Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Moreover, the artists' story is largely tragic. The revolution devoured its children. In the 1930s, after Stalin's seizure of power, the work of these artists was ruthlessly suppressed as "bourgeois formalism." It lacked the three nosts of Socialist Realism: ideinost, or belief in the class basis of truth; narodnost, or accessibility to the people; and partinost, or Party spirit. The artists now appear in the treble guise of visionaries, heroes and victims. Most art lovers probably believe, on this point, that Stalin betrayed the revolution and are unwilling to think of Lenin as the savage autocrat he was; they...
Petra Kelly's death is extremely tragic for those who knew and loved her. Whether the motive for her shooting was personal despair or a political grudge, it has very frightening implications for what the global fight for ecology and human rights represents to those who dedicate their lives to it. Her murder must not, however, shatter the ideals of those who are still fighting for a world in which both humans and ecology are treated with the love and respect they deserve. I want to honor Petra Kelly by continuing on in her work for humanity...
Helen too has an overreaching plan, to leave Phil and open an upscale restaurant of her own. As she and Harry head toward failure, they also approach, but never attain, something like tragic status. As characters they are not complicated or resonant enough to sustain that kind of grandeur...
This tautly written volume is The Caine Mutiny of the Vietnam War. Like Herman Wouk's wonderfully elusive Captain Queeg, the Green Beret conspirators, beginning with Colonel Rheault, seem indisputably guilty, however tragic the circumstances. But by the time Stein is finished, in Kafkaesque fashion no assumptions remain unchallenged. War, Stein implies, defies moral judgment, though judgments must be drawn. One such judgment was drawn by Daniel Ellsberg: the Green Beret case served to harden his determination to publish the Pentagon papers. The rest, as they say, is history...
There is was. Crown Heights in all its tragic display, the victims and the victimizers, but who was which (hardly a seam between them)? The thing I had heard about in passing was now alive, breathing, walking the stage, evolving--with each new face, into the terrible truth at its center. A dramatic gesture toward immortality, a dramatist's gesture toward immortality. An immortality of the pain and the grief. An immortality of the voices, the torn and urgent voices that vie in boundless cacophony. Voices to which the rest of us shut our ears to hear of only...