Word: sevastopols
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...Russian writer Turgenev, entertaining a visitor one day in 1855, kept the conversation in whispers for fear of waking Count Tolstoy, who was asleep in the next room. "He's like this all the time," Turgenev explained. "He has come from his battery at Sevastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gypsies, and cards every night; then he sleeps like the dead until two o'clock...
...firsthand experience of war, which Ernest Hemingway has called indispensable to the greatest writers, awaited Tolstoy at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat...
...called for resistance to the Japanese invasion of northern China, or when Litvinoff was the only representative of a major power to speak for Ethiopia against Italy, or when the U.S.S.R. alone made an effort to defeat Franco in Spain? Or during the '40s, while the battles of Sevastopol and Stalingrad were being fought, while the U.S.S.R. was managing to save more of the Jewish civilians left in Europe than any other major power, or perhaps while the charter of the United Nations Organization was being signed...
Spicy Little Column. Igor's distant alliance with nobility, which he makes much of, comes from being grandson of Count Arthur Cassini, once the Tsar's Ambassador to the U.S. Igor was born in Sevastopol, grew up (after the revolution) in Denmark, Switzerland, Italy. At 21 he came to the U.S. to coach tennis at the University of Georgia, went back to get his brother, Oleg, a nubile young man. Oleg's marriages, to date: with Million-heiress Merry Fahrney, Cinemactress Gene Tierney. Igor covered sports and read proof for an Italian paper in New York, wrote...
...inch railroad cannon, probably the biggest gun ever made (and used by the Germans at Sevastopol), which fired an 8-ton shell...