Word: borodino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces...
...director Jiri Weiss: "To me an actor is what five divisions of the Soviet army are for Sergel Bondartchuk (Soviet director, author of the gigantic film version of War and Peace). And a conversation between a man and his wife is more interesting to me than the battle of Borodino. The miracle of cinematography is the reconstruction (or, if you will, the construction) of human life. Film magnifies human "fleas" to superhuman proportions, and a tremor of the lips or the eye's loving glance is more powerful than a cannon shot...