Word: muzhik
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...Yeltsin has proved immune to efforts by sycophantic followers to turn him into an uncrowned Czar. He is a true man of the people -- a real muzhik, as the Russians say -- who works in his own garden and loves to eat herring with boiled potatoes. To maintain the common touch, he often stops his official motorcade to chat with people on the street. Although he has an unfortunate habit of making promises dictated by the feelings of the moment, he has been courageous in supporting unpopular economic policies that have eroded his standing among ordinary citizens...
...Troyat points out, Chekhov "drew the line at glorifying the 'holy Russian muzhik.' " He knew better; his grandfather was a peasant and his father an incompetent grocer and religious fanatic who spent most of his time praying, preaching and beating his six children. The family lived in Taganrog, a small port, a "deaf town," on the Sea of Azov, and as soon as they were able, the young Chekhovs were put to work in the unheated shop. On Sundays they were made to stand for hours in church. Wrote the author years later: "When I was a child...
...chronicle of an event. The directors never romanticize anything or anybody, least of all the virtues of peasant life in the hinterlands. If anything, the Taviani brothers flirt with the danger of caricaturing the figure of Efisio Ledda, a self-conscious Sardinian rebuke to the Tolstoyan idealization of the muzhik. And it is the very bluntness of the portrayal of the patriarch's tyranny that reveals the directors' background in documentaries. The father's capacity for sadistic fury knows no bounds in disciplining his eldest son: Efisio is a petty and mean-hearted fellow, and the Tavianis never...
...collection? What mysteries of the Zeitgeist were riding on the mannequins' shoulders? Saint Laurent's muse told him women will now look like czarist imitations of gypsies, booted peasants in $5,000 velvets and taffetas, long-limbed and slightly fantastic creatures. The feminine mystique becomes the feminine muzhik...
...most Russians of the virtues of social ism and persuaded them to take a class-conscious view of history. By its achievement, it seems to have given them more self-esteem and pride in their country than the mass of Russians have ever had before. Gone is the obsequious muzhik whose manners were formed by centuries of serfdom. No longer pervasive is the type that Lenin belittled as "the exhausted, hysterical, misery-mongering intellectual who, publicly beating his breast, cries: 'I am bad, I am vile...