Word: baba
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...gall to say-and believe-that they have had to play down to conductors for years, and that they must maintain their own high standards. I'd love to hear Beecham's reply to that . . . They're musical mobsters. They're out to have Ali Baba for a chairman-there are just 40 of them...
...Baba-Yaga was a bloodthirsty witch who flitted through the skazki (fairy tales) of old Russia. She had a false leg fashioned from the polished thighbone of a young boy. She lived in a house that hopped on chicken-footed stilts, around which was an iron fence ornamented with skulls. After dark, the eye sockets of the skulls glowed with fire to light her way. Her chariot was a mortar, which she pushed with a pestle, using her besom to erase her singular track. Innocent children were her favorite fare, but once a girl child, who might have been...
...Russia there is little room for such ideologically unorthodox characters as Baba-Yaga. Since Lenin, writers of the new Soviet skazki have been instructed to fashion their fairy tales as "pictures of the Socialist way of life."* But Soviet writers cannot always follow Soviet Socialism. In Moscow last week Baba-Yaga might have chuckled a hearty witch's chuckle. Two of her Socialist successors-Bread Crumb and Gunpowder Crumb-were being boiled...
...Gunpowder from the hunter's brush and was heroically destroyed when Gunpowder exploded. Bread Crumb, meanwhile, came to his appointed happy end. The hunter ate him. Platonov's moral: "Bread gave the hunter strength. Gunpowder wanted to singe the whole world but only burned a sparrow." In Baba-Yaga's Russia such a feeble, artless fable would have had a hard time finding a publisher. But in Soviet Russia its publication evoked a thunderstorm. Pravda blasted: "Reeks of cheap pacifism*. . . both false and harmful. 'Peace on earth, good will to men,' our planet...
There was a curiously ironic angle to Nikola Petkoff's legal murder. When Georgi Dimitroff awaited trial in a Nazi jail, Petkoff was one of a group of Bulgarian political leaders who arranged for Dimitroff's 72-year-old mother, Baba Parashkeva, to visit him. Gratefully she said then: "If my son lives through this, he will repay you a thousand times...