Word: tolstoys
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...principal literary creation (and expository device) is a staff colonel named Verotyntsev, who has license to follow the battle to frontline trenches as an observer and sometimes as tactical hero. Verotyntsev has fictional possibilities. He combines a kind of detached professional elegance that suggests Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in Tolstoy's War and Peace with that passion for bearing truthful witness at all costs that has been the center of Solzhenitsyn's own career as a writer. In August 1914, though, Verotyntsev is too busy carrying messages around the battlefield (and from the author to the reader) to seem...
Having turned 88, Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of Leo Tolstoy, was in the mood for reminiscing. "One day we were reading War and Peace aloud," said Miss Tolstoy at her home in Valley Cottage, N.Y., "and father came into the room, and he stood there with his hands inside the belt of his blouse, and he said, 'What's that? It isn't badly written.' He was a vegetarian and a pacifist, but when a mosquito sat on the head of Chertkov [one of Tolstoy's followers], father killed it without a thought. Chertkov turned...
Hollywood has rarely made a film on a political subject that is both socially accurate and respectful of human dignity. So it's no wonder that American audiences have come to expect superficial cynicism as the acceptable tone of "progressive" American filmmaking efforts; leave Tolstoy to the comp lit classroom, leave the values of foreign filmmakers as diverse as Godard, Pontecorvo, or Costa-Gavras to their one-shot or arthouse audiences...
...eyes of the young, but it is light that we see in the old man's eyes." Miss de Beauvoir's judgment of that: "Mystical twaddle." Her heroes are not those who praise decline but the men who fight the body's disintegration, like Tolstoy, who learned to bicycle at 67, and Goethe, who at 64 could ride a horse for six hours without dismounting. Alas, even this "incessant struggle" is doomed...
...suspects, however, that Tolstoy was right. War is irrational, and it is this aspect of the war that is so often lacking in the accounts written from and about the battlefields. Viet Nam has been at blazing war for 27 years. There is hardly a person anywhere in Indochina who has not been touched directly, in one way or another, by the fighting. Mothers have lost sons and daughters. Sons have lost fathers and mothers. Farms, homes, towns, cities have been destroyed. The draft touches every young man between 18 and 35 -except those who can bribe their...