Word: serafimov
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When a huge, innocent-eyed, pockmarked Russian exile named Serafimov came out alive after his flight across China, those words expressed all that he had distilled out of his experience. Expelled with six other Europeans by the Bolsheviks from "the very middle of Asia," later held in custody in Aqsu. Serafimov had spent a winter in a particularly colorful environment of Asiatic depravity, had fallen in love with a haggard Russian prostitute and, having finally touched the lowest depth of despair and loneliness, had attained a lasting state of grace by strangling a companion fugitive...
This week Serafimov's violent adventures and mystical strivings, together with the equally searing experiences of his six companions, formed the substance of an imaginative, intense volume that won the eighth Harper Prize Novel competition ($7,500), seemed likely to impress readers as the most unusual selection thus far.* The work of Frederic Prokosch, 28-year-old author of The Asiatics (1935) and The Assassins (1936), The Seven Who Fled is distinguished by its sensuous imagery, queer plot and elusive symbolism, as well as by a tantalizing, ambiguous philosophical message which will leave most readers wondering if they have...
When Soviet machinations in revolution-torn Sinkiang province brought an order to get rid of all "questionable" foreigners, the roundup produced seven individuals as mysterious as Serafimov, who traveled together until further machinations caused a further splitting up of their ranks. Serafimov's victim was a fastidious, ratlike Belgian named Goupillière. A murderer himself, Goupillière's face was "as subtle as a woman's, as ambiguous as a thief's," since it was divided by an ugly scar left when a mistress had tried to kill him with a pair of scissors...
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