Word: vitebsk
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...little book contains no names, not even that of its owner, though there is evidence that he had some connection with Vitebsk, in Byelorussia, and had served with Soviet forces in Hungary. He was a dead Soviet paratrooper, whose personal journal had fallen into the hands of anti-Soviet Afghans...
Russian highlights include Archipenko's monumental nudes and a gleeful Mare Chagall work, "Self portrait with woman." In 1921, Chagall had not yet emigrated from Russia. A leading art educator in Vitebsk, he portrays himself happy, in familiar surroundings, a woman floating breezily from his hand like a kite...
Memories of his Russian youth float through the paintings of Marc Chagall like some well-loved dream. Although he has lived much of his life in France, he went on painting the rabbinical figures, village steeples, brides, bouquets, clocks and animals of Vitebsk. Back in the U.S.S.R. for the first time since 1922, the 85-year-old artist was visibly moved by an exhibition of his work, some of which has been kept under lock and key as too "formalist" for the Soviet censors. Did he remember the paintings? Tentatively touching his 1917 oil, The Wedding, Chagall replied with tears...
...dancing, the common, ordinary concerns of the village, all contain divine sparks that, if allowed to shine through, bring man into harmony with his fellow man and with God. Chagall is not consciously spreading Hasidism. But he imbibed it to his very core when he was a boy in Vitebsk, and has been giving it forth ever since...
...Chagall could not long escape into the world of theater and ballet. The disasters of war inflamed him, and in 1943 he painted the Yellow Crucifixion. Amidst acidic yellows and greens, Vitebsk burns, a ship sinks, a ladder is half-posed to remove Christ from the Cross. In his Falling Angel, begun in 1923 and not finished until 1947, the whole world violently disintegrates, with a rabbi fleeing with the Torah and an angel hemorrhaging down through a tempest-torn...