Word: lenin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ransacking the brain for the soul of an equally mysterious power: genius. Perhaps the most famous case is Einstein. Slices of his brain were recently pored over by a pair of California neuroscientists. More revealing of the bizarre possibilities of this kind of scientific quest is the case of Lenin. In 1925 the Soviets, applying a socialist definition of genius, entrusted his brain to a German neurologist, Oskar Vogt. The idea, explains Psychiatrist Walter Reich, was "to establish an institute in Moscow entirely devoted to the purpose of discovering the 'materialist' (that is, 'physical') basis for Lenin's political...
Materialistic is a Marxist term and, in the context of this lunatic search for Lenin's "genius," a kind one. A better word is reductionist: there is no better example of scientific reductionism than to look for--let alone to pretend to have found--the source of Lenin's powers in the pyramidal cells of his brain. Even if one were to concede that in principle, and in some far-off century, psychology will be reducible to anatomy, science will hardly give us the key to evil and genius, which are, after all, not physical but cultural phenomena. The problem...
...spirit looming over the first business session the Soviet leader has ever held with top American officials was that of Lenin, whose brooding fervor seemed to pervade the exchange. Huge portraits of him decorated Red Square in anticipation of last week's anniversary parade of the Bolshevik Revolution; a portrait of Lenin even peered over Shultz's shoulder in the austere Kremlin conference room where the talks were held. Gorbachev opened with a comment that "most often misunderstandings come from a lack of knowledge." Shultz replied: "That's right, although sometimes I know cases where I wish I didn...
...part from his meeting with the Shultz team, Gorbachev has been keeping a low presummit profile. He made only obligatory public appearances at last week's celebrations of the 68th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, reviewing the traditional parade of Soviet military might from atop the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square on Thursday and delivering a brief address at a Kremlin reception expressing hope for a "fruitful" summit. But the Revolution Day symbolism was every bit as unyielding as any of Gorbachev's remarks to his American visitors. NO TO STAR WARS proclaimed many of the posters tacked up around...
...R.S.C. has been equally innovative with Breaking the Silence, a quasi-biographical work that centers on Playwright Stephen Poliakoff s grandfather, a Russian Jewish aristocrat who refuses to accept the changes that Lenin's Soviet revolution have brought. Forced to live in near squalor on a railway carriage while assigned as a roving inspector, he stubbornly devotes all his energies to developing a talking motion picture. Although he is an untrained amateur, there are glints of genius in him. The play deftly balances his private quest against vast social change, and culminates in an agonizing exile from a homeland that...