Word: balzacs
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Budu, however, does not write as a political fugitive; indeed, he seems to be more interested in collecting royalties than in grinding political axes of any kind. Artless, candid, at times naive, he pictures a Stalin who dotes on Balzac novels, Turkish coffee and the color orange (he even has his watering cans painted that color), who hauls out pictures of his young son as fast as any bourgeois dad, warbles a passable tenor, and plays a sharp game of gorodki (a Russian mixture of shuffleboard and ninepins). Budu's Stalin is more human than the headlines he makes...
...against this background that British Author Angus Wilson moves for a "deserved re-estimation" in his short, sharp critical study, Emile Zola. Wilson's summary: Zola was "one of the great cumbrous, magnificent pithecanthropi of 19th century literature . . . the close companion of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, a little less than them . . . but having ... a strange clarity of direct vision which their great fusions of the dream kingdom and the waking world obliterate...
...knows that most of the machinery of his story, to say nothing of the polish, can be worked in later. He introduced many minor characters by name only, breathing a mere suggestion of life into them. Lamiel was beginning to look more & more like the plan of one of Balzac's great social histories when Stendhal suddenly took sick and died...
...value of a particular edition of "The Divine Comedy." Editions that are rather valuable, but not quite valuable enough to ocupy space in the Houghton Rare Book Library, are locked in the "Inferno" to asure protection. Several beautifully-bound volumes of "The Arabian Nights," of Browning, and of Balzac are kept in the Cage for this reason...
...Milton, Pascal, Newton, Huygens, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Kant, The Federalist (by Hamilton, Madison and Jay), J. S. Mill, Boswell, Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday, Hegel, Goethe, Melville, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein. † New coinage meaning "collection of topics." * Positivists are the philosophical school, virtually dominant in the U.S. and Britain today, which suggests that philosophy is merely a tool for the logical analysis of limited propositions. Adler hates the positivists' guts, and they his. * Students in his first class...