Word: tolstoys
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...Tolstoy, War and Peace
...Bowers' book on Vladimir Nabokov's lectures [Nov. 16] reminded me of the extraordinary final exam I took 24 years ago in Nabokov's course at Cornell. All his students were aware of his emphasis on "the word, the expression . . . not ideas" and, consequently, had read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with great care. However, very few of us were prepared for questions like "Describe Vronsky's last glimpse of Anna" (dead under the wheels of a train), and the "trick" question: "What color paint was on the walls of the room where Anna was sick...
...tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence. Where newspaper readers saw the case as little more than an upper-middle-class rendition of Frankie and Johnny (he done her wrong. Bang! Bang!), Trilling sees a drama worthy of the talents of Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also teases out enough class conflict to spin a dark web of one of egalitarian America's most sensitive subjects...
...Americans at least, have not explored the alternatives on the down side of civilization. Anyway, ideals of privacy, cleanliness, spaciousness and a certain domestic dignity are fairly new to the history of housing. It is not so many generations ago that we stopped keeping pigs in the house. At Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, the serfs curled up anywhere in the house that they felt drowsy and went to sleep like cats...
...harmonizes with the tenets of the Bhagavad-Gita being sung and the goals of Gandhi's revolution acted out onstage. The opera's three acts (seven scenes) trace the beginnings of the Satyagraha movement during Gandhi's 21 years in South Africa: the founding of the Tolstoy Farm commune, the increasing resistance to discrimination against Indians, the climactic Newcastle march of 1913 in which Gandhi led striking miners in protest against restrictive racial policies. While each scene is self-contained, the effect is cumulative and powerful...