Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...recounts the Nazi massacre of thousands of Russian Jews outside the author's native Kiev, implies that many Russians were not displeased to see the Jews gone. Kuznetsov's latest novel, The Fire, which was serialized in one of the largest Soviet magazines, tells of suicide and despair among young engineers in a large industrial city...
...civilization. For, before Romanticism, must come cynicism. And the cynic says men were never very good. There were only fewer of them. Mrs. Lessing pinpoints the popularization of jazz along with its "patient long-suffering tolerance of other people's disabilities, loyalty to one's intimates, a contained despair" as the beginning of a romanticism of despair. "Not since the days of Werther, "she writes, "has there been so sentimental a cult...
...somehow, all this doesn't lead to despair. Despair--or what would lead to it--is transmorgrified. It is the old ugly duckling routine: man, we are told, is ugly, the uglier the better, because (and this is where the inexorable logic of the human heart denies the overwhelming evidence of history) man is soon to become the swan. What kind of swan? Well, the speculation forms the basis for a whole body of literature, a literature whose only real unity is a pervasive belief in man's future transfiguration. Tolkein, Hesse, Arthur C. Clark, all the fountainheads of their...
...detached resignation at least partly rooted in the belief that the nation's destiny is controlled by outside forces-the French after World War II, the Americans and the North Vietnamese in the present conflict-and that the individual is powerless to bring about change. It also reflects despair over the lack of alternatives and deep disenchantment with both the Saigon government and the Communists...
Rather, we might imagine, to supplement the right-to-left line for political stances, a linearly independent vector for romanticism. Left-romantics want to change people because they despair that systems can be changed or because they believe that systems will change to fit the change of people's needs. Left-unromantics (pragmatists?) want to change the system to change the man (or perhaps for more abstract reasons, justice, etc.). George Orwell, in his essay on Charles Dickens, recognized the trends, saying, "They appeal to different individuals, and they probably have a tendency to alternate in terms of time...