Word: proletarianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has changed course numerous times in its tumultuous 27-month existence. The alternating current is provided, of course, by Mao Tse-tung. His heart is with the radicals, who advocate violence to cleanse conservatism from China, but his head must sometimes nod to the moderates, who say that stability is needed before the revolution can make progress. Last week a set of new directives from Peking made it clear that Mao has decided, at least for now, on head over heart...
...mule drivers, 1,430 mules and camels and a small army of servants to keep the Kaiser and his retinue comfortable on the journey. Cook's has never since done anything on quite such grandiose scale. It hopes from now on to increase profits by presenting a more proletarian image...
There is no mistaking Bulgakov's target in The Heart of a Dog: it is the boorish, overweening, ignorant, slogan-stuffed Soviet proletarian. Bulgakov wrote this short, scornful novel in 1925, drawing on his inexhaustible supply of contempt. Its method is the "fantastic realism" he was to use later in The Master and Margarita. Matter-of-fact becomes matter-of-fantasy; madly grotesque events are described in the language of naturalism...
...dead balalaika player in the body of a mongrel dog. Lo, the animal is transformed; he begins to talk and to assume human characteristics. Unfortunately, they are those of the balalaika player, a sodden, crude-minded lowlife. Nevertheless, the dog is welcomed as an equal by the sanctimoniously proletarian house committee of the professor's apartment building. Sharik the dog becomes "Sharikov" the Soviet citizen. He is supplied with identity papers and, except for a tendency to chase cats, is indistinguishable from any other member of the ruling mass. That is to say, Bulgakov suggests, he is stupid, foulmouthed...
...caricature of Lenin. Obviously, Bulgakov was courageous; he wrote with rare fury for the rest of his life, muffled but not silenced by censors. But the evidence of The Heart of a Dog makes it questionable how clearly he saw things, at least in 1925. To Bulgakov, the proletarian state seemed vulgar, mindless and infuriating, but the book does not give a sense that he felt menaced by it. The growing shelf of Bulgakov's work begins to take the form of a literary puzzle, and a trustworthy biography would be a useful addition...