Word: maximov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...relaxation, he watches sports on television, collects antiques, reads Russian authors (Maximov, Nekrasov, Sinyavsky) whose works are not published in the Soviet Union. He enjoys the company of fellow exiles, such as Poet Joseph Brodsky and Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. He is a tireless Five-F man, in constant pursuit (in no special order) of Fiddles, Food, Females, Friends?and Fodka. He is a shameless flirt, eats like an orchestra, and puts away more booze than a commissar at a convention. "What I remember first about Slava," says Seiji Ozawa, "is lots of drinking. He taught me how to drink fantastic...
...SEVEN DAYS OF CREATION by VLADIMIR MAXIMOV 415 pages. Knopf...
Like other dissident Russian authors, Vladimir Maximov, 44, has a well-earned lien on the attention of U.S. readers: Western sympathies are automatically stirred by anyone who tilts a pen at totalitarianism. As his writings during the post-Stalinist thaw grew increasingly cool toward Communist ideology, Soviet authorities turned frigid. Maximov's support of party nonpersons, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, finally brought about his own forced exile to Paris last year...
...framing his answer, Maximov eagerly risks comparison with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Souls, he insists, have been parched by the enforced loss of mystical Christianity in Mother Russia. Maximov's art is not yet ready for such awesome competition. His novel is a string of craftsmanlike vignettes awash in hyperbole. Emotions are so consistently overwrought that tempestuousness is soon diminished to nagging petulance. Some of the blame may belong to the translation. One Russian greets another with an improbable, hearty "Hallo, Pal" or a "Come on, Boss...
...quick images, Maximov slashes a scene in place. His hero, hating the smug, virtuous world, rejects the sympathy of the few kind and decent people he encounters because it is rage itself, he comes to understand, that keeps him alive. "I defend myself against them," he thinks in a rare moment of self-understanding, "with all the fury accumulated in years of wolfish life." Eventually he gives in and accepts society, because he realizes that, bad as it is, it is redeemed by individual acts of humanity...