Word: czars
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...brilliant Novelist-Critic Vladimir Nabokov calls the greatest play in Russian. The Government Inspector. The conception, suggested to Gogol by Pushkin, was ingenious: a character is mistaken in a provincial town for an important government official, and the whole corrupt, incoherent Russian officialdom is exposed in apparently hilarious farce. Czar Nicholas I himself saw the play and is said to have remarked (roughly translated): "Everyone gets the business here. Me most of all." Gogol and his adored Czar thought it all comedy. But was it? The vein of unreality in Gogol himself had laid bare the basic unreality of Russian...
...Wall Street, a philanthropist, sportsman, landed squire, patriot, "adviser to Presidents," park-bench sage, and above all, a continuing American legend. Timed to appear on his 87th birthday, this first volume of his autobiography tells only half the Baruch story, barely reaching his World War I stint as czar of the War Industries Board (a companion volume in the fall of '58 will bring the saga up to date). The book packs no surprises, but in its engaging, unpretentious way, it has the universal appeal of the American dream as it once again comes true...
...tensions generated by Canada's historic postwar rise vibrated through the House of Commons one day in May 1956, when the Liberal government's economic czar, Trade and Commerce Minister Howe, brought in a bill to ensure the construction of a gas pipeline from Alberta to Eastern Canada. The franchise had already been granted to Trans-Canada Pipe Lines Ltd., a corporation controlled by U.S. oilmen; now Howe proposed to lend the company $80 million to start construction. In addition, Howe planned to set up a government corporation to build an uneconomic section of the line. Angrily...
Military Career: At 19 served as enlisted man with the czar's dashing Novgorod Dragoons, then joined the revolution's Red irregulars, became a party member in 1919. Educated at Moscow's Frunze military academy, got final professional polish in Germany under famed monocle-wearing General von Seeckt, who taught him the tactics and strategy of the "breakthrough." One of a dozen or so professionals to survive Stalin's pre-World War II army purges (in which 374 generals were killed), rose rapidly in battle command. When Stalin panicked at the German advance on Moscow...
...Constantine Kirillovitch, a doctor who illustrates in his old Russian virtues the fatal inability of the Russian ruling class to come to early terms with the nation's liberal professional classes. One of his daughters is an actress whose sole ambition is to play before the Czar; instead she sees his back in a railway station as he is about to make his exit from history. Another Arapov is a captain in a crack cavalry regiment, and one aspect of Russia's tragedy is seen in the inner conflict of this passionately loyal man who, amid mutiny...