Word: chekhovs
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Stalin said: . . . These people, devoid of conscience and honor, people with a morale of beasts, have the impudence to call for the destruction of the great Russian nation, the nation of Plekhanov, of Lenin, of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, Gorki, Chekhov, Sechenov and Pavlov, Repin and Surikov, Suvarov and Kutuzov...
Gorki, son of an upholsterer, himself a worker in the railway shops of Tiflis, wrote of tramps and social outcasts with the familiarity of a man who was one. A city took his name. Chekhov made heroes and heroines of people who suffered. Sechenov and Pavlov, the greatest Russian physiologists, tried to analyze suffering...
...night air above pent and country houses. Aldous Huxleyans and Evelyn Waughans smile from time to time with irony and pity, but their eyelids are a little weary. Confirmed Wodehousians hoot, holler, writhe, snort, bellow, nicker, and in culminating transports, belch. Asked why, they may look blank, indignant. Anton Chekhov once said that the best description of the sea he had ever read was written by a Russian schoolboy: "The sea is vast." Wodehousians explain the master's illimitable spell just as simply: He is funny...
Bert Lytell gives a savory performance as the ham and Evelyn Varden is comic as the fat directrix of the players who rehearses to the refrain of "Nuts in May, nuts in May!" a dance intended to enliven one of the morbid dramas of Chekhov. But as a whole this supposedly sparkling little vehicle by the author of the 1934 comedy hit Personal Appearance gives off about as much electricity as a horse...
...distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...