Word: migr
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Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather...
...artists have come as haltingly to art as Redon. Born in Bordeaux in 1840, the son of a French émigré who had struck it rich in New Orleans, young Odilon (named for his Creole mother, Odile) spent a sickly childhood. As an escape from loneliness he turned to music, drawing and daydreams. An indifferent scholar, he later tried, and failed, at architecture and sculpture, lasted only briefly in academic painting classes, fought in the Franco-Prussian War. Not until he was 35 did he find his medium-charcoal-and then the lithographer's stone...
Family & Early Life: Greatgrandfather was a political émigré who fled Austrian rule in Italy after Napoleonic Wars, settled down in England in Lamb House, Rye (later the home of Novelist Henry James) with his bride, a cousin of Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Young Harold Caccia (pronounced Catch-a) went to Eton, graduated from Trinity College, Oxford...
Insisting to the last that the whole ugly business was a frame-up engineered by disgruntled Czarist émigrés, officials at the Soviet embassy in London came reluctantly to the conclusion that British justice could not be sidetracked. As Olympic Discus Thrower Nina Ponomareva doggedly practiced pushups for six weeks in an embassy bedroom, they maintained with stolid poker faces that in Russia no one is dragged to court until he is proved guilty. In Britain, the Foreign Office explained patiently, things are different: there it is considered the court's function to determine innocence or guilt...
...famed University of Pittsburgh laboratories where the Salk polio vaccine was invented, Dr. Gisela Ruckle, a German émigrée, reported that she had grown 25 generations of the measles virus in test tubes. The virus had hitherto defied domestication; now researchers may be able to make an effective measles vaccine...