Word: zolas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Matthew Josephson, 79, biographer of an imposing collection of Old and New World figures; in Santa Cruz, Calif. After a period as a young expatriate in Paris in the 1920s, Josephson concentrated on famous Frenchmen (Rousseau and Zola). But a roving intellect led him home to do literary portraits of Americans (Thomas Edison, Al Smith and Sidney Hillman) as well as a study of 19th century capitalists whose rapacious ways he exploited in his most celebrated book, The Robber Barons...
Dostoyevsky thought him a haughty poseur; the Goncourt brothers found him an amiable giant. He wrangled with Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language...
...walks through the fields and accompanied by soupy music, much like the middle third of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Just as they consumate their love, however, he recovers his memory. He abandons her for his celibate priesthood and she dies of a broken heart. In the Emile Zola novel on which the film is based, this ending was clearly intended as an anti-clerical attack. Unfortunately, the sentimentality and lack of reality in the film's portrayal of the priest's return to Eden undermines the contrast between his two lives. And the power of the film fizzles...
...public realm, Sennett shifts the scene abruptly--to the concert hall where Paganini made his violin performances more riveting than the music itself, to the barricades of 1848 where Lamartine made his frequent appearances before the workers more inspiring than his policies, and to the courtroom where Zola in J'Accuse made the matter of personal honor in the Dreyfus Case a more important question than anyone's actual guilt...
...Boys of the City" and "Vita Violenta" ("Violent Life"), his two best-known prose works, he decried the barriers of class in contemporary Italy, the profound social divisions between regions, cities, even neighborhoods. His polemics against corruption, injustice, and violence at all levels of society have been compared to Zola's work; Pasolini, like Zola in his time, saw in the "ragazzi di vita," who have neither ideals nor morals, a mirror image of the capitalist bourgeois who wield power in Italy. But Pasolini proposed no alternative to the existing power structure. Though he professed commuunism, Pasolini was no Marxist...