Word: brainlessness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Author Gorky introduces characteristic figures-the hunchback brother who tries to hang himself for hopeless love, later becoming a monk, then losing his faith; women of various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post-the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action...
...dueling a pitiable farce and who would rather watch the love-antics of moorfowl at sunrise than slaughter them. In the white castles and proud manors, dames still drill their men-servants, still preserve an ancient ritual for meals and marriage, dancing and death. Yet there is a lady, brainless perhaps, whose love transcends pride and ancestors. Baronial Germany, decadent, is threatened with perception. Light shows through the chinks of crumbling castle walls...
...Science stagnates the individual," stated Lorenzen in the opening speech for the affirmative. "It impairs his initiative, his judgement. If we continue to stress the importance of science, man will no longer be man, but a psychological creation, clad in the skin of a hairless, limbless, brainless mollusk, with one abnormal ear glued continually to a telephone receiver attached to a storage 'think-tank...
...edges; and there is chronic fog in Flatland, through the obscurity of which the slant of lines is quite apparent and a Figure's angles and shape can be inferred without feeling all his sides'. The Flatland women are mere straight lines, like needles. Hence they are brainless; hence also dangerous, for they would puncture a male Figure upon collision. Quaint rules for women result. Society is ranked by the number and regularity of its members' sides, from formidable isosceles-triangle policemen with sharp apexes, through an equilaterally -triangular bourgeoisie and square professorial, to a polygonal aristocracy...
Thus, whether figures lie or not, they can be used to refute their own compilers. Education is of some help even to the brainless; and, of those of which "one is born every minute", there are a few who may profit by the wisdom of their teachers...