Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Herring & Hot Plates. This year's crop of Americans in Russia comes from campuses as diverse as Berkeley and Emory. Most students are in their early 30s; all speak Russian. Topics of study tend to be esoteric: Russian comment on the French Encyclopedist Diderot, peasant self-government after the emancipation of the serfs, the attitude of the Czarist gentry to peasant reform. The predominant hoariness of the subjects is partly a result of Russian reluctance to open archives on recent events, for in Soviet practice, as one American put it, "What is history today may be non-history tomorrow...
...writes Nicolson, in a sly reference to her 30-odd lovers, "she did much to repair this gap in her experience." In later life she was also a great lip servant of liberty ("Liberty is the core of everything; without it there would be no life"). The French philosopher Diderot once shook her till her shoulders were black and blue to get her to apply a little enlightenment to her realm. With regal practicality she retorted: "Your medium is paper, and paper is always patient. I, Empress that I am, have to write on the sensitive skins of human beings...
...Studies in the Psychology of Sex is so weighted with abnormal cases that to generalize from them is rather like taking a height norm from a sampling of basketball centers. His self-prized autobiography. My Life, is a talky, pseudo-candid aside. In his literary essays, e.g., on Diderot, Whitman, Ibsen, he was an appreciator but no critic. As a thinker he belongs to the age of the New Woman, with its feminists, pacifists and socialists-pressed flowers in the book of ideas. Ellis' real enemy was Victorian prudery, and the real dragon he killed was Mrs. Grundy...