Word: russian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hidden Flames. A major breakthrough in Byzantine art was the rediscovery of the Russian icon, one of the great, traditional art forms. Medieval Russians carried wonderworking icons into battle against the Tartars, held them aloft in religious processions, encrusted church partitions with them. Because pious tradition held that the earliest images were painted-from-life portraits of New Testament figures, the icons were scrupulously copied for some 800 years, repaired when damaged and endlessly varnished...
Icons bought up at the turn of the century by N. P. Likhachev, whose collection is now in Leningrad's Russian Museum, and I. S. Ostroukhov, whose collection is now in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, laid the basis for scholarly study. Cleaning them for the first time in centuries was a revelation. Says Soviet Expert Victor Lasareff: "In place of dark, gloomy icons coated with a thick layer of varnish, [viewers] beheld glorious works of art, radiant with colors as bright as precious stones. They blazed with the flame of cinnabar; they caressed the eye with their subtle...
...Thunderer. Soviet researches, summarized in a handsome outsized volume published this year by UNESCO (Early Russian Icons, New York Graphic Society; $18), establish the medieval stronghold city of Novgorod, southeast of Leningrad, as one of the great centers of icon making. A Constantinople-trained Greek named Theophanes-called by a contemporary the "very excellent book illuminator and painter"-was the artist who brought the secrets of Byzantium's golden age to the cold north in the late 14th century, sparked Novgorod's greatest period...
...Russians had another reason to welcome Eaton: as a self-starting elder (74) statesman on a personal campaign for "world peace," Eaton had been corresponding with Premier Khrushchev, had been recently praised by Khrushchev for his efforts to soften U.S. policy toward Russia. The Reds were plainly grateful for such help-especially from such a prize specimen of capitalist. At an agricultural fair, Eaton was presented with a gold medal for his "great contribution to Russian agriculture." Later he was escorted to the Kremlin for a 1½-hour talk with Khrushchev, whom Eaton found a "clean-desk...
Thus the U.S.S.R.'s Boris Pasternak, who once described himself as "almost an atheist," seems to summon his readers to stand-not before the official Communist deity, which is a thing called history-but before the divinity of Jesus. This helps to explain why Doctor Zhivago, the greatest Russian novel since the Revolution, will not be read in Russia. The poem is attributed to the novel's hero, who supposedly leaves it with a sheaf of other verse as his legacy, but it plainly speaks for Pasternak and his gentle genius...