Word: tolstoys
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...masters of the Kremlin have long been troubled by the challenge of great writers. When Tolstoy spoke out against famine or religious persecution in 19th century Russia, his voice so carried around the world that the czars took heed. In the early years of Communist rule, Maxim Gorky wielded his renown to save and protect people, until he died a mysterious death probably arranged by Stalin. Boris Pasternak constituted an invisible government that the regime could never quite overthrow. Khrushchev could make Pasternak give up his Nobel Prize, but no one could erase the protest he raised in his masterwork...
...agony of One Day comes from the spectacle of a simple man, laboring and suffering with naive good humor, and all for nothing. For Russian readers this agony is redoubled. Russians have always loved innocents in literature, and the carpenter Ivan is a peasant innocent in direct descent from Tolstoy's Platon Karataev in War and Peace. His meekness is in jarring contrast to the degradation of the camp?where an extra bowl of mush makes a day "almost happy," and where your most important possessions are your felt boots, a spoon you made from aluminum wire, a needle...
...burning books again in Red China. Singled out for censure in Mao's land, according to the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta-a potboiler that likes to call the kettle black-are the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Twain, Steinbeck, London, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...
Imperial Russian counts have never carried much clout in the Soviet Union. But Count Leo Tolstoy is somebody special. Last week marked the 140th birth day of the great author, whose deep sympathy for the restive peasants of his day has earned him the approval of the Kremlin. To honor the occasion there was a large party at Moscow's State Museum and a mass pilgrimage to his grave. For a change, party functionaries and intellectuals found something they could celebrate together...
...after all the excesses and errors, considerable power abides. Tolstoy's book may not have been reliable as history or wholly satisfactory as fiction; yet it achieved, in the words of Tolstoy's biographer, Henri Troyat, "the majesty of a second Genesis." Bondarchuk's film catches part of that majesty by showing Mother Russia dressed in the 19th century's bloodstained finery, overshadowing her doomed, noble children. She, and she alone, is worth two trips to the movie house...