Word: sergei
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thirty-four years ago a gaunt young Russian with a crew haircut took over the job as chief conductor in the orchestra pit of Moscow's Imperial Grand Theatre. Muscovite socialites liked the way he conducted. But Sergei Rachmaninoff had other fish to fry. Not only was he Russia's best pianist, but also the composer of three operas, a symphony, two piano concertos and a sheaf of smaller and more popular operas. One of these, the "Flatbush" Prelude in C Sharp Minor, had already swept the world, made his name a byword among people who never went...
Good shot: swarming vigilantes marching on two levels (across a high bridge and down a long flight of stairs) that seems to come straight out of famed Bolshevik Director Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin...
They That Take the Sword not only has a good chance of success because of new interest in 20th-Century Russian history, but also stands out as a good novel in its own right. It tells its bloody epic through plausible human (and inhuman) characters. Its hero, Sergei Kuskov, is human in his contradictions. He coolly plans the assassination of Tsarist generals and police, but is tormented by puritanical scruples in his love affairs. A deadly foe of Tsarism, he nevertheless wins a medal for his zeal as a railroad construction boss, becomes a patriot in the War, gets...
...this portrait, Sergei (like other characters in the book) has more of the Russian character as portrayed by Tolstoy and Dostoevski than of that played up by Soviet fiction. Soviet critics explain that Russians have changed, grown cheerful, hygienic, machine-minded, athletic, non-acquisitive. They That Take the Sword suggests that the Russian character survives more stubbornly than any Soviet official confesses...
Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, pudgy, cagey head of the Russian Communist Party's Agitprop (Agitation & Propaganda) Committee, is generally regarded as the heir-apparent to Dictator Stalin's job. He became next in line when a bullet removed the original runner-up, Stalin's "Dear Friend" Sergei Mironovich Kirov. The idea that Heir-Apparent Zhdanov can have a personal opinion about anything not shared by the Kremlin would make even dour Comrade Stalin laugh...