Word: turgenev
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President, once put it this way: "We're not just trying to establish a reformed system. We're trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom." Trying--and perhaps failing once more. The words Ivan Turgenev wrote in The Dream more than a century ago, some years after Alexander II's decision to free the serfs, could apply today: "And once again after years I traverse your roads, And once again I find you, the same, unchanged!...And although you were freed from slavery, you do not know what...
...dacha in the country outside Moscow, the self-absorbed extended family living there oblivious to events in the outside world, the visitor whose energy and mystery stir this nest of gentlefolk -- Burnt by the Sun has the air of something Chekhov or Turgenev might have imagined...
...play is the 20th by George F. Walker, one of Canada's leading writers yet largely unknown in the U.S. -- although his Beautiful City, part of a trilogy touching on the same family, has just finished a run in Chicago, and Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, had a splendid production starring Tom Hulce at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in 1988. Walker's work certainly travels. Although Escape was originally set in Toronto, Lewis' staging makes it feel entirely American, from the opening moment, when a battered TV onstage starts blaring The Donna Reed Show...
Maybe so. But 17 years ago, in a talk with TIME, he used almost exactly the same words. And so one is left with the noble, and slightly poignant, image of a restless, ambitious, complex man trying and trying for simplicity. "There's a line in Turgenev," he says, "in Virgin Soil, that absolutely haunts me. It's a suicide note, and the entire note is, 'I could not simplify myself.' What an arrow through the heart...