Word: borodino
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...Schnittke's dark, Russo-Germanic artistic universe, strings do not soar, they brood; woodwinds do not chirp, they protest; brass does not shine, it glowers. Created in the caldron of Central Europe, his music speaks of epic battles and terrible defeats; it is Kutuzov and Napoleon at Borodino, Von Paulus at Stalingrad. Why, then, is it suddenly so popular...
...uses a suspect, mongrel art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what? Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of % Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy's imagining of it in War and Peace...
...destiny when I can guide it, chance when it slips through my fingers," and the historian believes him. But, Tolstoy implies in his epic novel, chance--and the random effect it has on the lives of millions of people--is history's major determining factor. The victory at Borodino towards the end of the novel belongs to the aging Russian general Kutuzov not because he stopped the French but because, looking at the carnage, he realizes that no one can either understand or control events...
...real reason for the disintegration that sets in after Borodino is that history is being made too fast. Jumping from the battlefield to Andrei's death to Natasha's marriage with Pierre, the play loses its sense of drama and becomes a mere chronicle of events. Once more the audience is left wondering with Pierre "What does this all mean?" By the end of War and Peace, despite the valiant struggle of the director and cast, only the historian knows for sure...
Authors David and Nancy Dall Milton were English teachers at Peking's First Foreign Languages Institute until the Revolution. The couple describe themselves as "Pierres at Borodino," who, like the character in Tolstoy's War and Peace, survey the battleground less as participants than as observers. Their experience provides intimate details of the often mysterious doings of the cultural movement...