Word: rybakov
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DIED. ANATOLI RYBAKOV, 87, Russian author; in New York City. Rybakov started writing stories part time while driving a truck. His children's book The Dirk, published in 1950, was an immediate success and admired by Stalin. On the other hand, it took years for him to get his epic novel Children of the Arbat published. When the work--which freely discusses Stalin's terrors--finally appeared in 1986, it sold more than 1 million copies in the Soviet Union...
Russian critics of Boris Yeltsin's administration charge that Moscow has severely underreported Chechen civilian casualties. Tuesday night, lawmaker Yuri Rybakov said a group led by Russia's human rights commissioner has compiled a list of 25,000 civilians killed so far in Grozny, the Chechen capital. (The Kremlin has already rejected similar estimates, including one of 20,000 dead by the Russian parliament's defense committee.) Russian forces, meanwhile, began bombarding villages in Ingushetia, one of several border republics that Russia accuses of harboring Chechen rebels...
There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
...factual is Rybakov's Stalin? The author's flashback depiction of the son of a Georgian bootmaker who became a revolutionary after dropping out of a seminary should cause few objections. The outlines of Stalin's political career are familiar and generally accepted, as is Rybakov's assertion in the novel that the dictator had Sergei Kirov killed as an excuse for starting the purge...
...fiction is not history. Liberties are taken for dramatic effect; scenes must be arranged, dialogue concocted and interior monologues imagined. Rybakov's technique is no different from that of other popular novelists who incorporate historical figures into their books. Like most, he succeeds best when his imagination runs freest. A case in point: a scene in which Stalin's dentist, a competent though nervous practitioner, finds himself in the unenviable position of handling the bite that feeds...