Word: tolstoys
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DIETIES TO THE contrary notwithstanding, great writers are mortal: this is perhaps their greatest failing. When you've finished that last major Hardy novel, dug out the most forgotten Tolstoy short story, there is no more to look forward to. So it is with Jane Austen, the ultimate literary narcotic for the true believer. Six short novels to be read again and again, outings and conversations to be relived endlessly, the same people and families to be encountered over and over. But, frustratingly, no more...
...enough to keep the coward from combat. It is on the battlefield, with some astonishingly evocative camera work, that the director-writer-star sends up Russian literature and never lets it come down. It is as if one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Hasidic schoolboys were managing Tolstoy's estate and Dostoevsky's psychoses. The Brothers Karamazov meet the Brothers Marx; the epic of War and Peace is reduced to a battle of church and shtetl; Boris scatters Yiddishisms and one-liners all the way back to St. Petersburg and the girl he loves like a brothel...
...seven: International Rescue Committee. Inc., Church World Services, Lutheran World Council, U.S. Catholic Conference, Tolstoy Foundation, United HIAS Service, American Fund for Czech Relief...
...framing his answer, Maximov eagerly risks comparison with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Souls, he insists, have been parched by the enforced loss of mystical Christianity in Mother Russia. Maximov's art is not yet ready for such awesome competition. His novel is a string of craftsmanlike vignettes awash in hyperbole. Emotions are so consistently overwrought that tempestuousness is soon diminished to nagging petulance. Some of the blame may belong to the translation. One Russian greets another with an improbable, hearty "Hallo, Pal" or a "Come on, Boss...
...Tolstoy, the grim treadmill just continued; age brought no respite, maturity no fulfillment...