Word: literalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant nurse - both basic strains in his later writing. He proved erratic in school, but by the age of 18, he had already published 30 poems and begun lifelong associations with Russia's progressive thinkers and writers...
...contented himself with asking newsmen to tone down their attacks for a while. At a national conference of journalists in Prague, the newsmen announced that they could be silenced only by force. "I am not interested in the pronouncements of those who cannot stomach freedom of the press," proclaimed Literárni Listy Editor Antonin Liehm. "The alternatives are simple. Either they will win, in which case more than just freedom of the press will disappear from this country's life, or they will lose...
...press may not be able to hold out much longer. At Russian insistence, three important magazines-Literárni Listy, Reportér and the intellectual weekly Student-have already been banned. The Czech National Assembly last week was called into session to pass a "temporary" press-control bill that re-establishes censorship. As if to prepare for the event, Russian troops moved out of Czech newspaper offices and permitted journalists to return to their desks-where their activities will be easier to observe and control...
...drew closer, all Eastern Europe was edgy-and unsure of exactly what lay ahead. Despite their studied nonchalance, the Czechoslovak people pressed their leaders hard not to compromise. Thousands of them lined up to sign copies of a manifesto, written by Playwright Pavel Kohout and printed in the journal Literární Listy, which exhorted the leaders to "act, explain and unanimously defend the way that we have entered and do not in tend to leave while we live." Along with the manifesto, the journal's editors ran a cartoon showing a gargantuan figure of Soviet Party Boss...
Rare Moment. At week's end the Czech poet Miroslav Holub compared the Soviet attitude to that of the medieval Popes who denied that the earth moves around the sun. "This country is in the position of Giordano Bruno,"* wrote Holub in the journal Literárni Listy. "We are supposed to deny everything that we know to be true. We are to admit that the sun is revolving, and that we are facing a counter-revolution." Czechoslovakia is obviously unwilling to do so. "Rarely are there moments," concluded Holub, "when a people is as certain...