Word: tolstoys
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...reflection or the familiarity will remain too verbal ... Probably,... a course which chose eight great books would be trying to do too much. A list from which a selection would be made might include Homer, one or two of the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy...
CATHERINE TOLSTOY ARAPOFF Quincy, Mass...
...falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture vultures and modern art ("Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood"). For the rest, Pnin...
Prokofiev & Tolstoy The U.S. witnessed a major musical event this week: the American premiere of the late Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. Although the composer finished his first version while the Germans were still rumbling toward Stalingrad, the sprawling work, which in one version took eight hours, had been performed only once before outside Russia (in Florence, in 1953). The present 2½hour edition-brilliantly produced in an English translation by NBC-TV's enterprising Opera Theater, and conducted by Peter Herman Adler-was. the version Prokofiev himself approved before his death four years...
...libretto, by Prokofiev and his wife, Poetess Mira Mendelsohn, arbitrarily hacked great chunks out of the Tolstoy epic without ever linking them in true dramatic tension. Tolstoy's own brilliant literary counterpoint-in which he switched from peace to war scenes and back-was abandoned. All the peace was concentrated in the first part, all the war in the second, so that many of the figures in Part I suddenly dropped out of sight. Moreover, the libretto was narrative rather than dramatic, required whole passages of flat prose to be set to music, with the result that long stretches...