Word: pitilessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...basic, pitiless irony is that what he must do is sacrifice the happiness, often the lives, of his family (his wife, his elder brother, old associates). The end finds him stripped of everything he once valued except the one thing he found essential-unquestioned, unquestionable authority. It seems a far more terrible punishment than the bloody retributions the old movie code used to insist on applying to Scarface, Little Caesar and their...
Solzhenitsyn perceives that an entire nation has been debased by four decades of totalitarianism far more oppressive than Czarist authoritarianism. Ordinary people have been rendered indifferent to injustice and pitiless toward the suffering of others. Among bureaucrats, the absolute exercise of power in the past continues to corrupt absolutely in the present. "Thus," he mourns, "have we been driven to become savages...
Apple-Shaped. All the while, under this gaudily and rather unprepos-sessingly romantic Flaubert, another Flaubert was straining to break out -the pointed, pitiless observer of reality whose ambition was to clear away the vapors of the romantic novel in the cold clear rays of le mot juste. Here he is, describing a dancing girl named Kuchuk as she begins her writhings: "A tall splendid creature . . . When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges . . . heavy shoulders, full apple-shaped breasts . . . She has one upper incisor, right, which is beginning...
...doomed, Beckett is willing to grant but an instant of irony: the admission that "in this old abode all is not yet quite for the best." Then, soon, the last searcher ceases searching and joins the ranks of the vanquished, and the last sentence comes, as exact and pitiless as the first: "So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers...if this notion is maintained...
...finest production of a play ever mounted at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. The cast has been infected with the playwright's ethical fervor, and all its members deserve praise. In addition to Foxworth and Henry, three others win special laurels: Stephen Elliott as a pitiless magistrate, Pamela Payton-Wright as Foxworth's seductress, and Philip Bosco as a deeply troubled Christian minister...