Word: tyrant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...generation's doughtiest champions have been authors and poets, the very types who were the most closely indentured servants of Stalinism. Perhaps no other tyrant in history has ever imposed so rigorous a system of thought control as that of Joseph Stalin; his most powerful and systematic weapon was the doctrine called "socialist realism,'' by which artists became "engineers of souls." whose only function was to mass-produce Communist propaganda. Literature started up again soon after Stalin's death. In the six years since Nikita Khrushchev demolished Stalin's godhead at the 20th Party Congress...
...snows have melted since Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953. In the political and social thaw that has followed the tyrant's end, regimentation persists but the cruder kinds of terror have vanished almost as completely as the snow. To the 100 million Russians who are under 25 today, and who make up nearly a half of the Soviet Union's entire population, Stalinism is little more than a bad childhood memory. They have not been broken by the fear that haunts their fathers nor infected with the blind faith that guided some of their Bolshevik...
...However, unless I sorely misunderstand the play, the surface clarity of structure disguises a number of deep philosophic muddles. Electra assures Orestes that by committing his murders, he is merely fulfilling the curse on the House of Atreus; Orestes, on the other hand, assures Zeus that by killing the tyrant he is fulfilling himself. Certainly he never for an instant feels the remorse which Electra's interpretation of his act would make necessary--but Electra does. The play's great weakness is its Second Act, in which Orestes makes his decision, because we never know the reason for that decision...
...trip to the U.S., Nadia Boulanger, Paris' matriarch of modern music, became the first woman ever to conduct a full concert by The New York Philharmonic. Borrowing the podium of one of the few notable American composers who was never her pupil, mercurial Maestro Leonard Bernstein, the "tender tyrant" led the orchestra through psalms by her late sister...
...denounced Democratic Secretary of State Dean Rusk for his description, made during a Madrid stopover, of Spain's Dictator Francisco Franco as "an ally of the U.S. in the fight against Communist aggression.'' Said the telegram: "That a member of this Administration could praise a Fascist tyrant who has violated every basic precept of freedom and decency is indefensible just as General Franco is indefensible...