Word: russianizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fellow with an itch to dabble in the arts. Vain and hot-tempered but a man of impeccable taste, he decided that if he couldn't be a great artist himself he could encourage and sponsor men who were. In Paris he put on a giant show of Russian art, a series of concerts of Russian music, and the first Parisian performance of Musorgsky's great opera Boris Godunov, with Chaliapin in the title role. Then he was ready for his biggest project: Russian ballet...
...Diaghilev and his friend Jean Cocteau, and drove through the Bois de Boulogne. Cocteau remembers: "We were silent; the night was cool and clear. The odor of the acacias told us we had reached the first trees. Coming to the lakes, Diaghilev, bundled up in opossum, began mumbling in Russian . . . tears running down [his] cheeks...
After lunch, Stravinsky usually tends to stacks of personal and business correspondence (in four languages: Russian, French, English, German), sees friends and sometimes visitors, whom Stravinsky likes or dislikes instantly. Says one of his intimate friends, Attorney Aaron Sapiro: "When I bring a guest to his house or a person who wishes to talk to him, Stravinsky will excuse himself after a few minutes, call me to the hallway and say either 'take him away, he's insincere,' or 'I like him, we will enjoy this...
Most of the recent books about Tolstoy have emphasized his old age-as dean of Russian letters, Christian pacifist, anti-patriot and abysmally unhappy husband. Tolstoy As I Knew Him, published in Russia in 1926 and now fully translated into English for the first time, has the charm and importance of showing him in the full flush of youth, when he most delighted in the very things which he later renounced. A glimpse of the Czar, "sitting so handsomely on his horse," could make him feel "clogged with tears"; and " [life's] greatest happiness," he still believed then, "Iies...
...sound Italian, and, most important, that nobody understands them"). He loved his school, where he personally taught the children of his farm hands; but most other forms of "progress" horrified him-e.g., the novelty of using kerosene in lamps instead of good old fat, the creation of a Russian parliament ("perfectly absurd"), colleges and careers for women (except where "help is needed in large families"), the cleaning up of years of weeds and garbage from around his mansion ("I don't understand . . . We were getting on very well without this...