Word: elena
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play of violent action or of individual detachment. A stale retired professor (Serebriakov), his young wife (Elena), and the daughter (Sonia), brother (Vanya), and mother of his first wife live cramped lives on a faded Russian estate. A visitor, the overworked local doctor (Astrov) wanders in and out of the household. Sonia loves the doctor, who is unaware of her as a woman. Vanya, who feels oppressed and trapped, shares with the doctor a love for Elena, who is quite miserable with her old and pompous husband. The doctor dreams of forestry and the future, yet sees his education...
Until the final departure of Serebriakov and Elena, the one real act in the play is Uncle Vanya's overflow of rage at Serebriakov because the overweeningly self-assertive professor has stifled his life. Vanya shoots Serebriakov twice, once on stage at close range. He misses. Thus the tensions between the principals, their coordinated emotions, and their interdependent sadness are vital. And this is a dimension of Chekhov that the Adams actors rarely create...
Like 250,000 other Venezuelans, Señorita Mercedes Urbina and her cousin, Sefiorita Elena Josefina Gonzalez Urbina, enjoy taking a modest flyer on the Five-and-Six, he country's fabulous Sunday horse-race lottery, based on a five-or six-horse combination. But since they are sheltered girls who find form charts hard to puzzle out they relied mainly on Mercedes' brother Nelson for expert handicapping in last week's races at Caracas' Hipódromo track. With proper humility they accepted his picks for the first four races; then girlish independence took over...
Nelson, as it turned out, did very well; his winners got him $3,600 for a $3 ticket. But the girls' ticket, the day's only entry that listed all six winners correctly, paid off $300,000. Mercedes and Elena Josefina took the windfall calmly, perhaps because they could not understand just how much money $300,000 is. Mercedes is eight years old and is in the fifth grade; Elena Josefina is four, goes into kindergarten next year...
...Communists tended to be of two kinds: either freewheeling intellectuals like the handsome and dashing Aleksandra Kollantay, sometime U.S.S.R. ambassador, who advocated free speech and practiced free love, or professional revolutionaries like somber, spectacled Rozalia Zemliachka, the civil war liquidator of the Crimea, and the white-haired oldtime Chekist Elena Stasova. Although Stalin liquidated thousands of male members of the party apparatus in the great 1937 purges, he left these and other top women alone. But Stalin did not trust old revolutionaries, men or women...