Word: aristocrat
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...story of the aristocrat who wrote music full of crude peasant power, and his downhill rush from dandy to drunk, is as dramatic as any in music. Many of the facts, but few of the explanations, can be found in a newly published compilation of letters by & about him, called The Musorgsky Reader (edited & translated by Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson; Norton...
...bourgeois. But to Mann, this insult is a compliment, because he believes that it was precisely the bourgeois soil of the 18th and 19th Centuries that nourished the traditions he most admires. Goethe, a dutiful privy councillor of Saxe-Weimar as well as a world poet; Tolstoy, a schoolteaching aristocrat who tried to look like a simple peasant-these men were cradled by the "bourgeois ideal of individual human universality...
Holbrook Jackson's essay about Books Bound in Human Skin, which tells of a Russian poet who had lost a leg in a hunting accident, and used the discarded skin to bind a collection of his own love lyrics. Hides from many an aristocrat are said to have been used by leaders of the French Revolution to bind the works of their Patron-Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Correctly tanned and dressed, human hide, says Author Jackson, is definitely comparable in texture and quality to good morocco...
...measure of solitude was in prospect for French Historian Bernard Faÿ (The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America; George Washington: Republican Aristocrat), onetime lecturer in U.S. universities. For compiling a giant list of French Freemasons which the Gestapo used as a directory for arrests and executions, Scholar Faÿ was sentenced in Paris to life imprisonment at hard labor...
...Both of the novels by which he is best remembered were written later: War and Peace in his 30s and Anna Karenina in his 40s. They were not written by the unkempt peasant-patriarch of the last publicized years of Tolstoy's life, but by a rude aristocrat of tremendous energy...