Word: igor
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With Nichols, the reason was real. An émigré from Hitler Germany, Michael Igor Peschkowsky arrived in the U.S. in 1939. The seven-year-old could speak but two sentences in his new tongue: "I do not speak English" and "Please do not kiss me." Forbearance is difficult for a little boy; there are people who will kiss a child no matter what he pleads. Mike learned how to offer a cheek and withdraw a psyche. He was a great sponge of a boy who decided...
...Igor Stravinsky at eighty-eight is a lean and dragonish filament of a man, small, swift, acerbic, who has with the utmost restraint and greatest reluctance declined the invitation of fate to become the Russian Groucho Marx. His latest conversation book, Retrospectives and Conclusions, is presumably his last, although I suspect he will confound his critics, who have persisted for the last decade in treating him posthumously, by transubstantiating his immortal remains into yet another book, entitled Scances and Exhumations. Stravinsky employs a gleeful and at times parasitic mastery of Americanese to lightly convey his scorn of cultural dipsomania, sentimentality...
...Igor Stravinsky is one of the least bathetic men who has ever lived. He cannot tolerate the placid idiocy and demagogic pollutants of American society. He criticizes, as an American citizen, the corruption of monotone imaginations. He follows an austerely classical sense of art as the discipline of craft. His credo is essentially that of da Vinci: "The only liberty is through discipline." But he is saved from prodigiously sterile, mechanical retrogression by the capriciousness of his intellect...
...Igor Stravinsky despises commentary on himself, which is a final vindication of remarkable sanity. His greatness rests in his classic, harmonious balance of intellect and heart, never false to his craft, his faith. His life and art are a testament to the fecund sanity of stern, uncompromising intellectual hostility toward the world in the creation of beauty. His definition of the intellectual stresses the constructive moral power of analytical discipline and exploration...
...very greatest works- Petrouchka. Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Pulcinella. Apollo, Symphony of Psalins, the Mass, and the incomparable, Igon-Igor Stravinsky never yielded to the "luxurious gloom of choice" which has afflicted so many artists of this century. He pulls the mind of man above itself by the renovation of new rules. In this last book he laughs life into lucidity, he laughs the world into health. It is now an old man's laughter, pungent, compassionate, never self-serving...