Word: tolstoys
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...during the U.S. Civil War. Had he been educated by the Russian side, Knightley might have recalled that a young second lieutenant brought the horrors of the Crimean War home to Moscow with his articles from Sevastopol. They miraculously passed through the censors untouched, and bore the byline Leo Tolstoy. R.Z. Sheppard
...portraitist, Ilya Repin painted Tolstoy and Conductor Anton Rubinstein with great panache...
When Hitler's armies marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, the Russian people's fight for survival inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write an opera that would embody their struggle. His hugely ambitious choice for a story: Tolstoy's War and Peace. What he finally produced in 1943, however, was written in an almost schizoid style-part introspective love story, part heroic showpiece-that was difficult to grasp, easy to misunderstand. Stalin's commissars gave only grudging approval, demanded more pageantry and patriotic fervor. At his death in 1953, the composer was still rewriting the work...
Prokofiev's opera might as well have been called Peace and War. It starts well along in the Tolstoy novel, with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky on a visit to Count Rostov's country estate, musing on the seeming emptiness of his life, then discovering Rostov's beautiful daughter Natasha. That and the next six scenes depict, with a mixture of passion, intrigue and despair, the decadent social life of prewar Russia. The last six scenes are devoted to the French invasion of 1812. Napoleon struts nervously (to the accompaniment of diabolic fanfares in brass), while Russian Field Marshal...
...Love and Death, Allen takes his fantasy setting to its logical extreme--a-lavish Tolstoy Russia. It works, but not as an unseemly setting for a slapstick stooge. There's no question that Allen's stock formula has hit home to a lot of losers and tickled a lot of losers-watchers, but when you get right down to it, it's a pretty thin joke. There are only so many laughs to the 98-pound weakling dilemma, whether it's set at muscle beach or Martinique. And it is where Allen scrapes the dregs of slapstick gags that...