Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized by a good number of its reviewers as 'epochmaking...
...what is so gripping about his work is the in tensity with which Arikha engages that world. He speaks of the "hunger in the eye" that drew him away from abstract painting in 1965, and kept him doing nothing but black-and-white brush drawings and etchings from life for eight years. In his paintings since 1973, that hunger is palpable, and it takes nothing for granted. "To paint from life at this point of time," he argues, "demands both the transgression and the inclusion of doubt." Transgression, because any effort to depict something is a shot at certainty; inclusion...
...mistress Lili Brik, though his poems were scarcely as complimentary as Aragon's. Lili was Elsa's older sister, and the series of stunning lyrics that Mayakovsky dedicated to her in the 1910s and 1920s agonized over her indifference and infidelity. The Russian poet, who conducted his life as hyperbolically as he composed his verse, complained in "The Backbone Flute" that Lili's lips were "a monastery hacked out of frigid stone" and her eyes "the gaping hollows of two graves." Condemned by her coldness to the Siberia of the heart, he wrote...
Mayakovsky's reputation as the "iron poet" of the Revolution had slumped temporarily when he put a bullet through his all too vulnerable heart at the age of 36. Obsessed with suicide all his life, he finally, for no clearly discernible reason, "did away with himself as he would an enemy," as another poet, Marina Tsvetayeva, remarked. Official reservations about Mayakovsky's posthumous status were dissipated by Stalin in 1935, when he declared him to be the most talented poet of the Soviet era. "Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime," he added menacingly...
...nothing extraordinary about Lili's camaraderie with the secret police. After all, Soviet society, including the literary salons, was riddled with spies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled in her magnificent memoir Hope Against Hope. Had Mayakovsky not tak en his own life, he would surely have fallen victim to such informers, as Mandelstam and hundreds of other writers did during the Great Purges of the late '30s. But who could be held accountable for his actions? asked Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her answer may apply to all the characters in the pitiful drama...