Word: russian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Elena Kononenko, a member of the Soviet Writers' Union, had asked dozens of Russian youngsters the same innocent-sounding question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The answers were disturbing. Last week, in her book, We and Our Children, Russian readers were finding out that their kids want to be great and famous-and hardly any are dreaming of the workaday glories that lie ahead in mills, mines and on collective farms...
Professor Julian Huxley went to the Moscow Science Celebrations in 1945 and was enormously impressed with the Soviet attitude toward science. It seemed to him that his Russian colleagues enjoyed freedom of discussion, were generous in their appreciation of British and other foreign scientists, and were "anxious to exchange ideas, results and visits." Summing up, Huxley said: "It is certainly clear that without the U.S.S.R., neither a world political organization nor the world's intellectual life can flourish successfully...
...Great Sinner (MGM) is an expensive bloom resulting from some curious cross-pollination between Dostoevsky's The Gambler, elements of Dostoevsky's own life, and a few Hollywood afterthoughts. Like Dostoevsky, the hero of the story is a young Russian novelist (Gregory Peck) who is given to long gambling bouts in German spas, and to falling fits and visionary religious enthusiasms...
Like Alexei Ivanovich, the hero of The Gambler, he is also in love with the proud, cynical daughter (Ava Gardner) of a corrupt Russian general (Walter Huston) who has sold himself and his daughter as tools of an unprincipled Frenchman (Melvyn Douglas...
There the movie's resemblance to Dostoevsky ends. The rich, exuberant flow of dialogue, incident and atmosphere characteristic of the Russian master has been choked to a pedestrian trickle. Dostoevsky's brilliant insights into the tortured motives and emotions of his lovers have paled into klieg-lighted stereotypes. Much of the time Peck and Miss Gardner act as if they had been stranded at a sedate costume party. In other scenes, when they try for a truly Slavic intensity, they seem to be acting out a burlesque on the whole school of Russian novelists. A few supporting players...