha pirouetted giddily at a ball and lacily sang her infatuation with Anatol across the shimmer and sheen of violins. In one magnificent ball scene, a percussive, insistent invitation to the dance ("Dance, dance, dance the waltz") eerily foreshadowed the dance of death that was to come on the battlefields. In other...
...citizens in a hymn of thanks for victory. The second part also produced the most authoritative acting-and one of the finest voices-in Baritone Kenneth Smith, who played General Kutuzov with sinewy dignity. High point of the opera came in one of the closing scenes, in which Andrey and Natasha were reunited as Andrey lay on his deathbed. Through his delirium he hears a pulsing beat, played in the orchestra by the strings sul ponticello (bow strokes near the bridge), and echoes it over and over again in a faint, falling cry. In one of Prokofiev's most...
...departed as far from the facts of the novel as it does from its spirit. The central event--Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812--still remains, and so do a considerable number of the major characters. Natasha Rostov still falls in love with the noble soldier, Prince Andrey, and out again, and in again just before Andrey dies. Pierre Bezuhov still marries a worthless woman and fights a duel over her. But their actions, as well as those of some of the minor characters, often appear purely mechanical, without any inner logic that makes it all plausible. These people...