Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world's practitioners of the ancient aristocratic sport of fencing, none was more flamboyant than the Polish star Jerzy Pawlowski. Winner of an Olympic gold medal in 1968 and three-time world fencing champion in saber, the handsome 43-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Polish army was the undisputed sports hero of Poland. So great was the country's pride in Pawlowski's prowess that Polish Party Chief Edward Gierek is said to have brought the fencer with him to an informal meeting with Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev...
Then came the chilling news of Pawlowski's arrest. In a laconic communique last June that was buried in most Polish papers-some printed the item on the sports page-the official Polish news agency PAP announced that the champion had been arrested "in connection with the suspicion that he has committed crimes against the basic interests of the state." Other Polish sports figures and a number of Polish general staff officers are also believed to have been arrested, including a track star, Marek Bedynski, a colonel and two majors...
Western participants in the international fencing matches in Budapest last month expressed shock at the conspicuous absence of Pawlowski. Members of the now crippled Polish team, meanwhile, were plainly fearful of openly discussing the fate of their champion. Italian Fencer Mario Aldo Montano, twice the world champion, doubted tales that Pawlowski had been accused of espionage. "It is not the sort of thing one would expect of Pawlowski," said Montano. "He is so correct -a gentleman very much in the tradition of fencing." Added American Fencer Jack Keane, captain of the Pan American fencing team, who has often competed with...
Ironically, it is in such moments that the author's invited comparison with Dostoyevsky weakens. Though Kosinski ends with a paragraph from The Possessed, the brilliant Polish exile reaches the depths, not the peaks, of his Russian master. At Dostoyevsky's most pathological, he still illuminated his worst sinners, sometimes with anguished faith, sometimes with a grieving moral sense. Kosinski's protagonist views sex as a corrosive, never as delight or even consolation; for Tarden, all other characters exist as so many laboratory animals awaiting his stimulus...
...They are both enrolled in an English class, Groch because he wants to come into full poetic bloom and Deagle because she wants to be near Groch. But their teacher, a scholarly and enormously self-centered young dandy named Alfred Honore Pallantine, comes between them. Jessie, taken with his polish and crudition, falls in love with him, ditches Groch and spends most of her time chasing Pallantine around, squandering money on clothes and generally making a fool of herself. Groch, meanwhile, fills into a deep depression that centers around Pallantine, who has stolen his sweetheart and failed to recognize...