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The Nutcracker Ballet
''The Nutcracker'' (, ), Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet (conceived as a '; ) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination featuring a Nutcracker doll. The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's 1844 short story ''The Nutcracker'', itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King''. The ballet's first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on ''The Sleeping Beauty'', assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged ''The Nutcracker'' ballet was not initially as successful as the 20-minute ''Nutcracker Suite'' that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, it became popular in later years. Since the late 1960s, ''The Nutcracker'' has been danced by many ballet companies, especially in North America. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reforms Of Russian Orthography
Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries. Early changes Old East Slavic adopted the Cyrillic script, approximately during the 10th century and at about the same time as the introduction of Eastern Christianity into the territories inhabited by the Eastern Slavs. No distinction was drawn between the vernacular language and the liturgical, though the latter was based on South Slavic languages, South Slavic rather than East Slavic languages, Eastern Slavic norms. As the language evolved, several letters, notably the ''yuses'' (Ѫ, Ѭ, Ѧ, Ѩ) were gradually and unsystematically discarded from both secular and church usage over the next centuries. The emergence of the centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, the consequent rise of the state bureaucracy along with the development of the com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
