Word: witches
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week it looked as if all Soviet composers might soon be setting similar gems to music. The Party's witch-hunting Central Committee, in a fourth postwar decree aimed at keeping Soviet arts in tune with Soviet policy, rained brimstone on the foremost of Russian musicmakers...
...onion, at one time or another, has been enthusiastically recommended as a remedy for colds in the head and worms in the intestines. For centuries, the onion's medicinal value has been praised by witch doctors, old wives and bartenders. Rome's Pliny the Elder listed the onion as a cure for 28 diseases. Early New England settlers believed that the onion would prevent fits; Neapolitans of the Middle Ages thought it averted the evil eye. A 16th Century French surgeon, Ambroise Parè, used it instead of ointment to heal powder burns...
...Strangway's explanation: the natives' great fear of their witch doctors overstimulates their digestive juices...
Baba-Yaga was a bloodthirsty witch who flitted through the skazki (fairy tales) of old Russia. She had a false leg fashioned from the polished thighbone of a young boy. She lived in a house that hopped on chicken-footed stilts, around which was an iron fence ornamented with skulls. After dark, the eye sockets of the skulls glowed with fire to light her way. Her chariot was a mortar, which she pushed with a pestle, using her besom to erase her singular track. Innocent children were her favorite fare, but once a girl child, who might have been...
...ideologically unorthodox characters as Baba-Yaga. Since Lenin, writers of the new Soviet skazki have been instructed to fashion their fairy tales as "pictures of the Socialist way of life."* But Soviet writers cannot always follow Soviet Socialism. In Moscow last week Baba-Yaga might have chuckled a hearty witch's chuckle. Two of her Socialist successors-Bread Crumb and Gunpowder Crumb-were being boiled...