Word: tolstoyan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seemed to me as I left the theater that A Christmas Tale was a little too jumpy for its own good, with too many characters and plot points hastily interwoven. But I've come to think that it is faithful to its essential purpose, which is to disprove the Tolstoyan dictum that unhappy families are each miserable in their own way. We do see something instructive about ourselves in this melodramatically grumbling group. We also appreciate anew that there is nothing like a nice French meal to steady our nerves and serve as the precondition for achieving at least...
...commemorate the day of his arrest with a 'convict's day,' when he reverted to the diet of bread, broth and oats he ate in the labor camps. He rose early every day and wrote until dusk - producing, among other works, his novel-cycle The Red Wheel, a vast, Tolstoyan account of the Russian revolution that runs to 6,000 pages, beginning with August...
...Revolution, is meant to be received with extreme piety. These artists, all dead, now have a world audience they could only have dreamed of fitfully when they were alive. We gaze at their frail icons with reverence -- the replays of French Cubism with sturgeons, Cyrillic letters and Tolstoyan beards playing hide-and-seek among their facets; the posters exhorting us to "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"; the constructions of workers' materials like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about...
...peasant art and began to paint in the primitive spirit," he wrote later. The bulky twisting serfs in Floor Polishers, 1911-12, are the laboring cousins of the ecstatic figures in Matisse's La Danse, 1909, and the red-hot metallic forms of The Woodcutter, 1912, are a Tolstoyan version of Leger's "tubism." Aviator, 1914, plays with the standard emblems of Cubism -- printed words, a hat, an ace of clubs. But it has to be the only Cubist painting with a sturgeon...
Both works live up to their Tolstoyan title. Under executive producer Zvi Dor-Ner, the series freshens the emblematic images of the nuclear age with rare footage and ironic juxtapositions, so that the viewer is more likely to look, and think, twice. Yet another mushroom cloud, at first almost a cliche, becomes surreal as Communist Chinese cavalrymen are shown charging toward ground zero as part of a training exercise, riders and horses wearing special masks to protect them against the blast...