Word: tolstoys
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...stage, what the playgoer almost invariably sees is the skeleton of the book and the embryo of a play. A sense of events and characters killed for lack of space, of people and relationships underdeveloped for lack of time is present in this Phoenix Theater presentation of the Tolstoy classic, but it has an evocative life that refuses to be smothered. Thanks to Ellis Rabb's inventive direction, a substantial fraction of the surge, scope and thematic intention of the novel comes over the footlights...
...reality. Children are born, men and women marry or do not marry, father fights with son and son with father, the old die. Peace is love, war is evil. In war, the young die, husband is torn from wife, the round of daily life is violated and reversed; yet Tolstoy's instinct for portraying the tenacious domesticity of existence makes war seem the great interrupter rather than the great destroyer...
Against this private world, Tolstoy posed the public world of events, and the use of ingeniously flexible stage levels keeps the two worlds in ironic interplay. The public world reverberates with social reforms, patriotism, the trumpeted, and trumped-up, goals of nations and of wars. In Tolstoy's view, these are vampires of abstraction that suck real blood. The pinnacle of abstraction, as he sees it, is the great hero Napoleon. While the battle of Borodino is clumsily enacted onstage like a mock-up war game with wooden soldiers and generals, Tolstoy pursues the point that Napoleon...
There is a certain intellectual arrogance in a man of letters judging a man of action, but Tolstoy was undeterred by that, and War and Peace might be called Napoleon's second Waterloo. Tolstoy's thesis was that the multitudinous whims of chance, rather than the decisive will of a great man, determine history. War and Peace thus helped to foster an antiheroic philosophy of history that has gradually depopulated the modern novel and drama of heroes. But Tolstoy's own generalship, his vast marshaling and deployment of esthetic forces, never faltered. A century after his masterpiece...
...opening in May. The negotiations resumed this week in Geneva, where each nation presented a top-secret list of sensitive and important products that it wishes exempted from the tariff bargaining. Last week, as 45 nations prepared to dispatch their lists to the 19th century Geneva villa where Leo Tolstoy once lived, a new crisis in the Common Market once more showed that France not only is lukewarm about the Kennedy Round but could frustrate it at any time...