Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...curious new genre to literature: short historical fiction. In dispensing with the burdens of longer historical novels, Tatlin! presents an exciting array of portraits including Franz Kafka, Herakleitos, an ancient Greek philosopher, Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist, Henry Breuil, a French anthropologist, and minor sketches of Picasso, Chagall, Lenin and Stalin...
...area of expertise that Nelson stumbled. He decided to cover a wall of the main building at Rockefeller Center with a mural worthy of St. Sophia, and he commissioned the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, a celebrated Communist, to paint it. All went well until an unmistakable likeness of Lenin turned up in the mural. That was not acceptable in the citadel of capitalism in the 1930s. "As much as I dislike to do so," Nelson wrote Rivera, "I'm afraid we must ask you to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin's face now appears...