Word: gogol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TITLE OF ALFRED SCHNITTKE'S LIFE WITH AN IDIOT (Sony Classical) evokes a world of Russian literature -- Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin -- but the real impetus for this new opera by Russia's finest living composer is a powerful short story by the former underground author Victor Erofeyev. Any political resonance in the tale of an idiot named Vova (Lenin's nickname), who moves in with a hapless couple and destroys their lives, is, of course, purely intentional. Schnittke limns the moral and social breakdown of "I" and his "Wife" in a score of terrifying, eclectic intensity. The first-rate performance, recorded...
With a plot from Gogol and a play-within-a-play fiasco as funny as in Nicholas Nickleby, artistic director Daniel Sullivan and the actors of Seattle Repertory Theater hilariously send up censorship controversies, the regional- theater movement's fear of the National Endowment for the Arts and the widespread, pathetic dependence on A Christmas Carol as a holiday cash...
Sullivan, who wrote the script in collaboration with the actors, borrowed the theme from Gogol's masterpiece The Inspector General, about a corrupt town that goes all out trying to bribe a feckless clerk whom it collectively mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays...
...Russian author Gogol wrote a story called "The Nose." A civil servant wakes up one morning and discovers his nose is missing. Months later, he spies it walking down the street, wearing the uniform of a civil servant three ranks higher...
There is an unpredictable, impish streak in the Russian character often expressed in the desire to confound expectations and astonish with feats of prowess. The Russians have always longed to drive their national troika at breakneck speed, forcing other nations, in Gogol's words, to "look askance, as they step aside to give her the right of way." Now history has accorded them a unique chance...