Word: varvara
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...gion d'honneur, she was considered a walking proof that "genius has no sex." Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann were bright stars in the 18th century, Kauffmann in England for her history paintings, Vigee-Lebrun in France for her sparkling and elegant society portraits, like that of Varvara Ivanovna Narishkine (1800). By her 35th year, Vigee-Lebrun reckoned, she had earned more than a million francs with her brush, a prodigious income for a painter, and her husband spent every sou on whores and gambling...
...contrast to Lermontov stand Doctor Werner, his good friend, and Varvara Bekhmetyeva, his mistress, who pass through the novel unchanged. Michael Tratner, as Werner, plays from this vantage point with great skill, creating a physician who is solid and sensible, a man who has his head screwed on the right way. In doing so, he becomes the sorely-needed link between Lermontov's reality and his illusions, a function Lermontov becomes increasingly less able to fulfill himself...
...other figures that crowd about Lermontov-Pechorin, the most striking are Czar Nicholas and Bekhmetyev, the head of his Secret Police and Varvara's husband. James Burt makes the Czar a clever and proper bastard, and an amusing one. Jason Kanter, as Bekhmetyev, manages to create the figure to which, in some ways, Lermontov aspires, a man who lives by "intellect alone," devoid of emotion, manipulating and destroying the lives of others with absolute control...
...been widely read elsewhere. (This deft translation is the first time it has been reissued in the U.S. since 1916.) A poor schoolteacher in an ugly 19th century provincial town, Peredonov hopes to be appointed inspector of schools through the intercession of his vulgar mistress Varvara with a powerful princess...
This lament in Varvara Karbouvskaya's Bondage indicates how tired Soviet writers must be of the girl-meets-boy, girl-loves-tractor school of fiction. The 18 stories collected in this book by Anthologist Kapp cover the years from 1934 to 1956, and many of them, particularly those written after Stalin's death, reflect an impatience with Communist society that is apt to surprise U.S. readers. In Yury Nagibin's The Night Guest, a feckless sponger is held in contempt by two zealous Soviet citizens, but not before one of them reflects sadly...