Word: tolstoys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blunt Anglo-Saxon variety, but it sums up the reverence that every cultivated Frenchman feels toward the language of Voltaire and Racine. Since the war, it has been a matter of grave concern that the international community no longer shares this high regard. Gone are the days when Tolstoy's Russian aristocrats conversed and the Congress of Vienna convened-in French. Today France is waging a discreet campaign to reinstate-or, as one exhortation puts it, "maintain"-la langue française as an international tongue...
There is, of course, plenty of dissent from that view. Tolstoy failed to find opera godlike; in fact he found it downright godless. In his essay What Is Art? he gives a withering description of an opera rehearsal and rants against the absurdities he found onstage: "What they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas. People do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions." In a similar vein, Dr. Johnson called opera "an exotic and irrational entertainment...
...character in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. "She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Whether or not Doris ever suffers through all 365 chapters of Tolstoy's masterpiece, she is plainly a member in good standing of the summer self-improvement league, that earnest, ever growing army of readers who would sooner put a cherry in a martini than leave for vacation without at least one Great Book...
Maxim Gorky's life was the irresistible legend: unschooled Volga boatman turned great writer, angry appellant for Red Revolution, friend of Tolstoy and Lenin, humanist who loathed repression, diver to The Lower Depths and the grim, gritty world of his Childhood. In fact, judging from this careful exhumation of the man by Dan Levin, sometime novelist and lifelong Gorkyite, Gorky was at once a less noble and more tragic figure than his legend suggests...
...View of Vesuvius. Then, suddenly, came fame. Chekhov liked his early stories; Tolstoy was delighted by his crude force ("You . . . are a real peasant!"). Moscow's intelligentsia embraced the tall, stooped figure in high boots and belted black tunic. Gorky's wildly onomatopoeic Song of the Stormy Petrel became the battle anthem of the revolution, and soon he was hip deep in politics: setting up capitalist pigeons for Lenin to pluck, polemicizing both for and against the Bolsheviks. During the Leninist purges following the October Revolution, Gorky used his special relationship with Lenin to save many writers...