It needs pluck to play in triangular formation

Usage examples of balalaika.

Once, watching him as he slept, she played the balalaika tape for herself alone, but only once.

As fragile, she thought, as the lacy balalaika music trapped in its metal box.

Pain, balalaika, souls, curses-she looked away, anywhere away, out the little window to where the stars called from the PitCrawling under the horizon was the bright-yellow ELM.

Madame Karitska handed him her library card, her social security card, and her card of membership in the Balalaika Society.

Ships docked to load up our national products, goods transported from Stalingrad, Stalinsk, Stalino, Stalinbad, Stalinir, Stalinkan, and Stalinovo, goods to be sent forth to a waiting world: caviar and sables, vodka and papirosi, heroin and hashish, plutonium and red mercury, balalaikas, matryoshkas, lapel pins, rayon banners, platinum busts of our leaders, and coypu.

Romanov, the tsarevitch, son of the last Romanov ruler of Russia, fourteen years old, described over and over again as a physically fragile hemophiliac, had been learning to play the balalaika.

Mead and qvass flowed in the very streets, and the castle trumpets could not be heard for the sound of troikas and balalaikas.

All were titled and balalaikas were played at the drop of a blini and Mary Pickford invariably wept as she listened to yet another lament for the far-off river Don, and serfs aplay.

A band made up of balalaikas and Spanish guitars and Andean flutes and Mongol drums was splitting the air.

All the troupers had heard it played on balalaikas in restaurants and hotel dining rooms, and Boom-Boom Beck was scoring a version for his windjammers to play.

But I do know that when a naval officer spends more time wishing he was in Leningrad at the Hermitage or listening to a group of women play their balalaikas and sing peasant songs, then maybe he should think about changing his job.

And to top things off, he was a skilled musician, despite the loss of two fingers, who could play the bawdiest tune a seaman could name or spend hours staring into a lamp flame while he stroked soft, haunting beauty from his balalaika.

It took a bit more effort on Brandark's part—his balalaika and dandified air made him less elementally threatening—but after the night four burly longshoremen took flight through a second-story window, their fellows decided to leave him alone, too.

They were a three-piece outfit with a tall guy with brown curly hair playing flute, a short, dark, long-haired fellow swapping between six- and twelve-string guitars, and a big guy with muttonchop sideburns playing six-string guitar, acoustic bass guitar, and balalaika.