Word: switzerland
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...Baker, Lowell Weicker, and so on--is the wrong kind of hero to take hold of America. Those facets of his life which would upset a hero's image stand too close to the surface to be abstracted into a legend. For example, he lives as a millionaire in Switzerland. He calls for the revival of the Russian Orthodox church, a brutal arm of czarist oppression before 1917. He branded former Attorney General Ramsey Clark a "fluttering butterfly" for ignoring Russian dissidents, but visiting POW camps in Hanoi. Solzhenitsyn is among the most conservative of the Soviet dissidents...
...police only after he had already faced the dangers of being a loner on the force and a crusader against the ruling order. He offered public testimony against police (while still recovering from gunshot wounds in the head, incurred in a Harlem narcotics raid); he then sought peace in Switzerland...
...same issue of The New York Times which carried news of Solzhenitsyn's arrival in Switzerland reported as well, on a back page, the use of "behavior modification" in U.S. prisons. The example of Iowa was cited extensively. "When it was determined necessary to administer the drug," wrote the appeals court in the case, "the inmate was taken to a room near the nurses' station which contained only a water closet and there given the injection. He was then exercised and within about fifteen minutes he began vomiting. The vomiting lasted from fifteen minutes to an hour...
...here" is not only the hotel in Switzerland where Nabokov makes his home, but the rarefied, almost Jamesian air of Meisterschaft which has grown up about him in the last few years. He is the one clear, current giant of our literature, I mean of American literature and English literature in general, and it is there, in language itself, that he has been most at home, since leaving Russia at 20, Western Europe at 40, and America for Europe again...
What gives such a sense of the master about Nabokov is perhaps the feeling of common characters, common turns of phrase, common interests running through his long shelf of books. His novels span the gap between contemporary Switzerland and Russia before the Revolution. In between lie post-war America and Berlin between the wars, tea on the edge of Bloomsbury and dinner with Joyce in Paris. There are fantastic countries, like "Ultima Thule" published last spring in a A Russian Beauty and Other Stories...