Word: konstantin
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Towards the beginning of Chekhov's The Seagull, the young idealist Konstantin stages a play he has written for a critical group of houseguests. The monologue consists largely of pretentious, melodramatic schlock; the audience reserves its praise for Nina, Konstantin's bright-eyed and innocent sweetheart, who does all the performing. The playwright-within-a-play's honest and interesting intentions of reinventing drama get lost amid his overwriting. Only the contemplative old local doctor, Dorn, discerns any promise in the play's pseudo-intellectual rhetoric: "There was something in it... It was so fresh, unaffected...
Perhaps the Cornerstone Theater Company's production of "California Seagull," a recent adaptation of Chekhov's classic relocated to the Golden State, deliberately reproduces all the traits of Konstantin's play. Maybe it's a multidimensional meta-commentary on the original which adds new facets to the nexus between fact and fiction. Or maybe it's just an enthusiastic and imaginative enterprise that gets a little carried away with its "alternadrama" image. Whichever way you look at it, "California Seagull" suffers from an overdose of avant-garde. But there's something in it. And Nina is excellent...
...World War II, when the advancing Red Army arrived in Berlin in 1945 and confiscated art by the truckload. The world believed Schliemann's gold was lost. Curators at the Pushkin knew better. It wasn't until 1991, however, that Russian art historians Grigorii Kozlov and Konstantin Akinsha, who had ferreted out the existence of the artifacts, announced the discovery to the West. It took two more years for the Pushkin and the Russian government to fess...
...parliament who support Yeltsin. Responding to the Duma's action, they proposed that the election be postponed for at least two years. As explained by Vladimir Khubiyev, president of a North Caucasian ethnic republic within Russia, the need is "to discard all these elections and gradually move forward." Konstantin Titov, the regional governor of Samara, said, "Either you cancel your decision, or we cancel the June 16 elections...
...feeling too bad" and considered himself "out of danger." But the public-relations ploy did little to allay suspicions about the true state of the President's health. For many Russians, it recalled the early 1980s, when the successive deaths of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were all preceded by assurances from the Kremlin that they were in fine fettle...