Word: cossack
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Beat Keats. In a whimsical but nonetheless pointed peroration, famed Cossack Novelist Mikhail (And Quiet Flows the Don) Sholokhov wryly contrasted the obscure existence led by talented young poets in the provinces with the "triumphs of our currently fashionable boudoir poets." Neatly exploiting peasant resentment of city slickers, Sholokhov blamed the "backwardness" of Red letters on the fact that the great majority of writers live in big cities, thus have "only superficial knowledge of quickly flowing and changing reality." In their "impossibly narrow trousers and absurdly broad-shouldered jackets," he scoffed, they are interested only in showing...
...Brattle's offering this week is a good old-fashioned shoot 'em up, Russian style. And Quiet Flows the Don has all the cowboy accoutrements: fistfights, whippings, sex (diluted), cossack cavalry charges, and even an attempted suicide with a three-foot scythe blade. With these it combines the usual Soviet trappings: oppressed peasants, oppressive nobles, and oppressingly nationalistic shots of women out in the fields raking hay. But like the suicide attempt, which ends up cutting a tendon instead of the jugular vein, the movie is rather anti-climactic, despite the imitation-Hollywood splendor. No one is surprised when...
...movie's hero, a cossack peasant named Grigori, tries romantic love first; the obstacle is that the girl is alreade married. Grigori's father decides that this intrigue is dishonoring the family name, and to break it up he arranges for his son to marry another local girl, Natalya. Grigori spends the rest of the movie vacillating between...
Aten's tale, as ghost-written by professional author Arthur Orrmont, carries the reader through the early, swashbuckling advances of the White cossacks and the supporting British fighter squadron with which Aten flew. His book catches the enthusiasm which swept across the anti-Communist armies and which made the toast "Christmas in Moscow" a Cossack watchword. And finally, the dream shattered and the Communist counter-offensive moving forward irrevocably, Aten's narrative makes up the ghastly retreat to the Black Sea and the eventual evacuation of Allied forces from under the guns of the Bolshevik advance guard...
Mature or not, however, Aten was an extremely perceptive observer during what in hindsight has emerged as an extremely important part of history. For had the Cossacks been able to push their advance through to Moscow, and thus exterminated the Bolsheviks, the state of the world would be unrecognizably different today. Aten, in the midst of the Cossack army, had opportunities to meet and study its commanding officers. And the description of their policy conflicts and petty jealousies is another important part of his book. Two of these men clashed openly on the question of how far to extend...