Word: stalins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...your review "Blood Relatives" [Aug. 9] you say that our brother Alexander Pasternak was a member of Stalin's secret police, the Cheka. As an architect who designed one lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Alexander was employed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1936. The NKVD not only controlled all construction projects, like the canal and the metro, but had also taken over the functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more...
...20th century with ingenuous vigor. Feasting on suckling pig in Madrid's toniest restaurant or visiting the Valley of the Fallen, Spain's grandiose monument to its Civil War dead, the compañeros loudly dispute the merits of their beliefs: the Gulag vs. the Inquisition; Stalin vs. Judas; Brezhnev vs. Franco. The priest veers toward an ecumenical humanism; the Marxist sighs for a materialistic Utopia. They agree only about the culture that confronts them. Says Quixote: "It's an absurd world or we wouldn't be here together...
...Warsaw, about 1,000 demonstrators gathered on Constitution Square and began marching toward the monolithic, Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science in an effort to link up with another group. Police moving in to break up the crowds were greeted with shouts of "Gestapo!" "Solidarity!" and "We want Lech!"-a reference to Lech Walesa, the detained leader of Solidarity...
Tibor Grau still has much to learn. The son of a Jewish banker named Von Grau, a furtive homosexual, a teacher and philosopher of sorts, he survives wartime exile in Stalin's U.S.S.R. by following the principle: "You must lie to survive. But what is a lie?" The tale of the frogs keeps reappearing in new forms. Military Interpreter Grau tells it to some German war prisoners as a parable of how an arrogant team of jumping frogs lost at the Olympics. During the Hungarian revolt of 1956, finally, Grau becomes one of six Hungarians designated to negotiate with...
Freidenberg's part in the correspondence is as mesmerizing as Pasternak's. The plight of philologists and linguists under Stalin, who considered himself an expert in linguistics, has never been more acidly described. It is good to know that Freidenberg's long-suppressed writings on such innocent topics as the "Poetics of Plot and Genre" in classical Greek literature are gradually being rescued from oblivion by young linguists in the Soviet Union. But until the rescue is complete, Freidenberg, who died in 1955, will be remembered as the tough-minded and rigorous scholar who gave her inspired...