Word: russian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Soviet leaders have never played up the race to the moon in their domestic propaganda, and there was no evidence that Russians felt the same chagrin that bothered the U.S. when Sputnik 1 led the way into space. Russian TV provided only limited and delayed coverage of Apollo's flight. But President Nikolai Podgorny wired President Nixon after the splashdown: "Please convey our congratulations and best wishes to the courageous space pilots." Peking, on the other hand, attempted to jam all five of the Voice of America broadcasts in Chinese...
...does not pay to jest with a Russian -at least not with Defense Minister Andrei A. Grechko. One of the highlights laid on for Hubert H. Humphrey's current 13-day tour of the Soviet Union was a wild-boar hunt, for which the old game-bird hunter quite freely admitted that he was unprepared by either instinct or experience. As Humphrey told it, he jokingly brought up the subject with Grechko in Moscow six years ago. "I was just pulling his leg," says H.H.H., but Grechko took him at his word. So off he went to the Defense...
More words have been published about Isaac Babel than by him. It is a situation that would have greatly amused the Russian-Jewish short-short-story writer whose work exemplifies Pushkin's golden rule that "precision and brevity are the prime qualities of prose." As a writer who could be economical without sacrificing impact, Babel compares favorably with Chekhov. Even Hemingway, one of the most ruthless wringers of prose, conceded that Babel could "clot the curds" better than he could...
...which Babel fictionalized his experiences as a correspondent riding with the Red Cossacks against the Poles who repulsed the Bolshevik attempt to Communize their homeland. But instead of falling into the assembly line of Social Realism, Babel fell into one of the noisiest silences in the history of modern Russian literature. Some of the reasons for Babel's failure to fulfill his production quotas are touched on by Ilya Ehrenburg, Lev Nikulin, Georgy Mun-blit and Konstantin Paustovsky, writers and former friends of the author. Their reminiscences compose most of the generous appendix to You Must Know Everything...
Babel was not merely compelled to rewrite a story dozens of times, as the Russian authors suggest. He seems to have been incapable of writing anything that did not follow the unique lines of his own ironical and conflicting character. For all their straightforward drama and excitement, the Red Cavalry stories rest on the contradiction between professional bloodletting and revolutionary ideals...