Word: ploughland
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Panova shares Boris Pasternak's poetic affection for the Russian land. Serioja races across "black velvet ploughland" or watches the white-snow cling like "fat white caterpillars on the branches of the trees." Toward novel's end, the boy tastes bitter desolation when his stepfather is assigned a new post, and it appears that Serioja's health may force the family to leave him behind. At the last moment, seeing that parting will destroy the child, the stepfather scoops him up in a happy ending that is movingly true to the essential spirit of the book...
...Perse never allows the hope of purification and renewal to gutter out. In Anabasis (1924), his best-known work, partly thanks to an excellent translation by T.S. Eliot, Perse tells of the seedtime of history. Man, the nomad, ranges out over the deserts of the East, "Ploughland of dream." He raises and then razes a city. In Winds (1946), great storms sweep across Europe, "leaving us in their wake, Men of straw in the year of straw." The restless hero finds himself in the West as Perse conjures up the discovery and dynamism of America-"the great expresses . . . with their...
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