Word: tolstoys
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...Tolstoy once wrote, "All happy families resemble each other; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Not so, says Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a British play about a family which at curtain's fall is happy, or at least content, in its own very peculiar way. The plot, as summed up in the play's advertising, is this: "Sister wants to sleep with Mr. Sloane; Brother wants to sleep with Mr. Sloane; Mr. Sloane kicks Dada to death." Hardly the kind of situation which makes for happiness, in the natural order of things. But black comedy...
...less an authority on the Russian psyche than Leo Tolstoy wrote: "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Last week the nation was witness to a touching insight into the happiness and unhappiness of one Russian family - that of Dictator Joseph Stalin, whose only daughter, third and last child and sole surviving offsprinig, Svetlana Allilueva Stalina, 42, recently dissociated herself from both Communism and the chance catastrophe of her birth...
...qualifications and more: astonishing erudition, an edgy style, the wound of Jewishness and a bow of courage. He speaks four languages. He began publishing with two commanding achievements: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) and The Death of Tragedy (1961). Now he has found the absolute essential for a critic: a commanding idea. That idea is the breakdown of language. As he puts it, the "syntheses of understanding which made common speech possible no longer work." Today, Steiner notes, vast domains of meaning are ruled by nonverbal languages such as mathematics or symbolic logic; those who live beyond the veil of science...
Protagonist of all this dubious effort is a middle-aged account executive, Eddie Anderson, who was born Evangelos Topouzoglou. A would-be Tolstoy reduced to pushing Zephyr cigarettes for an advertising agency, Eddie also moonlights as Edward Arness, writer of hatchet jobs for slick magazines. Anderson-Topouzoglou-Arness is trapped in a Los Angeles "Spanish Renaissance ranch house" with a patient wife, a confused teen-age daughter, a supply of Picassos, tabs from the liquor store, and his mate's meddling analyst. "Asleep in the dell of respectability," he awakes with a whoop after making it with Gwen Hunt...
...STRING QUARTETS NOS. 1 AND 2 (Crossroads). Chamber music, particularly that of the 20th century, is often an acquired taste. But Leo Janáĉek wrote hummable, folk-flavored and dramatic pieces for strings. His first quartet was inspired by Tolstoy's chilling story The Kreutzer Sonata and is played with special eloquence and style by the Janáĉek String Quartet...