Word: lenin
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...committed to his politics that he refused to listen to Beethoven because he thought it would soften him too much." We managed to feel embarrassed for not knowing Lenin's musical preferences, but I didn't do too badly. I kept a record of my point total, and by the end of the semester I had won an all-expense paid trip to a colloquium on literature being held in Berlin...
...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...
...oversees Carr's non-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...
Stoppard seems chiefly concerned, in Travesties, to explore the relationship between art and social class. The aesthetic theories associated with Tzara and Lenin-dadaism and socialist realism--are both attacks on the conventional bourgeois notion of art, though from different directions. Yet just as Tzara becomes as conventionally middle-class as a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Lenin himself is only moved by the decadent art of Chekhov and Beethoven. Joyce, perhaps, offers another angle on the problem, but one not explored much by Stoppard, who leaves Joyce as a tweedy, limerick-spouting stage-Irishman and stock anti...