Word: ivans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...mute and futile gestures though they are, appear on the city's walls. They are the work of Marc Laverne, leader of an anti-Stalinist leftist group, a man so imbued with revolutionary fatalism that he seems like a disembodied symbol of rebellion. More human than Laverne is Ivan Stepanoff, an Old Bolshevik who has miraculously escaped from Stalin's prisons and who feels himself increasingly a historical anachronism. When Stepanoff is arrested, "his first concrete thought [takes] the form of a triple question . . . Vichy? Gestapo? OGPU? ... He [knows] how to recognize the agents of the OGPU...
Moscow has recently debunked other Western delusions of grandeur. The steam engine, it seems, was not invented by Britain's James Watt, but by Ivan Polzunov. Thomas Edison gets false credit for the light bulb; Alexander Lodygin thought it up first. The first airplane was not constructed by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but by a Russian naval officer, Alexander Mozhaisky. The first jet plane was designed by Nikolai Kibalchich, a terrorist, while he awaited execution, in 1881, for his part in the assassination of Czar Alexander II. It was Vyacheslav Manassein who discovered penicillin, 75 years ahead of Britain...
...suffering of millions of people is beyond comprehension. Wisely, this story focuses on just two individual samples of it-a Czech mother (Metropolitan Soprano Jarmila Novotna*) and her little boy (Ivan Jandl, who was "discovered" in a Prague radio station...
When a couple of American soldiers (Montgomery Clift, Wendell Corey) pick him up, they have to tame him as if he were a wild animal. Gradually he finds that he can trust them, and begins to learn English-just as nine-year-old Ivan Jandl did to play the part. Watching an officer's wife with her child, the boy begins to realize what a mother is, and what is lacking in his own life. Some of the suspense and coincidence through which the mother and son are finally reunited may seem a little overcalculated, but in postwar Europe...
Beards & Steeples. Richard Chancellor, one of the most daring of these merchant adventurers, pressed northeast until he reached a world where there was "no night at all, but a continual light upon the huge and mighty sea." Debarking, he and his crew eventually ended up-in Moscow, where Ivan the Terrible amiably "took into his hand Master George Killings-worth's beard . . . and pleasantlie delivered it to the Metropolitane, who, seeming to bless it, ,saide in Russ, 'this is God's gift'; as indeed at that time it was ... in length five foote and two inches...