Word: tolstoys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hamlet is a "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless work," complained the novelist. Man and Superman, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, is not "sufficiently serious." The music of Beethoven, Schumann and Berlioz, he told Tchaikovsky, has "an artificial style-striving for the unexpected." The critic was Count Leo Tolstoy, and these and other remarks appear in two volumes of Tolstoy's Letters (Scribners; $35), the first comprehensive translation into English of the Russian writer's prolific correspondence. In notes to friends and fellow authors like I.S. Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and Rainer Maria Rilke, Tolstoy also takes...
...working notes Tolstoy made her ugly, giving her a narrow, low forehead and a nose so big that it was almost deformed. But in looks at least, Anna Karenina has been lucky. The author himself fell in love with her, performing a graceful act of plastic surgery before he introduced her to the public, and over the years she has been portrayed by some of the loveliest women in the world. The great Garbo played her twice, and Vivien Leigh added her exquisite beauty to the part 13 years later. In this ten-part series from the BBC, premiering...
...said "Look, but don't touch." Leigh was unmistakably feminine, but she also seemed distant, as if she were covered by glass, like any other priceless work of art. Pagett, by contrast, is both sensuous and voluptuous, a creature of fire and earth. Her face is marked, as Tolstoy said of Anna, by a "persistent animation." Compared with her predecessors, her features are less than ideal: her eyes have a slight goldfish bulge, her lips are too full, and her cheekbones are uncommonly high. But in one of those wonderful accidents of nature, the mistakes cancel one another...
Nobody really minds that Tolstoy put words in Napoleon's mouth long after the event; it is the use of this technique for contemporaries, or the recent dead, that raises problems. Now that Herman Wouk is converting his bestseller The Winds of War into a television series, he was asked by Daniel Schorr about the propriety of giving to actors impersonating Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin words that the real figures never uttered. "You have touched a very live nerve," Wouk replied. "I don't know if anyone has the answer." But some try to answer: one successful scriptwriter...
Many facts about Nabokov's youth and early manhood are little known be cause of what Field sees as the aristocratic artist's need to be inaccessible to others. If, for example, Nabokov had told us that Leo Tolstoy once patted him on the head, it would sound like name dropping. When Field relates the incident, it not only is delightful in itself but also becomes part of a rich cultural context...