Word: pushkins
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Henri Troyat, Russian-born novelist, biographer of Dostoevsky and Pushkin and member of the French Academy, is well aware of the dangers of attempting to "explain" Tolstoy. Instead of offering absolute answers, he approaches his immense task with unflagging respect and fascination for the conflicting variety of ideas and emotions that filled Tolstoy's 82 years. His exhaustive but never exhausting chronology provides a picture of Tolstoy the man, as complete as can be found in any one book. What gives the biography its great stature, however, is not so much its bulk as the masterly stance Troyat takes...
...boss." Bonchy 's father, David, immigrated to London from Vilna (now in the U.S.S.R.), where, at the age of nine, he was set to work in a cap factory by his father, who spent his own days studying at a synagogue. David mar ried a fellow capmaker, Betsy Pushkin, and 13 years later with his wife and a growing family moved to Scotland, where, at her insistence, he sat down at his sewing machine and started his own capmaking business. He later expanded the line to blazers, frocks-and, inevitably, kilts...
...Dollar Shops." The Moscow Metro, prime example of Russia's cleanliness, with its magnificently mosaicked underground stations, is another must, as are the museums of art (particularly the Pushkin and the Tretyakov). Americans who drop into GUM, the mammoth department store, must be prepared for elbowing crowds and the Soviet system of shopping: the customer prices the item he wants, then pays for it in advance at the cashier's desk, returns to the display counter with receipt in hand to claim his purchase. Much better bargains are available to Americans at the "dollar shops" (called Beriozka), which...
...latter half of the 19th century-he was an enormously popular writer. Hardly anyone knows him today except as the sick mind who, like the Marquis de Sade, lent his name to the glossary of psychiatric terms. This first English-language biography by a journeyman translator and biographer (Pushkin, Brighter than a Thousand Suns) tries hard to deal coolly with its subject, but Sacher-Masoch was such a bumbler that the reader cannot take him seriously. The poor fellow was really a kind of romantic, who always hoped to find the worst in women and hardly ever...
...warmest time of all was had when Besner and his group met the Russian ship Bucyra. They were ominously surrounded by about 30 "very tough-looking" Russian sailors and escorted to the captain's cabin. Recalls Besner: "For hours, we drank toasts in vodka to the Hermitage, the Pushkin Museum, to Montreal, Moscow, Leningrad, Expo, Prime Minister Pearson, peace, understanding, love, and I don't know what else, except that there were a lot of broken glasses and it was deep night when we emerged...