Word: volga
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Life on the Volga. The outskirts are full of little 50 by 60 plots, fenced in with any stray piece of wood or wire. Kids romp in the wide-rutted clay streets, while fathers & mothers are off rebuilding the city, and an old babushka hangs out the washing on a line stretched over a gooseberry bush from a young peach tree to a young cherry tree. Even in the middle of the city, chickens scrabble among the ruins...
...winter of 1942-43 the world heard the heart-heightening story: that ill-equipped Red troops had trapped and smashed 22 crack Nazi divisions along the Volga. This film wrings considerable suspense from a tactical explanation of how the battle was won. War films made by capitalists usually tell their stories from the common soldier's point of view. The Russians, concentrating on their brasshats, have managed to pump excitement into a series of scenes where most of the characters address one another as "Comrade General" and spend most of their time standing morosely around map tables discussing high...
...night of Izvestia's blast, Radio Moscow-which must not have read its daily paper very thoroughly-put on another half-hour of Eddy Rozner's band. Included in the program: a hepped-up version of the Volga Boat Song, a swing finale full of cracks at Russian grand opera...
...grey old man was surely "the sounding bell of this world," wrote Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky. "Surely he is great and holy, [although] sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant, like a Volga preacher." Sometimes it was "painfully unpleasant" to hear his comments on women: "a string of indecent words . . . unspeakably vulgar. . . . He is really a whole orchestra, but not all the horns are playing in unison. ... It is terribly stupid to call a man a genius. It is quite impossible to understand what genius is. It is far simpler and clearer to say-Leo Tolstoy...
Borrowing from your own, or some other nation's, storehouse of folk music is an old composer's trick. Dvorak and Puccini used U.S. tunes. Tchaikovsky not only reworked Russia's own Song of the Volga Boatmen but borrowed a bar or two from Italian music. Ravel, Chabrier and Rimsky-Korsakov took from the Spanish; Aaron Copland from the Mexicans. Last week the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. decided to work each other's musical gold mines officially...