![]() ![]() People of art are extremely emotional and easily agitated. The next day he called the agent and told him, “I’m a man of art. He dreaded the assignment and grasped for a way to avoid it. But before plans were finalized, Voskresensky received a call from a KGB agent who asked him to carry letters to American contacts on the organization’s behalf. Arrangements were made for a tour of the United States. The Soviet cultural apparatus wanted to show him off to the world. He had medaled at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. He had played Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto at the Prague Spring International Music Festival, its first performance outside the Soviet Union, and in the presence of the great composer himself, who overcame his fear of flying to attend. He was a charismatic prodigy, on the cusp of stardom. T he last time Voskresensky engaged in a political act was in 1963. To put it in the parlance of another time: Voskresensky-a beloved figure who had won many of his nation’s highest honors, including the People’s Artist of Russia-was ready to defect. “I had this feeling that was ethically hard to live with.” Although he was 87 years old, he had a 4-year-old son, and he wanted his youngest child “to grow up free of this feeling.” His wife, who shared his distaste for Moscow’s wartime oppressiveness, agreed. “I’m guilty if I live in this society,” he told me, many months later. He couldn’t shake the feeling of his own complicity. Now it was becoming more like a conviction. As he left the conversation, he thought to himself: How can I live with intelligent people who think like this? The idea of fleeing into exile had been stirring in his head for weeks. But he added, “Since we started it, we have no choice but to win it.”īy the standards of Russian political discourse, this was hardly provocative. No profound difference of opinion separated them. One day, a fellow pianist approached him, and the conversation turned to Ukraine. “What part of Russian territory was attacked?” he would retort. The invasion of Ukraine was commonly described as a defense of Russian territory. ![]() Even in the hallways of the relatively cosmopolitan conservatory, he overheard jingoistic talk. Well before the discovery of mass graves in Bucha and Irpin, he considered the war not just a strategic blunder, but an expression of barbaric cruelty.īut he was an outlier. Whatever the propagandists proclaimed, he couldn’t think of Ukraine as enemy territory. More to the point, his mother was buried there. But, in a story typical of the imposed multiculturalism of Soviet times, he was born in what is now Ukraine, in the city of Berdyansk, on the banks of the Azov Sea. Voskresensky wasn’t ethnically Ukrainian. In February, two days before Russian troops began flowing across the Ukrainian border, Voskresensky played a concert for hundreds in the Conservatory’s Grand Hall, an exquisite artifact of the imperial age, with soaring walls lined by portraits of the nation’s great composers. His young wife, a talented pianist from Vietnam, had studied there. His granddaughter served as his assistant, teaching alongside him. For decades, he was the venerable chair of the piano department, specializing in the masters of 19th-century romanticism. Got close, but bungled the last bit to open the final wall that would have led to the conclusion.T here was no place Mikhail Voskresensky loved more than the Moscow Conservatory. Ultimately, I couldn't finish it despite having the aid of a walkthrough. You really have to love complex puzzle solving to complete this game and apparently, based on reviews, some players are fine with that challenge. The puzzles get harder and harder and the game is completely fantasy driven with no basis in reality. Unfortunately, after awhile you really don't care about Harry and all the gushing he does about Norah. Harry's goal was to find a cure for Norah's strange sickness, but it's hard to see a connection between that goal and all the gizmos the expedition was using. The early puzzles are related to the natives and weren't too bad to solve, but then Norah encounters numerous machinery of varying types all of which are out of commission that she must restore. Though the landscapes in the game are often breath-taking, I was amazed at how technically complex the game is. I was expecting a leisurely and fun experience akin to exploring Disney World's various theme parks. The marketing poster for Call of The Sea is engaging with a pretty girl named Norah going on an adventure to some strange island in search for The marketing poster for Call of The Sea is engaging with a pretty girl named Norah going on an adventure to some strange island in search for her husband Harry. ![]()
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