Word: pushkin
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Queen of Spades is ham, well-done. It's got bejeweled nobles, fragile ladies, wild eyed gypsics, and a drooling villain who goes stark, raving mad in the last scene. If Pushkin were alive today, he'd probably go mad a good deal sooner, but everyone else excluding the purists, will enjoy the motion picture...
...remnants of Pushkin's plot are recognizable. The action takes place in old St. Petersburg, where a power hungry young officer slyly schemes to obtain the secret of success at faro from the wizened old countess (who sold her soul to get it). Anton Walbrook, who doesn't need a sound track, plays the officer; the rest of the cast are competent English actors, quite at home in their nineteenth century dress...
Only Kliment Voroshilov, whom Stalin always calls Klim, regularly ribs back. Budu once heard him tell Stalin a story that was going the party rounds about a proposed monument to Pushkin: "Several sculptors submitted drawings . . . The one Stalin picked showed a massive statue of Stalin holding a book on which was carved in small letters: 'Pushkin's Poems.' " Stalin laughed first, loud & long...
...From Berlin to Moscow as a Deputy Foreign Minister-Georgy Pushkin, Ambassador to the East German Communist regime for nearly three years...
...Continent, from Germany to France, to Italy, to Switzerland, to France again, and always back to Rome-his favorite city. ("Europe exists in order to watch," he said, "and Italy in order to live.") All the while, Gogol worked at his novel, Dead Souls, also based on one of Pushkin's ideas. In 1842 it was published and, as the Journalist-Historian Alexander Herzen records, "shook the whole of Russia...