Word: ivan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...
Love not withstanding, one must eat. Of this reality Maria is all too aware, and in her broad construction of the word "love," much is permissible. On a train she encounters Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny), aging French textile magnate and insinuates her way into an executive position in the company and a place...
...sally into a hoary Russian genre, the "death of a forgotten man" story. In "A Distance of a Half a Kilometer," a nondescript man dies at his dinnertable, his face plopping forward into a bowl of pea soup. Not as cosmically reverbrating as, say, Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," this story has a black-and-white bluntness that sheds a fascinating glare on its subject...
Little in these stories could warn you that their author had a flair for the mock-epic that shaped his full-length works, The Ivankiad and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. These tales are small-scale, under-written, you might even say unambitious--but only if you were willing to argue that portraying fairly simple characters economically and sympathetically is an unworthy ambition...
...Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich (Bantam; $2.25). A Soviet Catch...