Word: chekhovisms
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...Leningrad, ruled by Politburo Member Andrei Zhdanov, was waging an esthetic purge. Two outstanding literary figures, Poetess Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko (whom many Russians consider their best short story writer since Chekhov), were barred from all Soviet publications for "decadence" and "rotten lack of ideology." The literary magazine Leningrad was suspended and Zvezda condemned for ignoring "the vital foundation of the Soviet system, its political policy" and "spreading a spirit of obsequiousness to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West." With obsequious haste, the Leningrad writers' union voted to abandon "the theory of pure art" and, instead, "train...
Gorky's extraordinary Reminiscences of Tolstoy, written a generation ago and long out of print in the U.S., are now republished in a single volume with his Reminiscences of Chekhov and Andreyev and a few minor items translated for the first time. In 1900, when he was a young and promising writer of stories, Gorky went to call on the great novelist, later spent some time near Tolstoy's home in the Crimea. Perhaps he had expected to find a dull old vegetarian disguised in a peasant's smock and spouting platitudes. He found instead a henpecked...
...over and said to me in a low voice: 'He's lying, all the time, the rogue, but he does it to please me.' " The state of Tolstoy's own soul puzzled Gorky greatly. "I could never believe that he was an atheist," he wrote Chekhov, "although I felt it, but now . . . I know that he is indeed an atheist and a confirmed one. Am I right?" Gorky, godless himself, was hardly right, but in many respects he saw Tolstoy plain-his "misty preaching" rising from "the unhealthy ferment of the old Russian blood...
...story is a Hecht original: a great dancer (Ivan Kirov), subject to fits of homicidal insanity, marries a budding ballerina (Viola Essen), who hopes that his dancing and her love will work a cure. Great Teacher Judith Anderson and threadbare Impresario Michael Chekhov, torn between terror and balletomania, hover unhappily in the wings. Another sideliner, Poet Lionel Stander, grates out Mr. Hecht's own highly debatable views on Love & Art, and dashes an occasional gruelly tear from his granitic eye. To climax a triumphant tour, the dancer's mind finally cracks and he turns...
...alert score is the absence of Spectre's traditional music (Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Waltz). Among the film's good points: young Kirov's tormented athleticism; Viola Essen's fresh beauty; the rich, workmanlike performances of Miss Anderson and Mr. Chekhov...