Word: czarist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Yurii Zhivago's life, Larisa (Lara) Feodorovna Guishar, is being schooled in a very different way. In her mid-teens, she is seduced by a middle-aged lawyer lecher named Komarovsky. The characters are easily seen as symbols. Komarovsky plainly stands for the corruption of the old Czarist regime, while Lara may be Mary Magdalene or Russia herself. And what of Yurii Zhivago? He too stands for Russia. He also stands for martyrdom (Critic Edmund Wilson notes that Yurii means George and perhaps suggests St. George, martyred under Diocletian). Above all, Zhivago is Christlike in his suffering...
...subsidies were of great importance to the Bolsheviks, and the massive extent of the funds offered by the policy of "expropriations," meaning armed robbery; Stalin himself carried out successful heists. Moorehead evokes the strange quality of Russian life with its tone of "brittle lethargy," the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Czarist system and the paternal absolutism of the Romanovs, which was inherited by the Russian revolutionaries and became "the core of [their] mind." Finally, Moorehead stresses the importance of police socialism-the system by which police agents became party leaders and all lived in a "half world of bribery and twisted...
...seen by Westerners. Among the trip's happiest chapters: a lavish official picnic in a forest near Sverdlovsk, within sight of a boundary marker inscribed "Europe" on one side and "Asia" on the other; a leisurely trip up the Volga in a side-wheel steamer left over from Czarist days. "Everywhere I went," said Stevenson politely at a farewell reception in Moscow, "I saw signs and heard speeches urging people to catch up with American production of butter, milk and meat, but in one area you don't have to catch up with America, and that is hospitality...
Witty Sting. Wunderkind Ustinov was born in London, a descendant of a titled Russian who was exiled in 1868. (Peter's grandmother owned the largest caviar fishery in czarist Russia.) His father, a German citizen, was a journalist, spent 14 years as press attache at the German embassy in London. Peter drifted out of school in his teens and into London cabarets, where his mocking monologues kidded diplomats and aristocrats, prima donnas and generals. At an irreverent 18, he enchanted Londoners by mimicking-in ersatz Swahili-an addled bishop of the Church of England who had stayed too long...
...Century's Mel Stuart and James McDonough, TV shows glimpses of history that might languish forever unseen. Some of the rare footage comes from wartime enemy-made films, e.g., Japan's own record of the attack on Pearl Harbor. From a onetime lady-in-waiting at the Czarist court, whom he found in New Jersey, Stuart once got 8,000 precious feet of royal family life, including the Czar swimming in the buff. Sometimes unusual film gets scrapped. Example: a shot of Charlie Chaplin doing a little jig for visiting Winston Churchill in Hollywood in 1929. Twentieth Century...