Word: tolstoys
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Often, Joyce Carol Oates' creations suggest 19th century romantic novels: a Tolstoy heroine tuned to the breaking point over the frets of love, a Dostoevsky soul glutton, a Stendhal glory hound. The settings, however, are strictly 20th century American, illuminated by sheets of cold neon. Urban infestations where "taxes are rising and the tax base is falling," suburbs that miraculously exist for hours without the visible presence of human life, transitional neighborhoods where elderly holdouts keep their white elephants alive by secretly feeding them boarders...
...Solzhenitsyn for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In a country where church, judiciary and other institutions have often proved unable to restrain the power of either czar or commissar, the writer has emerged as the last authoritative voice of conscience. Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn is aware of the power-and perils-of the writer's role...
...with Novelist Norman Mailer, who was in for stabbing his wife (she later refused to press charges). Given a sentence of ten to twelve years, Kemp began smuggling short-story manuscripts out of prison for Mailer's comments and corrections. He trained himself partly by rewriting passages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his own words. He also learned French and earned a high school equivalency certificate. "Somewhere around the age of 15, I had declared war on America, but I'd chosen all the wrong weapons. I decided to write and continue my fight with more effective tools...
...Tolstoy said that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Theatrically, unhappy families do have something in common: they are the breeding grounds of durably vital plays and of great playwrights. From the Greek tragedies through Ibsen and Chekhov, the unhappy family recurs as a dominating theme. Similarly, it is almost a catalogue of the best American plays. Think of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Edward Albee...
Then there is Barthelme's Tolstoy Museum, including 30,000 giant pictures of the great Russian master as well as a 640,086-page Jubilee Edition of Tol-stov's published works...