Word: czars
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Married. Robert Moses, 77, New York's onetime power, park and parkway czar, now chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority; and Mary Grady, 50, an Authority secretary for 30 years; she for the first time, he for the second (one month after his first wife died); in Jersey City...
Cloak & Cricket. The double agent is Alexander Kamensky, a minor functionary in the household of an Imperial Russian count living in Paris in the 1900s. Kamensky arranges the murder of czarist leaders, while he fingers his revolutionary comrades for the Czar's secret police. Dame Rebecca hints of his duality, but she is in no hurry to expose him. After all, the effect of a double agent depends partly on the ability to wear his ambiance like a cloak...
...without blunting the purpose of Dame Rebecca's book, which was to explain the double agent's rationale. Kamensky had a real-life counterpart, one levno Aseff, who operated around the turn of the century, accepting missions from Russian revolutionaries as well as from the Czar. The abstract motivation that Dame Rebecca gives to Kamensky would have baffled such a man as Aseff...
...just a handyman, a fixer, carefully pared and peeled down from every commitment but to his own identity. His wife has left him for a goy. He leaves his village ("an island surrounded by Russia") for a new life beyond the Pale-the ghetto areas that the Czar designated for the Jews. He also leaves behind him the Law, takes off in a ramshackle, horse-drawn contraption for the future. He has shed everything but Spinoza, whom he had read by night in his ratty hut, and from whom he gleaned the notion that man is without history, God merely...
...passionate patriot, he is also a ferocious critic of Communism. In a horrendous poem printed in 1963, he likens the relation between the Russians and their rulers to that between Peter the Great and one of his mistresses. Having cut off the poor wench's head, the czar snatched it up again by the hair and then, according to eyewitnesses, kissed the bloody carrion passionately on the lips. Unlike Evtushenko, however, Voznesensky is not primarily a political poet. He is concerned with politics because he is concerned with the suffering it causes, but he clearly comprehends that...