Word: troyat
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...decors of both are mainly Russian provincial. The characters are an engaging assortment of dreamers and bored intellectuals. The atmospheres are tumid with unreleased passion, and there are ample supplies of tea and sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov's belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. "You ask me what life is," he wrote his wife shortly...
...Troyat points out, Chekhov "drew the line at glorifying the 'holy Russian muzhik.' " He knew better; his grandfather was a peasant and his father an incompetent grocer and religious fanatic who spent most of his time praying, preaching and beating his six children. The family lived in Taganrog, a small port, a "deaf town," on the Sea of Azov, and as soon as they were able, the young Chekhovs were put to work in the unheated shop. On Sundays they were made to stand for hours in church. Wrote the author years later: "When I was a child...
IVAN THE TERRIBLE by Henri Troyat Dutton; 283 pages...
...biographer has painted the tumult and suffering of Russia's past more vividly than Henri Troyat, whose previous subjects include Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Catherine the Great. A master of the purposeful anecdote, the graceful accretion of detail that helps explain motive and madness, Troyat finds the key to Ivan's character in the ruler's early life. The heir to the throne of Muscovy was orphaned at seven, and he grew up amid endless scheming by Russia's landed aristocracy, the boyars. "Observing the brutal treatment that grown men inflicted on their fellows...
...five weeks supervising the slow deaths of as many as 60,000 of the city's inhabitants. All along, Ivan felt that he was doing heaven's work. "Having beaten, flayed, pincered, quartered and roasted, [he] plunged into a woman or into God with renewed vigor," observes Troyat. "After each series of executions, Ivan and his son were to be found in church again, in a calm and pious mood...