Sportsman's Sketches – "Записки охотника"

Nest of Gentlefolk – "Дворянское гнездо"

Questions:

1. When did the Golden Age of Russian literature begin?

2. What works Alexander Pushkin write? What is the role of Pushkin in Russian literature?

3. What feelings has Mikhail Lermontov expressed in his verses The Death of the Poet?

4. What is Gogol famous for? Do you enjoy reading his prose? Why?

5. What gift of the author do Sportsman's Sketches demonstrate?

6. Who is considered to be the master of psychological prose in Russian literature?

7. Why has the novel Crime and Punishment made Dostoevsky famous in the whole world?

8. What can you tell about Tolstoy's life?

9. Do you agree that Chekhov is "an incomparable artist"?

Text 5

The Age of Shakespeare

1. The last half of the 16^th and the beginning of the 17^th centuries are known as the golden age of English literature. It was the time of the English Renaissance, and sometimes it is called "the age of Shakespeare". By that time England had become a powerful state, English trade was flourishing. The yoke of the feudal barons had been thrown off. New branches of science were developing. There appeared new names in literature: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, etc. They created a new poetry free from the medieval influence and more relevant to the century interests.

2. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is the greatest and most famous of English writes, and probably the greatest playwright who has ever lived. His merits are enormous. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays. Among them there are deep tragedies, such as Hamlet, King Lear, Otello, Macbeth, light commedies, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, historical dramas such as Henry lV, Richard lll. He was also the author of numerous sonnets, popular even today.

3. Shakespeare was a great humanist. He believed in high and noble features of man's mind and heart. He created characters of great depth and unusual intellect. We see a philosopher in Hamlet; a learned in Horatio, a cunning diplomat in Claudius (the King of Denmark).

4. Shakespeare alone is the whole epoch in world literature.

5. Prose developed much later than verse in all literatures. The early seventeenth century was the time when the English novel began to develop as a distinctive literary form. But it was not until the eighteenth century that anything what we mean by the novel emerged (Defoe, Eliot, Fielding).

Questions:

1. What period is known as the golden age of English literature?

2. Was England a powerful state at that time?

3. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright of all times, isn't he?

4. How many plays did Shakespeare write?

5. What characters did Shakespeare create in his works?

6. What can you say about the development of prose in the early seventeenth century?

Text 6

The Birth of the Blues

The blues was born on the Mississippi River Delta in the early 1890s. After the Civil War, the slaves were free, but life was still not easy. They had to find new work. In the South, new camps were formed. Black people from the camps worked on farms and built up the Mississippi River banks. During the week the people worked hard. They often lived alone, without their families, far from home.

On weekends, the workers got together at picnics or drinking places. Traveling black musicians with guitars entertained them. The musicians sang songs about the difficult life of the workers. Those songs were called the blues.

If you have the blues it means you feel very sad. You can have the blues because you have no money, no job, no lover, no home, or no friend. You can have the St. Louis blues, the Memphis blues, or the Monday morning blues. But blues songs were not only sad. Some of them were happy and many of them were funny.

The blues was a new kind of music. In blues songs some notes were flattened. These notes were called “blues notes”. They made the music sound sad and different.

Early blues singers often had very interesting names, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Leadbelly.

Sometimes the blues singers had song contests. Each singer sang new words or a new style of the blues song. They made up the music as they played. In this way they created new music. This is called improvisation. Later, improvisation became a very important part of jazz music.

The blues began in the country in the South. As black moved into big cities to work, the blues went with them. There they sang about life in the cities. W.C. Handy, a black band leader from Memphis, made the blues popular all over America. In 1914 he wrote the most famous blues song of all, “The St. Louis Blues”.

Questions:

1) Where and when was the blues born?

2) Which songs were called the blues?

3) What does it mean if you have the blues?

4) Who were the early blues singers?

5) Did improvisation become a very important part of jazz music?

6) Who made the blues popular all over the world?

7) When did W.C. Handy write the most famous blues song of all “The St. Louis Blues”?