Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...decades between Cambridge and World War II, three pieces of great good fortune befell Nabokov. In 1925 he married Vera Evseena Slonim, the slim and beautiful daughter of a Jewish St. Petersburg industrialist also ruined by the revolution. In 1934 they had a son, Dmitri, an only child now studying opera in Italy. In 1939, having moved from Berlin to Paris to avoid the Nazis, Nabokov quite by chance received and accepted a proposal to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford...
...miles a day together. In the evening, they play out their Scrabble tournaments, often with a Russian set (he can run up a 500 score). The chess problems he eventually publishes are set first for her to solve. They like to read to each other. They reread War and Peace in a motel in Montana a few years ago, and sad to say, Tolstoy flunked. " 'He paled slightly,' or 'Andrei half smiled,' " quotes Vladimir condescendingly. "Really." Between Tolstoy and Nabokov it is clear that Vera would choose Nabokov, and the dedication she brings...
...TIME, Sept. 27). Both reveal a savage irony and a cold, implacable loathing for war-and for the species that causes it. In a sweep of severe, formal landscapes, The Round Up recounts the misadventures of roving Hungarian patriots in 1868. With mechanical authority, Austrian troops traverse the nation, rounding up the freedom fighters in an unending search for their leader. Even 100 years ago, captors were instinctively aware that mental anguish was far more effective than the knout or the noose. Alternating terror with false promises, the Austrians turn innocent men against each other. Betrayal becomes the order...
Sculptor in Soil. In place of a plot, Jancso exhibits portraits of an embryonic police state, set against a pitiless sky and a plain so vast that it seems to show the curvature of the earth. In his cold eye, war is an aleatory art in which values are as random as bullets. A military band plays an exhilarating march; a moment later the tune is whistled by a doomed man. A woman is run, naked, through a line of whippers; her lover, unable to watch, jumps to his death. Other prisoners follow his example like an audience seeking exits...
...tired, tragic faces are one. The viewer must be content (or disturbed) with a vision trained on people but not on persons. Though Jancso is sometimes eclectic, he borrows only from the best, from the wintry compositions of Ingmar Bergman or from Goya's acid Disasters of War. At his most original, the director resembles neither film maker nor painter. In his own deep-dimensioned, black and white montages, he seems a sculptor who scrapes his material from the soil of his native land and gives it a cast of permanence...