Word: krupskaya
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Give Prince Borbon a blank check, Unleash Scrooge and Chaing Kai Shek. Women's Lib is no dilemma--Forget Krupskaya and Red Emma...
...premise Stoppard devised for Travesties is perhaps the most surefire of all his plays. Zurich in 1916 was the wartime refuge of such interesting people as James Joyce, Lenin, Krupskaya (Lenin's wife), and the Rumanian dadaist Tristan Tzara, all of whom Stoppard brings together onstage (they never met in real life). All the ingredients of a fine intellectual comedy are there, but Stoppard fails to make them gel. The problem is the character he chooses to be his catalyst: Henry Carr. In real life, Carr, a British consul in Zurich, once sued Joyce to recover some money...
...handling of his diplomatic duties, a closet communist who's quite good at putting his master in his place. He provides the insubstantial link between the verbal minuetting of the English-dadaist group and the heavy, teutonic oratory Stoppard puts in the mouths of Lenin and his sentimental wife, Krupskaya. The one diplomatic assignment Carr receives, which he first discovers once Lenin's train is safely on its way to the Finland Station, is to make sure, at all costs, that the Russian leader does not leave Switzerland...
Lenin is the focus of Act Two. His sealed train puffs out of Zurich and into Petrograd, and we watch, through Krupskaya's eyes, his years in power. Stoppard is chiefly interested in Lenin's views on art--we hear him passionately wonder why the young people only want to see the avant garde experimentalism of Mayadovsky and not good, solid Chekhov. The only art that could move Lenin to tears in his last years, Krupskaya tearfully recounts, was--and the spotlight falls on Carr once again playing it--the Appassionata sonata...
Others did not fare so well. Stalin had little respect for Nadezhda Konstanti-novna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, Lenin's widow and sister, recalls Khrushchev. He used to say that he did not think either of these women was making a positive contribution to the party's struggle. "After Stalin's death we found an envelope in a secret compartment, and inside the envelope was a note written in Lenin's hand. Lenin accused Stalin of having insulted Nadezhda Kon-stantinovna. Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] demanded that Stalin apologize; otherwise Lenin would no longer consider Stalin...