Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them...
...what he is trying to do to see the significance of what he has already done: he has accelerated history, making possible the end of one of its most disreputable episodes, the imposition of a cruel and unnatural order on hundreds of millions of people. Sooner or later, their despair and defiance would have reached critical mass. But the explosion occurred this year, much sooner and more spectacularly than anyone had predicted, because the people had in Gorbachev the most powerful ally imaginable...
...more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis; the repression was a response...