Word: samovar
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...some respects, no medium was less appropriate for chronicling old Russia than the primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head full of literary and historical associations, while fiction may draw...
...simmering minihell of incessantly frustrated emotions in a barren provincial outpost of non-civilization, this particular cast stirs up only a tempest in a samovar. Vanya should be compacted of anguish; Hutt is merely consumed by pique. When he shoots at Serebriakov and misses him twice, one hears only the toy pistol retort of a toyed-with emotion...
Middle-class Muscovites have been buying the traditional paintings, both for their timeless beauty and as a practical hedge against inflation. The images have become so popular that last week Russians were buying up a first edition of a samovar-table book on the subject (with 50 color plates) at $11 a copy. Literaturnaya Gazeta complained that some citizens purchased icons simply to "create an illusion of eccentricity of thinking or way of life"-in other words, to express their individuality. The images remain a sufficiently powerful symbol of religion and the old regime that many collectors feel compelled...
NEARLY a month after the event, the Soviet Union released photographs of its Mars 3 capsule, the first earthly vehicle to make a "soft landing" on the planet Mars. Although they were accompanied by few technical details, the pictures of what looked like a flying samovar gave some clues to its operation: after its conical heat shield (not shown) was jettisoned, a small parachute was released, retarding the capsule's descent slightly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Then the larger main chute was unfurled from a ring-shaped container under the lander's spherical body. Finally, a burst...
Drop in the Samovar. The cracks are still narrow. In 1970 the U.S. sold $118 million worth of goods to the Soviets, mostly hides, pulp, aluminum oxides and machinery. In return, Americans imported $72 million in Russian goods, principally sable skins, fuels, aluminum scrap, chrome ore and other metals. That was a mere drop in the samovar for the Soviet Union, which does about $5 billion worth of business a year with other non-Communist countries...