Word: musts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...qualities. He dismisses Chulkaturin's compassion as maudlin because nothing can arouse his sympathy, for Zoditch, Chulkaturin's love is overly sentimental because Zoditch is not even capable of the mildest sort of affection. That is precisely why he cannot accept the ending of Chulkaturin's manuscript, why he must scream "I am loved; there is no other ending!" He has not even the smallest bit of the self-respect that allows a man to endure so cruel a fate...
Joseph Maher is acceptable as Masha's doting husband Kulygin, a pathetic and essentially brainless schoolteacher who likes to go around spouting worn-out Latin slogans. We must forgive him, for he knows not what he does to Masha...
...aging army doctor Chebutykin, who lives Irina as he had loved her mother. Carnovsky provides a masterly depiction of a gradually deteriorating personality. He has never read a book, and occupies himself with little that is more lofty than his ever-present daily newspaper (in real Russian, too). He must have been a pretty inferior physician at the outset, and in the course of the play he sinks to the belief that absolutely nothing matters anymore. So far gone is Carnovsky's doctor that, after washing and drying his hand in a basin, he proceeds immediately to wash them...
...passes through each successive decade (the late fourties and an attempted return to normalcy; the espionage and red-baiting of the fifties; the calculated idiosyncracies and extravagant violence of the present), Martha's progress becomes more and more analogous to that of a snake as she outgrows and stoically must shed restrictive skins of convictions and illusions. Hers is a progress of discarding belief. And since the direction of Martha's growth is never really voluntary, it is not a "quest" at all-it is simply the inevitable path awaiting anyone who has attained for impressive level of self-consciousness...
...perfectly obvious. The Four-Gated City, however, is persuasive evidence that the New Romanticism, properly so-called, goes a lot further than just the celebration of the immediate. It retains a view of history. It makes no attempt to erase the undeniable downhill slide of civilization. For, before Romanticism, must come cynicism. And the cynic says men were never very good. There were only fewer of them. Mrs. Lessing pinpoints the popularization of jazz along with its "patient long-suffering tolerance of other people's disabilities, loyalty to one's intimates, a contained despair" as the beginning of a romanticism...