a new German command team of Paul von Hin-denburg and Erich Ludendorff time to develop plans already outlined by staff officers on the ground- to concentrate their entire force against the Second Army.
After five days of hard fighting, between August 26 and August 30, there were 50,000 Russian casualties, and 90,000 prisoners. Samsonov committed suicide and the Germans turned on Rennenkampf, driving the First Army back over the frontier between September 7 and 14, in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes.
The Russians came closer to victory in East Prussia than is generally realized. Their failure was primarily a consequence of attempting a campaign of maneuver arguably beyond the capacity of any army under the tactical conditions of 1914. But while the losses in men and material were replaced, the blow Tannenberg inflicted on Russian national morale was never restored throughout the war. See also: WORLD WAR I
Golovine, N. N. (1934). The Russian Campaign of 1914, tr. A. G. S. Muntz. Ft. Leavenworth, KS: The Command and General Staff School Press. Showalter, Dennis. (1991). Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, CT: Archon.
DENNIS SHOWALTER
(1932-1986), Russian film director.
Tarkovsky was born in the village of Za-vrazhye on the Volga river in the Ivanovo province, northeast of Moscow. His father, Arseny Alexan-drovich (1907-1989), was a poet, at that time working as a translator before achieving acclaim in later years. His mother, Maria Ivanovna (Vish-nyakova), had studied with Arseny at the Moscow Institute for Literature but was working as a proofreader for First State Publishing House in Moscow. Soon after the family moved to Moscow in 1935, Tarkovsky’s parents separated and later divorced. Tarkovsky remained with his mother and sister, but his father continued to play an important role in his intellectual and emotional development.
Tarkovsky started school in Moscow in 1939, but after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was
evacuated in 1941 to relatives in the town of Yuryevets, near his birthplace. In 1951 Tarkovsky entered the Institute for Oriental Studies but soon abandoned his academic life. In 1953 he joined a geological expedition to Siberia. On returning, he enrolled the following year at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, where he studied under the supervision of the renowned Soviet director Mikhail Romm. Fellow students included Andrei Konchalovsky, who also later achieved international fame as a director, and Vadim Yusev, who worked as director of photography on several of Tarkovsky’s early films.
In 1957 Tarkovsky married classmate Irma Rausch. In 1960 he graduated from film school with honors. For his diploma work, he wrote and directed a fifty-minute feature film called The Steamroller and the Violin, which treats several themes- childhood, innocence and loss, male friendship, and the redemptive power of art-which later become central to his work. In 1961 Tarkovsky started work on a Mosfilm commission, released the following year under the title Ivan’s Childhood. This film, which explores the relationship between a young boy and two adult soldiers experiencing the physical and psychological dislocations of war, immediately won international acclaim. Tarkovsky’s next film, Andrei Rublev, is considered by many to be his masterpiece. This long, complex account of the life of the early fifteenth-century Russian icon painter took five years to complete (1961-1966) and, because of its unconventional treatment of national history, its vivid depiction of medieval cruelties, and its central concern with the relationship between spirituality and artistic creation, encountered the hostility of the Soviet authorities, who delayed its release by another three years. During this period, Tarkovsky left his first wife and, in 1970, married the actress Larisa Pavlovna (Yegork-ina), who worked in many of his later films.
During the next decade, Tarkovsky directed three more films in the Soviet Union, each intellectually challenging and stylistically innovative: Solaris (1972), a profound reflection, in a science-fiction setting, on human relationships, mortality, and the nature of existence; Mirror (1975), a kaleidoscope of autobiographical episodes exploring themes of childhood, maternal love and marriage, time, memory, and loss, which provoked official disapproval for its subjective nature but won widespread critical acclaim; and Stalker (1979), a grim allegory of the human quest for moral salvation. Tarkovsky’s next film, Nostalghia (1983) was a joint Soviet-Italian production. Following its completion, the director decided to remain in Western Europe. He finished his final film, Sacrifice (1986), while already suffering from lung cancer. He died in Paris at the end of the year. In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev’s new cultural policy inaugurated a posthumous celebration of Tarkovsky’s work in the Soviet Union. Since 1991 his reputation, both in Russia and internationally, as one of cinema’s great artists has not diminished. See also: MOTION PICTURES; RUBLEV, ANDREI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Green, Peter. (1993). Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. (1994). The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tarkovsky, Andrey. (1986). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. London: The Bodley Head. Turovskaya, Maya. (1989). Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. London: Faber.
Tashkent is the capital city of the Republic of Uzbekistan, a country located in the region of Central Asia between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The city itself is located on the Zarafshan River, just to the west of the Ferghana Valley. The history of Tashkent goes back more than 2,500 years, to a time when there was evidence of habitation in the region. The name itself means “city of stone,” perhaps indicative of the stones used in its construction. It grew to be a significant stop on the great silk road in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, yet remained in the shadows of the more important city of Samarkand, which is approximately 300 kilometers (185 miles) to the south.
The city’s fall to Russian forces in 1865 signaled the beginning of Imperial Russian rule over the region. It was designated as the capital city of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship and was the Russian capital of Central Asia. Indeed, as the city grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distinct districts were formed, for both indigenous peoples and for the European colonizers. Tashkent was the scene of some of the bitterest
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Boy selling musical instruments at a Tashkent market. © NEVADA WIER/CORBIS fighting during the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war. For much of this period, Tashkent was a Red bastion, surrounded by anti-Bolshevik forces.
The political importance of Tashkent continued through the Soviet period. While Samarkand was initially designated as the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (UzSSR), in 1929 the honor was given to Tashkent. During World War II, numerous factories and industries were moved to Tashkent from areas within Russia and Ukraine that were threatened by invading German forces. Consequently, Tashkent became industrialized from the 1940s onward, giving the city a strong economic importance to Central Asia and the Soviet Union as a whole.
In 1966 Tashkent experienced a devastating earthquake that left significant portions of the city in ruins. The Soviet government made the city’s reconstruction a national effort, and citizens from all parts of the country moved to Tashkent to help in the rebuilding, with a number staying afterward. As a result, the population of the city quickly exceeded one million, and by the late 1980s was more than 2.5 million. As of 2002 the official population of the city was 2.6 million residents, although some estimates are closer to 3.0-3.5 million, or 12-14 percent of Uzbekistan’s total population. While Samarkand and Bukhara make claims to be the cultural centers of Uzbekistan, Tashkent remains the political and economic power of the country. Moreover, it is a major transportation and trade hub for Central Asia. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
