Word: leninism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most important question of life concerns fame-who gets it, who doesn't, and why. Some-Lenin, Joyce, for instance, go on from the murky obscurity of 1918 Zurich while others stay behind. Is it talent, luck, a combination of the two? Or is it the blind dice shaking in the hands of an angry god, rolling thunder, Jordan and sixes with equal equanimity and an uncaring laugh...
...that, as Stoppard says, is a thought. James Joyce as I knew James Joyce, in Zurich in 1918: a myopic drunken Irishman; bloody pacifist. Or Lenin, a ripple in the seemingly endless stream of refugees and cafe plotters, writing Imperialism in the public library. Lenin as I knew Lenin. The Lenin I knew, or if memory serves, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov: short, balding, desperate to lead the revolution finally taking place in Russia. A snowball in hell-wants to turn the civilized world into a standing committee of workers' deputies. Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Travesties opens with a dark Flander...
...that's a thought. Lenin and Joyce, together in Zurich in 1918--one a revolutionary artist, one merely a...revolutionary who would remake the civilized world-or Russia, at least-into, well, a standing committee of workers' deputies. What if they encountered each other? Better yet, what if they encountered a third party, a silly fop who, like everyone else at this early stage, doesn't recognize their greatness. This is the protagonist of the play, Henry Carr, an old man retelling the story of his days in Zurich during the war, when he may or may not have been...
While at Harvard and in Cambridge, productions are using adaptations of other forms of art, in Boston, Travesties is stealing from life itself. Not literature or film but history is re-written when Lenin, Tristan Tzara, the Dadist and James Joyce meet in a library in Zurich. Their fictive joint story is told by a character who himself re-writes the story as he goes along. Tom Stoppard's scintillating play, studded with allusions to the radicals' works, which never did as well in New York as it deserved, is playing at the Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, beginning...
...police as an SSRC agitator, another student, Shadrack, 17, met me in a remote section of Soweto. "We are not a bunch of bomb-throwing radicals," he insisted. "Because we struggle for a decent education, the authorities call us Communists. What rubbish! My heroes are not Marx and Lenin. They are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Our campaign is peaceful, non-Communist and nonviolent. How many police have been killed in this bloodshed? Three? That should prove which side is the violent one." (Officially, the SSRC has deplored firebombings buttressing its boycott...