Word: bereft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Throughout the novel the whole vast, vague Russian steppe slips from its habitual disorder into the anarchy of revolution. Trains do not arrive. Officers are suddenly bereft of rank, people of homes. Families lose touch. If the book sometimes reads like a primer, there is probably a good reason: the alphabet of this revolution is still being learned. Troyat has none of the exile's bitterness, but might well claim title to the words of one of his own refugee characters:"Where I am, there is Russia...
Acknowledging that he was the pleased catcher of the bride's bouquet, Chicago Grass Widower Adlai Stevenson, 56, a guest at the recent marriage of his distant cousin Helen Stevenson to New Jersey's Democratic Governor Robert B. Meyner (TIME, Jan. 28), seemed bleakly bereft of romance, though confessing that he would like to rate as eligible: "I hope the bouquet portends something, but I'm inured to disappointments...
...sians?" Defiant, but sensible of their lives, some of the workers' councils insisted that they wanted no armed help from the West, which might jeopardize their fight; they were confident they could win alone. The fact is, that for all their tanks, the Communists were bereft of one necessary ingredient of Soviet control, a trustworthy party apparatus among the people themselves, able to spot and block trouble...
...toward the novel's end, tragedy bows to contrivance which teeters on the brink of absurdity; the writing turns from archaic simplicity to perfervid pleading. Unfortunately for her purpose, the characters who seem most alive are the women : the silly, gabbling, pitiable gossip, Mrs. Plopler, and the bereft Sarah, who had wept so much that "the ocean had drained away, and she cried now with only the pebbles on the beach...
...other matters, however, Director LeRoy has been overly faithful to the play script. Actors march on and off the screen just as if they were making stage entrances and exits. Eileen Heckart, as the bereft mother of Patty's schoolmate, sobs through two long hysterical scenes that may have been effective theater but are merely repetitious film. And, as the horrors and corpses mount up (Patty is planning a fourth murder when the thunderbolt gets her), what had been eerie becomes ludicrous. At the film's end, LeRoy makes his final obeisance to the stage: all the characters...