Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the well-known book," that Moscow wanted a relationship of peace, trade and cooperation with "such a great country as the United States of America." Samantha said that Andropov's reply read like "a letter from a friend," and that the Soviet leader did not seem as grim as she had imagined. Her father Arthur Smith, an English instructor at the University of Maine, was more skeptical of Andropov's motives, saying he "didn't write to her simply because he's one of her fans...
Those warnings, grim and intentionally provocative, were issued last week by the 18-member National Commission on Excellence in Education in a 36-page report called A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Headed by University of Utah President David P. Gardner, the NCEE was set up 20 months ago by Secretary of Education Terrel Bell to examine U.S. educational quality...
...Notes from Underground (and under the influence)--a profoundly funny novel that ranks as a satirical masterpiece. In his preface, Erofeev explains that "The first edition of Moscow Circles sold out fast, since it came out in only one copy." However, tongue-in-check, this statement reveals much grim truth about present official Soviet culture. Moscow Circles is a product of the samizdar (from sam--"self" and izdatel' stvo--"publishing"), whereby unpublishable novels circulate clandestinely in typescript copies. Appearing in this form in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, it eventually made its way abroad, and became a best...
THOUGH the spirit-soaked pages of Moscow Circles are a grim testimony to the destructiveness of alcoholism in the Soviet Union--Erofeev makes it clear he's lived through it himself--the novel's implications reach far beyond the topical or the social. Erofeev's alcoholic innocence is ultimately a spurious from of escape: "I have seen the world close to and from a distance, from within and from without, I understand it but I cannot accept it...I am the soberest man on earth...
Another theatrical coup is the Sergeant Sacrifice anecdote. "Sergeant Sacrifice," perhaps a grim caricature of U.S.-backed Commander Suicide and his insurgents currently terrorizing Nicaragua, is given a Las Vegas-style introduction. Carried into the theater, a corpse under a blood-stained American flag, he lies still as the glitzy M. C. calls to the audience in the innuendo-filled jargon of show business. "Come on, give him a hand. He has to feel the warmth before he can get up here and perform...