Word: russianize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...into space. Unofficially, it is held by the members of the Bolshoi Ballet, who last week bounded about the stage of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House like a herd of nail-tailed wallabies. In the second week of their eight-week U.S. visit, the Russian dancers proved that they can leap higher, farther and more daringly than anything north of Australia. More important, in some dazzling performances of Swan Lake, they gave Manhattan audiences their first look at the Soviet classical ballet linked to the lavish, lush dance style that is the source of the company's fame...
...Russians do it, the evil bird-sorcerer is killed by the Prince, and the lovers walk happily into a rose-colored sky; the fight in which the Prince tears off one of his enemy's wings is a bit of Socialist realism totally out of place in the classical ballet, but it makes for some immensely exciting dance. The effect of these and other changes was to make the Russian Swan Lake a looser, more romantic interpretation than Western observers are accustomed to seeing. On the other hand, the Bolshoi Swan Lake provided the soloists with more elbowroom...
...danced the role of the Evil Sorcerer with briny conviction and made his final, crippled death dance a wonderful virtuoso exercise; Nicolai Fadeyechev, who was superb as the Prince, particularly in his leaps in the Act III Black Swan variations; Georgi Soloviev as an acrobatic Jester (a happy Russian addition to the ballet). Occasionally ragged the first evening, the Bolshoi's Swan Lake was danced with fine precision at the second performance. The repetitive, copybook attitudes of the ballet corps occasionally clotted the action and wearied the eye. But for the most part, the old war horse...
None of the Russians' three massive Sputniks had reported the Van Allen radiation. One theory is that the Russians outsmarted themselves by refusing to tell the outside world how to interpret signals from their satellites. Since only the low parts of the Sputnik orbits were over Soviet territory, Russian scientists never got reports from high altitudes. If any of the Sputniks carried tape recorders, they apparently did not work...
Another theory is that the Sputniks' Geiger tubes were blacked out near apogee by Van Allen radiation, and that the Russian scientists did not know how to interpret this odd behavior. The live dog carried in Sputnik II died in about a week, but the Russians have not told whether it was affected by radiation sickness. Very likely they do not know...