Word: dmitri
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Composed in 1932, Dmitri Shostakovich's second and last opera is one of the finest scores of the 20th century, a passionate and bawdy setting of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 short story. This tale of a frustrated, lascivious and ultimately homicidal rural housewife and her working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity, and at age 25 he appeared well on his way to becoming the most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music...
...retaliatory strike. Surrounded by hard-core war-mongering generals, his touchy-feely Red Line conversation with Kissoff, the missile attack blinking ever closer on the Big Board behind him, seems surreal. "Yes, I am sorry," he soothes, "I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are, Dmitri...
Both CIA agent Aldrich Hazen Ames and Russian informant Dmitri Polyakov ((ESPIONAGE, Aug. 8)) were double agents. But General Polyakov's altruistic nature was evidenced by the fact that "he would not accept much money" for passing Moscow's secrets to the U.S. This behavior, coupled with his commitment to remain in Russia to right the wrongs within the Soviet system, shows that he was the antithesis of Ames, a piece of profit-oriented garbage. Why is someone like Ames extended the courtesy of a life prison sentence? It would seem his very existence poses a security threat...
...young man, Dmitri Shostakovich had a very skewed idea of what the term "jazz" meant. Living in the sheltered climes of Lenin's young Soviet Union, Shostakovich could only glean origins and aspects of form from cultured friends from the West and bits of historical information that happened to come...
...knows where Dmitri Polyakov is buried -- or how he died. When sentenced to what Russians euphemistically refer to as vyshaya mera -- the highest measure of punishment -- the condemned person is taken into a room, made to kneel, then shot in the back of the head. It was part of the Stalinist tradition. To save his country from that legacy, Polyakov chose to betray its rulers. And betrayed by another betrayer, he lost his life...