muzhik

At the end of the room is YSL's desk, and on the wall behind it, a portrait of him by Bernard Buffet, a black and white photograph of Catherine Deneuve, pictures of his beloved French bulldog Muzhik. The set-up is, Madison Cox informs me, exactly as it was "apart from it's a little bit tidier - there were rolls of fabric everywhere and his dog running around snipping at models' ankles."
Cox, a San Francisco-born landscape designer and a long-time friend of Saint Laurent and, latterly, Berge's husband, designed the latest incarnation of the Jardin Majorelle.

Referred to by the transliterated Russian term muzhik, they appeared to belong to a separate nation.

This sexagenarian casts himself as an average Russian muzhik. By the unwritten laws of that country, he is supposed to be a statistical skeleton.

The dread of an impending social catastrophe, which Tolstoy believed could be prevented by the elite's assimilation into a peasant's mode of being, shapes the theme of vengeance in the novel and finds its expression in the vision of the incongruous figure of the French-speaking and iron-wielding muzhik. This subject of Anna's and Vronsky's nightmares, and the object of Levin's persistent religious and economic quest, represents the unconscious presence of history in Tolstoy's novel: specifically, the Russian peasant's historical trajectory from an unskilled agricultural serf docilely tilling his master's land to a skilled industrial worker capable of standing up for his or her own economic interest.

Rasputin was a paradoxical muzhik who will remain an epitome of intrigue in the annals of history.

This "other" who now becomes Ivan's sole partner in his descending spiral toward death turns out to be his "butler," "a clean, ruddy young muzhik" (peasant) by the name of Gerasim.

Dressed as a muzhik, he hears the jingle of a troika, and is witness to a heroic revolutionary act carried out by a "violently beautiful" Slavic woman "with dreadful black eyes and black hair" (369).

Trudovik writers objected to the Kadet view of the non-urban electorate as "backward," a reflection of a long-standing "intellectual" prejudice against the muzhik. If one listened to the "simple language" of the peasants, if one accepted them as citizens, one would see that abstract notions of civil rights, the importance of the four-tail suffrage (equal, direct, secret, universal), of a unicameral legislature with control over the budget, were just as embedded in the popular consciousness as bread and butter issues.

"Thanks, Muzhik," the Cossack says, which I guess makes at least a little bit of sense since he's got the Russian accent and all.

Their consciousness is blocked from view for Oz's reader, just as was the consciousness of the Ukrainian muzhik in Shteinberg's story.

Stavans's memoirs, however, seem to perform what his grandmother had to face all her life but refused to accept: 'Amerika, America' and the Mexican culture of mestizaje: "She disembarked from the Sparndam [the ship that took her over the Atlanic ocean] and was exposed, for the first time, to a different type of muzhik: the mestizo" (2002: 72).