Word: wretched
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Miserables. While forced into retirement by the displeasure of Napoleon, Victor Hugo wrote his great novel venting protest against the harsh penal system of the day. He meant to proclaim the Christian doctrine that all men are brothers, the hopeful opinion that even the most reprehensible wretch is kin to God. His example is Jean Valjean, a strapping fellow, brutalized by 19 years in the chains of convict labor for the theft of a loaf of bread. The kindness of an old bishop causes the spark to glow in Valjean, so that after his release, he devotes himself to saintly...
...sunny, ivy-grown rancho of the Vasquez family, who founded San Francisco. There she might have breathed rose-laden zephyrs and married Terrence O'Shaughnessy (Charles Mack) but for Buckwell (Warner Oland), villainous politician. He wants to take away her rancho. Because she senses that, despite appearances, this wretch is a Mongolian, he carries her off to the most devilish abyss in old Chinatown, "the inner circle of the mile of hell." There, on the point of worse than death, it occurs to her to repeat the Lord's Prayer. In answer, God sends the earthquake...
Polykushka, however, is showing. Its simple story is the tragedy of a 19th Century serf, a drunkard and a petty thief. His mistress forgives him a serious larceny, provided he swear on the Cross to mend his ways. This the poor wretch solemnly does, whereupon, to prove her faith in him, the benefactress despatches him to bring a purse of rubles from the village. In the course of the errand, the money is accidentally lost. The miserable serf hangs himself from a rafter in the barn, while an honest traveler returns the money found along the roadside, to the owner...
...tempted to seek the river and thus rid himself of it all. Having psycho-analyzed its condition, mental and economic, for the last decade, the nation may now turn to the business of convalescing from its shame. To be an American does not always mean to be a boorish wretch,, unconscious of the higher things in life. Without degenerating into flagwaving one may easily endure a comparison of the United States with its most caustic critics...
KYRA KYRALINA-Panait Istrati -Knopf ($2.50). Five years ago, hospital attendants in Nice found upon the person of a wretch who had cut his throat unsuccessfully, a letter addressed to Author Romain Rolland, the French pacifist-humanist. The patient lived and, encouraged by M. Rolland, wrote many stories, of which this book contains the first three to be published in English...