Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Weekend, French Film Maker Jean-Luc Godard foresees the end of the world as an immense traffic jam. Stanley Kubrick sees the men of 2001 as murder victims of a machine they have made more clever than themselves...
Bruno dies on the last page. Much of the book is taken up with an intricately choreographed, totally absurd mating dance set in motion around his fusty deathbed, as various relatives pursue each other in preposterous shifting triangles like the occupants of a French bedroom farce. They even fight a mock duel. Most kinetic is a cheerful, kindly son-in-law named Danby in whose house Bruno is dying. Danby begins by sharing his bed with Adelaide the maid, then flirts with his brother-in-law's wife and finally consorts with an ex-nun named Lisa...
Elusive Simplicity. Some of the problem is that Pushkin's reputation for greatness stems in part from his historical significance. Much Russian writing of his age cloaked itself affectedly in secondhand French elegance. In such superb tales as The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style-spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish-which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems...
...Peter the Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant nurse - both basic strains in his later writing. He proved erratic in school, but by the age of 18, he had already published 30 poems and begun lifelong associations with Russia's progressive thinkers...
...years his junior. "My hun dred and thirteenth love," he called her - a very modest estimate. Ironically, Pushkin's wife became a favorite at the Czar's court, and her flagrant flirtations threw him into fits of jealousy. Finally he challenged the boldest of her courtiers, the French-born Baron Georges D'Anthes, to a duel. Pushkin was shot in the stomach and died two days later...