Word: chekhovisms
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...warming that one up. There has been comparatively little pressure on composers to wave the flag or concentrate on Americana, though Leonard Bernstein is setting to music poems by eight favorite writers, including Whitman and Poe. Dominick Argento and Vivian Fine are writing chamber operas respectively on Chekhov's monologue On the Harmfulness of Tobacco and Famous Women (Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf). For a touch of Shakespeare, Alan Hovhaness and John Harbison are at work on operas based on Pericles and The Winter's Tale, though Harbison picked his play four years ago. Out in Seattle...
...some level I am, but it's hard to know. Since I began reading I've seen the contractions between the way people speak and the way they acted, beginning with parents and teachers. But I never formalized impressions until I began reading, like Dostoyevsky--"Notes from Underground"--and Chekhov. In them I see "say A, but inderstand BCDE." This is what draws me into the theater and film. It's a way of investigating these contradictions...
...Zurich and into Petrograd, and we watch, through Krupskaya's eyes, his years in power. Stoppard is chiefly interested in Lenin's views on art--we hear him passionately wonder why the young people only want to see the avant garde experimentalism of Mayadovsky and not good, solid Chekhov. The only art that could move Lenin to tears in his last years, Krupskaya tearfully recounts, was--and the spotlight falls on Carr once again playing it--the Appassionata sonata...
...Tzara and Lenin-dadaism and socialist realism--are both attacks on the conventional bourgeois notion of art, though from different directions. Yet just as Tzara becomes as conventionally middle-class as a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Lenin himself is only moved by the decadent art of Chekhov and Beethoven. Joyce, perhaps, offers another angle on the problem, but one not explored much by Stoppard, who leaves Joyce as a tweedy, limerick-spouting stage-Irishman and stock anti-social artist. Stoppard should have spent less time trying to be clever in the first act and moving...
Lawrence of Arabia and Harold Wilson and one of us went to Jesus College, Oxford. Lawrence, in the end, turned out to be a masochist and changed his name from T.E. Lawrence to T.E. Shaw. Wilson's comeback as Prime Minister again. Maybe soon he'll be Harold Chekhov. We're going to be the Brothers Karamazov. This movie is particularly relevant today, showing as it does the problems of a state-owned railroad system facing constant interruption of service. Wilson might learn a lesson here...