Word: symbolist
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...account that emerges from that brief visit is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist's eye. Rushdie the symbolist notes that the wife of the deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was named Hope and that the Ministry of Culture goes by the acronym MINICULT. Rushdie the ironist observes that the campesinos battling "U.S. imperialism" dine to the radio accompaniment of Born in the U.S.A...
...existent. History, fickle jade, balked at this fence and took a turn. One cannot imagine future painters mining Louis' work for motifs and ideas, the way Jackson Pollock's was mined by Louis and other artists of his generation. Here is the beautiful impasse, the last exhalation of symbolist nuance in America, soon to be a period style...
...brooding music is spheres apart from the pastoral beauties of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or the nautical tone painting of La Mer. Indeed, in its consummate wedding of text to music, the work Usher most closely resembles is Debussy's only completed opera, the shadowy symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande. The tormented Roderick Usher, Poe's unhappy protagonist, is depicted in agonized music that is drenched by the misery in the man's soul. Debussy intended Usher to last about an hour; Allende-Blin's realization runs a little more than 22 tantalizing minutes. What a pity...
Part of the secret of his success is that his eclecticism creates surface expectations of major art (complexity, depth, psychic intensity and so on) without discharging them in explicit meanings. He wittily exploits the affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing...
...fiction inside. But if his background is unclear, Erofeev's literary heritage is not: his prose is in the great Russian grotesque tradition, hearkening back to Gogol by way of such earlier Soviet satirists as Bulgakov, Zamyatin, and Zoshchenko. There are also traces of authors as diverse as the Symbolist Andrei Bely (in some of the bizarre urban imagery). Rabelais, and J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was widely circulated in the Soviet Union...