Word: serf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...idea. They can smell his desperation. It invites their casual contempt. When a movie star (Melanie Griffith) grants him a sexual favor, it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime benisons queens sometimes bestow on a lucky serf, not the beginning of a relationship. When a supermodel (Charlize Theron) catches a glimpse of his only glamorous asset, a classic Aston Martin sports car, she thinks its owner may do as an escort for a night on the town, but her attention keeps wandering...
Although he belonged to a distinguished St. Petersburg family with medieval roots and country estates, Nabokov never sentimentalized the old regime. Not for him the romance of serf and turf. He was above all a cultural and intellectual aristocrat, part of the Russian liberal class whose hopes for democracy were crushed by triumphant Bolshevism. Scorn for tyrants is etched on many of the pre-World War II Berlin stories, as well as others written during the '40s and '50s after he immigrated to the U.S. And woe to the poseur whose influence is based solely on personality. From Spring...
...Undergraduates retreat to the local pub, the Serf'n Turf, to regroup. There, Sasha Nidiot (a Cliff Clavin parody played by Nick Gordon '95), informs us that it's nice to be where everybody knows your name. And we learn that Dusty Yevsky, a local cowboy and poet, has a crush on a singing cow, Bess Western ("But soft," Mr. Yevsky exclaims passionately, "what light from yonder bovine breaks." Sadly, Ms. Western has her doubts. "I don't feel right dating someone who's higher up on the food chain," she demurs...
...making of America hits all the traditional themes of patriotic pageantry, it sees the national character as violent, deceitful and cruel. Firearms or knives are used in seven of the plays. The other two practice violence of the soul -- a bankruptcy "trial" that turns a man into a serf on land he owned, and a coal-mining contract, foisted on an illiterate, that turns his homestead into a moonscape for a fee of a dollar an acre. Although the plays trace the fortunes of seven generations of three intertwined families, there is not one unalloyed hero and only one heroine...
...have chosen to sing mainly in the West. "Our problems here are very much the same ones this country faces today," says Bolshoi general director Vladimir Kokonin. "The country aspires to freedom and a decent way of life. We here aspire to get rid of the vestiges of a serf theater...