Word: russia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...19th century version of Portnoy's Complaint, in which the protagonist never stops griping that his desires are repugnant to his morals. Tolstoy's diaries and instructional writings are engorged with this seriocomic theme, a fact that led Biographer Henri Troyat to conclude more than 20 years ago that Russia's literary icon was "a billy-goat pining for purity...
...contradictions and racked conscience. His imaginative approach to the mysteries of personality is a good reminder that consistency is for peanut butter, not for geniuses who exploit their conflicts in creative acts. Wilson's Tolstoy is the story of the literary titan's relationships with three subjects: God, Russia and women...
...past seven weeks alone, the Soviet leader has played host to a superpower summit meeting with Ronald Reagan, climaxed by the signing of the first treaty eliminating an entire category of nuclear weapons; improved relations with religious leaders during ceremonies observing the millennium of Christianity in Russia; and presided over what may be remembered as a historic Communist Party conference that endorsed his plan for political and economic perestroika (restructuring). Last week Gorbachev turned his attention to Eastern Europe, paying his first state visit to its largest member, Poland, and presiding over a summit of the Warsaw Pact military alliance...
Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
Almost all the traffic is by rail, along a line that Czarist Russia helped build in the late 19th century from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, to the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, more than 300 miles to the southeast. The principal border-crossing point for the region is Suifenhe, five hours by the daily milk train from Mudanjiang, near the Ussuri River, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in 1969. Here too there are plenty of reminders of potential trouble. Green military staff cars dart about the streets, their horns blowing at pedestrians and the occasional horse-drawn...