Word: bolshevist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first act involves Carr, Gwendolyn (Katharine McGrath), Carr's sister and a Joyce patron, Joyce himself (played by James Booth), and Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist artist. While on orders from London to keep an eye on the Bolshevist Lenin, Carr finances Joyce's theater troupe in a performance of Ernest, for which Joyce promises him the lead role. After the opening library scene, the lights dim and the spotlights come out on Carr, an old man in a housecoat who sets the scene and reminisces about the old days in Zurich. The play, but especially this scene, showcases the talents...
Look at the Harlequins! purports to be a writer's memoirs, an "oblique autobiography," although at times the mask slips and we find ourselves looking over the narrator's shoulder at his memoirs-in-progress: "I was eighteen when the Bolshevist revolution struck--a strong and anomalous verb, I concede, used here solely for the sake of narrative rhythm." Sometimes, indeed, the effect is rather witty...
...broad outline, the narrator's life resembles the author's: When the Bolshevist revolution strikes, Vadim Vadimovich N finds it expedient to leave his native Russia; after a few years at Cambridge and a few in Paris as a writer-in-exile, he crosses the ocean to become a writer-in-residence at a prestigious Eastern university. The memoirs at hand dash through some fifty years, four wives, and a series of books (first in Russian and later in English) that correspond, more or less, to Nabokov...
...bureaucratic rise was rapid. He joined the Justice Department in 1917, and two years later was head of a new general intelligence division ordered to study subversives during the "Palmer Raids," an anti-Bolshevist dragnet that made McCarthyism a generation later seem a model of tolerance. It was Hoover's first encounter with Communism, which all of his life he regarded as "the greatest menace free civilization has ever known...