Word: despotism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such was the astonishing portrait of Joseph Stalin conveyed by his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, in her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Svetlana has since had some second thoughts. In her latest book, Only One Year, published this week by Harper & Row, she pictures her father as a despot who brought about a bloody terror that destroyed millions of people-in sum, "a moral and spiritual monster...
...lives of ordinary citizens. The evidence that it does these things and more has become all too credible. The image persists of the colorful gambler who speaks quaint Runyonesque, or the romantic loner ? Jay Gatsby, say ? who has his own somehow justifiable morality, or of the paternalistic despot who challenges society by his own peculiar code...
...Daley scrambled upward through the party ranks. Hence his understanding of Chicago's muscles and nerves is deeply intuitive. But it is growing archaic, as the mayor's lines to the Negro community atrophy and he continues to rule in the personalistic style of a benevolent Irish despot of the wards...
...young revolutionary is transmogrified by power-and the fear of losing it-into a ruthless madman who rules his country with whims of hurricane force. After his death, his career is recalled by Frank, a government photographer and an old friend from the underground days, who now records the despot's lying in state. Frank's secret hobby is building up a huge collection of candid but forbidden photographs: "unsuitable pictures taken from unsuitable angles, the averted face of the world in which [the tyrant] moved, a parade of folly, a riot of vanity, a debauch of cowardice...
...adaptation of Coriolanus in East Berlin, June, 1953. Brecht, and here Plebeians tells no lies, has transfigured Shakespeare's tragedy into a didactic tract for revolution. Shakespeare's silly tribunes of the people become radical ideologues; Coriolanus -- the "colossal" as he is described in Plebeians -- is reduced to a despot with a certain knack for winning battles. And quite as much as Brecht tampered with Shakespeare, Grass has tampered with Brecht. He has made him a patronizing, cynical esthete resigned to the failure of revolution in the world at large, yet committed to its success on stage -- the success...