Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kafka to Pasternak. A dynamic, contemporary society above all demands a degree of decentralization. Indeed, Russia no longer has the idle hands and lands to afford the manic wastage, inspired inefficiency and brontosauric unresponsiveness of an economy nannied from Moscow. Its real gains in the future will have to come through increased individual efficiency, even if efficiency in turn demands a degree of freedom that Russians have not yet attained...
Clearly, though, Russia is no longer the passive pastoral society that quivered before Stalin. The Kremlin will increasingly feel the pressures of an urban culture that is no longer resigned to an indefinitely receding Utopia. Communism's Kafka-and-abacus stage is already being overtaken by its Pasternak-and-hi-fi era. Affluent Communists might not be any easier to live with. But they would certainly have more to live...
Actually, this big hunk of nonsense is one of the year's most entertaining films. It's main achievement is molding into one story the ideas of Franz Kafka, Ian Fleming, and whoever writes those Doris Day scripts...
...late Italian Playwright Betti was obsessed by what he called "the bewildering incongruity that we see between our existence and what it ought to be according to the aspirations of our soul." Kafka was similarly obsessed, but he found the distance between God and Man unbridgeable, while Betti bridged it by daring to revert to orthodox Christian doctrine. Not a play to stir the passions or warm the heart but to disturb the mind and chill the soul, this exceptional off-Broadway production is an intellectual and spiritual jewel in the theater's cardboard crown...
...would be right. He must please not only his wife but placate the judgment of the sisterhood. Vassar's standards are high. One Vassar girl explains of her husband: "Freddy isn't an intellectual. But before we were married, we had an understanding that he should read Kafka and Joyce and Toynbee. Some of the basic books. So that semantically we would have the same referents...