Word: talese
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The only things we do know in Barry Lyndon are told us by the narrator. The narrator has no personality. His presence is obstrusive--sometimes only his comments make sense out of a scene, and his voice has the all-knowing tone of the unctuous omniscient author. Bur he doesn...
Ivan the Terrible, who suffered from insomnia and, perhaps, a bad conscience, kept three blind old men to tell him fairy stories during the long nights in the Kremlin palace. For at least seven centuries in Russia, czars, noblemen, merchants and peasants sought diversion in the wondrous skazki, the folk...
Cockroach Milk. When Russia burst triumphantly into literary history in the 19th century, it was hardly surprising that most of her great writers were steeped in folklore. "Each one is a poem!" said Pushkin, who, like Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, used folk tales as vital elements in his work. The...
Although folk tales throughout the world bear an uncanny and unexplained family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field...
Peasant Formula. Russian tales in the oral tradition have a distinctive diction, which is here brilliantly rendered by the translator, Norbert Guterman. This involves such conventions as repetition and introductory and concluding flourishes. The traditional "and they lived happily ever after" may be replaced by the more homely peasant formula...