Word: tolstoy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...
STRIDER Galloping off-Broadway to the Great White Way comes Strider, an allegorical comedy--with music--adapted from a Tolstoy short story about a horse. Unequivocably theatrical, the cast of Strider turns a bare stage into a field, a stable, a palace, a racetrack and a Russian steppe. Without pretension, from the first beats of Russian folk music to the last piercing neigh of Strider's death, this play uncovers the inhumanity of man, the horrors of a class system and the evil of ethnic, sexual, and age discrimination--delightfully...
Singer cited Tolstoy, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, and especially Poe among his favorite and most influential writers. "Poe is the great master, and we are all his disciples," he said...
DIED. Yaeko Mizutani, 74, grande dame of the Japanese stage for a quarter of a century; of cancer; in Tokyo. A breathtaking beauty, Mizutani made her stage debut at eight and became the national sweetheart, playing romantic roles in plays by Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Ibsen. In 1928 she joined Japan's renowned Shimpa theater company, and later proved her acting talents in films and on television...
...RUSSIAN also contains Voinovich's sally into a hoary Russian genre, the "death of a forgotten man" story. In "A Distance of a Half a Kilometer," a nondescript man dies at his dinnertable, his face plopping forward into a bowl of pea soup. Not as cosmically reverbrating as, say, Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," this story has a black-and-white bluntness that sheds a fascinating glare on its subject...