Word: tolstoys
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...Heavy Sand, about Soviet Jews' persecution by the Nazis during World War II. He describes his new work, which is set in the year 1934, as a "group portrait" of his own generation at a time when Stalin was consolidating power before the Great Terror. In the manner of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel mixes fact and fiction, historical figures and imaginary ones. Most important, it contains a "full portrait of the man" Stalin, Rybakov told the New York Times, "multifaceted as he was, including his merits as a politician, his ambitions...
...like a play by Anton Chekhov. The decors of both are mainly Russian provincial. The characters are an engaging assortment of dreamers and bored intellectuals. The atmospheres are tumid with unreleased passion, and there are ample supplies of tea and sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov's belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. "You ask me what...
Some people think that war and mass destruction are turn-offs. Why is it so hard for many of us to break from the bondage of negativism? I believe it was another man named Leo--Leo Tolstoy--who named one of his fine books War and Peace. He was saying to us, "Grab life by the throat and hug it." If he wasn't saying this, who cares? We all make mistakes. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Take me, for instance. Sometimes a tiny voice tells me, "Leo, you are creating soft-centered, runny confections again." But then...
...Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government, at unsympathetic neighbors. Yet like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each town is unhappy...
DIED. Edward Crankshaw, 75, British scholar who turned out 16 graceful, lively, popular histories and biographies on such subjects as Nikita Khrushchev, Austria's Habsburgs, Germany's Bismarck and Authors Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad; of cancer; in Hawkhurst, England...