Word: ekwilist
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Dates: during 1947-1947
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...Harmonious Majority." Life under the Ekwilist (equalitarian) regime is sketched by Nabokov with a disgusted charm unequaled by contemporary satirists. He has an ear for the obscene overtones of the dictator's loudspeaker: " 'From now on,' continued the tremendously swollen Tyrannosaurus, 'the way to total joy lies open. You will attain it, brothers, by dint of ardent intercourse with one another ... by adjusting ideas and emotions to those of a harmonious majority ... by letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State...
...When the Ekwilist State triumphs, murdering innocence, Nabokov's style is still playful, but it takes on a Swiftian intensity. Krug goes mad. And it is clear that the professor's doom (which is Europe's) came about not merely because he was honorable, but because he was vain, obtuse to evil, and absorbed in his own past...
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