Word: tolstoys
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Rachmaninoff: Songs (Jennie Tourel, accompanied by Erich Itor Kahn; Columbia, 6 sides). Mezzo-Soprano Tourel's eerie interpretation of Pushkin, Alexis Tolstoy and Victor Hugo verses is outstanding in the current rash of Rachmaninoff. Performance: excellent...
...overcritical of Hardy's often cumbersome, melodramatic writing if they fail to grasp that his work was modeled on the Elizabethan drama-on the wild and stormy tragedy of King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi rather than on he carefully constructed novel form of a Tolstoy or a Jane Austen. They may also become impatient with his pessimism if they do not realize that, unlike his great Elizabethan predecessors, Hardy was a reluctant atheist...
Gorky's extraordinary Reminiscences of Tolstoy, written a generation ago and long out of print in the U.S., are now republished in a single volume with his Reminiscences of Chekhov and Andreyev and a few minor items translated for the first time. In 1900, when he was a young and promising writer of stories, Gorky went to call on the great novelist, later spent some time near Tolstoy's home in the Crimea. Perhaps he had expected to find a dull old vegetarian disguised in a peasant's smock and spouting platitudes. He found instead a henpecked...
...epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be-the tragedy of the bedroom.' " "How do you like." he asked Gorky, "Sophie Andreyevna [his wife]?" Not many years later the aged Tolstoy ran away from home because of Sophie Andreyevna, fell ill en route and died in a stationmaster's dwelling a hundred miles away...
Gorky saw disciples flocking to tell the Master how pure they had become since following his teachings. To Gorky's mind they all had "boneless perspiring hands and lying eyes"; Tolstoy himself rose above them like a "noble belfry." Once when a disciple was discussing the state of his soul, Tolstoy "leant over and said to me in a low voice: 'He's lying, all the time, the rogue, but he does it to please me.' " The state of Tolstoy's own soul puzzled Gorky greatly. "I could never believe that he was an atheist...