Word: kuprin
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Died. Maurice Edelman, 64, cosmopolitan British author and Labor M.P. who represented Coventry for over a quarter-century, while writing a succession of well-received political novels and plays (A Call on Kuprin, The Prime Minister's Daughter...
Stung by Drama Critic Walter Kerr's panning of the play based on his novel, A Call on Kuprin (Kerr called it "a great deal of scenery in three acts'"), Welsh-born Novelist and Member of Parliament Maurice Edelman dashed off a disastrously timed letter to the New York Herald Tribune. "It is a pity," huffed Laborite Edelman, "that Mr. Kerr should have been so busy sawing up the scenery that he should have neglected the play-which, after all, is the thing." Unhappily, it wasn't. In the very issue that carried Edelman's letter...
...Call on Kuprin (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee; based on Maurice Edelman's novel) tells of an American journalist (Jeffrey Lynn) who, while vacationing in Moscow, seeks out his former Ohio astronomy professor (George Voskovec), now the greatest of Soviet scientists. What begins as a mere reunion turns, at the behest of the U.S. embassy, into an appeal to Scientist Kuprin to escape to America. What begins as an appeal turns, through the vigilance of the U.S.S.R., into some brisk spy-and-counterspy hanky-panky. At the end Kuprin, caught out, swears to stay permanently...
...trouble with A Call on Kuprin is not that it is one more lively routine thriller, but that it is that for only a fraction of the evening. The rest of the time it is a variety of other routine things-routine Intourist comedy, routine U.S.S.R. satire, routine romance, routine sentiment. The authors have fitted their occasional thoughtfulness and sense of balance inside a framework of hackwork so that the play, in the end, has no more sustained topical value than theatrical impact...
Russian literature, a powerful weapon in the Russian people's struggle for liberation from the Czars, was plunged into confusion after the establishment of the Soviet state. Many famous authors (Kuprin, Bunin) went into exile voluntarily; disillusionment led others (Yesenin, Mayakovsky) to suicide. To give literature drive and direction, and broaden its appeal, the party formed the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by famed Maxim Gorky. But Gorky's optimistic ideas about "socialist realism" did not suit Stalin. The dictator found his man in Fadeyev, the steely-eyed...
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