Word: konstantine
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...readers. In Yury Nagibin's The Night Guest, a feckless sponger is held in contempt by two zealous Soviet citizens, but not before one of them reflects sadly on the ''warmth and gaiety" that the wastrel brings into people's lives. Loaf Sugar, by Konstantin Paustovsky, features an overbearing Soviet Organization Man whose mere presence "filled the air with weary boredom...
Although the magic laws of Newton pointed clearly into the sky, no one apparently followed their lead until a shy, deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher, got to thinking about air travel in the 1890s. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, wrote about space flight with amazing prescience. He chose the rocket as the only possible space engine and derived mathematically the speed that its exhaust gases would have to attain. He decided that it should burn liquid fuel. This conclusion he published in 1898, when not even an airplane had left the ground...
...with many moderns. So much so that it takes half of Leningrad Popular Science Films Studio's production to get us out of the past. Billed as "Russian science fiction," the Brattle film is only partly that. After an account of the early struggles of the late Soviet scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a breathless rundown of recent rocket developments culminates at the magic date of October 4, 1957. As past becomes future, satellites flourish, Soviet citizens view the "other" side of the moon on TV, the planets unfold their secrets, and the narrator's tone loses none of its confidence...
...future is offered as a fantastic but closed book. The invasion of the cosmos isn't as exciting as Walt Disney or George Pal might make it. More interesting is the account of the early struggles of the late Soviet creator (in 1903) of the multiple-stage rocket, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a schoolteacher "as modest as he was great." Half-deaf himself, Tsiolkovsky was able to gain no other ears than those of his young students until the October Revolution put an end to Russia's scientific backwardness. A typical scientist, Tsiolkovsky was ever-absorbed in the fantastical imaginings...
Helped by a superb set of costumes and stage furnishings (including their own axes and logs, since "English ones might not have the right ring"), 15 well-disciplined M.A.T. pros, descendants of the group that "Method" Director Konstantin Stanislavsky helped to found 60 years ago, gave their Chekhov a faithfully reproduced period atmosphere. But their exuberant performance carefully nurtured the most hopeful stems in his grim orchard, and pruned out the darker growths in his vision of social decay. Trofimov, for example, a pompous dreamer in most Western versions, becomes more the fiercely earnest youth, obviously the bright hope...