Word: realisms
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...Even an inane conversation between secretaries cannot extinguish the brutality of police charging into the building, systematically beating the students and filling up the gym with tear gas. The romance turns to nightmare, and the people, even though they have been stick figures, are beaten and bloodied with anguishing realism...
...written a tale of witchcraft, then set it in the least likely locale in the world for witches' sabbaths: a Midwestern suburb. Twelve Ravens is that most difficult of storytellers' tricks, on-again, off-again realism. Night falls, and the mamas and papas of the bored middle class race to the town's hill like nude nymphs and satyrs to worship their resident Mephistopheles, Gypsy, the neighborhood handyman...
Since he first began to publish his poetry twelve years ago, Voznesensky has been sharply rebuked by Nikita Khrushchev and dismissed by conservative critics as a "formalist"-a derogatory term for a Soviet writer who allows himself to become preoccupied with experimentation rather than socialist realism. And he has frequently tussled with officialdom over censorship. His controversial stage revue, Look Out for Your Faces (TIME, March 9), an exuberant plea for individuality and self-expression, was ordered closed in February after only two performances. But his widespread popularity as the voice of a new Soviet generation has clearly survived undiminished...
...common theme of Chekhov and of Johnson is the internal conflict between the yearning heart and the self-analyzing mind. Both men study the impossibility of satiety, the evanescence of happiness, the self-consumption of bright hopes; and both men offer only the stern consolation of realism-the uneasy and none too comforting suggestion that the hopes which keep people living are also those which make them miserable. Ambition is fugitive, love is usually for the wrong things-usually only self-love-and the complacence which can come from believing you understand your vanity, is most harmful. Johnson writes...
...part of Chekhov's comic irony that audience detachment is impossible since such a feeling of lucid superiority is itself comic in its self-deception. His realism, then, does not say "All men are like this; therefore, take note and beware"; but rather, "All men are like this, mysterious and deluded; as you cannot understand, so you cannot judge by laughter; but remember that it is a comedy; if you start lamenting about despair, you become part of the comedy...