Word: irina
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Marcia Tucci brings a glowing radiance to Irina, the youngest, who is loved by two men she cannot love and who ardently believes in the restorative power of hard work. One can see her vision of the future in her very eyes...
...young baron Tusenbach, the lieutenant who wins Irina's hand only to be shot in a duel, Brain Bedford performs with great skill--to the extent to actually playing on the piano the middle section of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. His glasses, moustache, and long hair parted squarely in the center help make him properly homely. There is an extraordinary amount of traffic in this play--entrances and exists, greeting and farewells. One of the most moving farewells in all drama is the parting of Irina and Tusenbach in Act IV--a fine example of Chekhov's oblique method...
...exited from the courtroom in a rain of spring flowers, the crowd shouted, "We're with you, Irina!" When one furious KGB guard stomped on a bou quet, a girl friend of Irina's grabbed it and struck the secret policeman on the head with the flowers. After a scuffle, Irina was spirited off to prison in a truck that looked like a bread-delivery wagon. Russian spectators recalled a sim ilar scene in the last chapter of Al exander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, when the hero, Gleb Nerzhin, is carried off to a Stalinist...
...Irina's trial was only the latest reminder of the Stalin era. The many hundreds of arrests of dissident intellectuals during the past four years have coincided with an official campaign to rehabilitate Stalin's wartime image. As the experienced reader of the Soviet press knows, every favorable mention of Stalin heralds some return to Stalinist methods by the authorities, including intimidation, denunciations, arrests and political show trials...
...victims are most often young people like Irina Belogorodskaya, whose life story perfectly embodies the generational conflict between Stalinists and libertarians in Russia today. Irina was tried for possession of documents that quoted a political prisoner as saying that "present conditions in Soviet concentration camps are just as terrible as under Stalin." Among the few spectators allowed to attend her trial was a high-ranking officer of the organization that, among its other grim tasks, ran those camps for over 40 years. He was Colonel Mikhail Belogorodsky of the KGB, Irina's father...