Word: yars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jewish tinsmith (Rolan Bykov) and his family. Their enforced intimacy sparks a cultural exchange: the commissar becomes feminized, and the tinsmith's wife (Raisa Nedashkovskaya) becomes a bit of a feminist. Outside, though, the Jew's children are taunted and tortured in a kind of dress rehearsal for Babi Yar. And after Vavilova gives birth, she must decide whether an officer's first loyalty is to her besieged country or her infant...
...prominent spokesman for Gorbachev's liberalization campaign. The new work is theatrical but tame. The targets are either old monsters or the class of unreconstructed bureaucrats whom the new regime has pledged to replace. The daring urgency of earlier poems, such as The Heirs of Stalin and Babi Yar, has given way to all- purpose indictments of totalitarianism and effusions of universality. "I ; would like to be born in every country,/ have a passport for them all" is how he begins...
...knew we had earned those diplomas, many of them with honors--a great accomplishment but typical of our time. I don't remember whether President Pusey or President Jordan handed them out on that broiling hot day in the Radcliffe Yar...
...veteran Yevtushenko watchers, such comments sound like the Angry Young Poet of old. During the Khrushchev era, Yevtushenko became a hero of liberal Soviet intellectuals for his bold poems condemning anti-Semitism (Babi Yar) and Stalin's reign of terror (The Heirs of Stalin), many of which he recited on poetry-reading tours of the West. Beginning in the late 1960s, Yevtushenko's dissident fire seemed to dim, as he churned out "official" verse celebrating Soviet workers and attacking...
...Ararat. D.M. Thomas has set out to prove that dictum. In The White Hotel, his collaborative efforts were a critical and popular success. That novel began as an ingenious imitation of a case history by Freud, then moved to an account of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, originally written by a Russian novelist, Anatoli Kuznetsov. But what was an effective device in The White Hotel has become a conceit in Ararat. The density of literary allusion in Thomas' latest novel has rendered it virtually unintelligible...