Word: prussian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...notes with regret in an afterword: "Now that I am on my way to the goal, I am afraid it is too late. I may not have time and creative imagination left for this 20-year work." Solzhenitsyn focuses on eleven days during the Czarist army's disastrous East Prussian campaign. He sees this period as the turning point of modern Russian history, leading to revolution and the birth of the Bolshevik regime. Although it occurs more than 100 pages before the panoramic novel's end, the excerpt that follows is the dramatic climax...
...takes place on the night of Aug. 29, 1914, after the rout of the Russians at Tannenberg. The Russian commander, General Alexander Samsonov (an actual historical figure), walks through the dense Prussian forests with the remnants of his staff. "He had only wanted what was good," writes Solzhenitsyn, "but it all turned out extremely badly." This is one of the novelist's principal themes?that good intentions are not enough to make the world a better place...
...perhaps paranoia. It is best articulated by Comedian Flip Wilson. In his familiar television routine, a dialogue is going famously, fairly humming with jolly good will. Then the other party touches Flip-a friendly clap on the shoulder, a matey hand on the sleeve. Wilson recoils like a Prussian who has been slapped. An expression of non-negotiable hostility does a slow freeze across his face. In a rising falsetto he cries: "Don't touch me! Don't you ever touch me!" Wilson is not just self-mocking the compulsive suspicion of a black being pushed around again...
...times like this, I get the impression that the etiquette of a gentleman's club has an absolute supremacy in the minds of scholars, just as the ideal of hierarchic obedience held an absolute supremacy in the Prussian officer corps. This leads to trouble. If we tell the truth about Kissinger, then there is a limit to how polite we can be, and the limit is low. In your letter you conveyed a false conception of the man and of the problem that he presents. Your attitude to him as a person means to me that you are being false...
...rules of toy battles that he and his friends fought out near his country home. Many of today's rule books draw heavily on Wells' work, devised, as he put it, to attract "boys of every age and girls of the better sort." With deadly seriousness, Prussian officers originally developed the idea in the mid-19th century to hone their tactical skills for actual warfare. Today, of course, professional war-gamers play out their grim battles in locked rooms in Washington and Moscow...