Word: ptitsa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kalmuck peasant, who yesterday guided a primitive plough hitched to a camel, is picked up as by zhar ptitsa, the legendary firebird, and deposited for some revolutionary anniversary on this field. He knows with a naked realism sometimes denied to Europeans, with their insulating layers of sophistication, that he is in physical contact with a new magnitude of power -vlast, sovyetskaya vlast: Soviet power...
...steppes, the dark conifer forests, the softly falling snow. They are dominated by strange creations of the Slav mind-Baba Yaga (the witch who lives in a little hut that stands on hen's legs), the Sea King (who rises from the depths to enslave human beings), Zhar-ptitsa (the Firebird), Koshchey the Deathless, who is really "little father death." These stories throb with a violence that makes the atrocities of German fairy tales seem tame. If you do not finish by morning, says the Czar curtly, assigning to the hero some impossible task, I will have you shot...
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