Word: heroic
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...professor still hopes, which makes him seem heroic, sitting back in a chair in a neat office at a new building in Brandeis called the "International Building," done in the I.M. Pei style and festooned with flags of different countries. Quietly, without wanting to make too much of it: "I am very strongly drawn toward decentralized, nontyrannical political systems like Yugoslavia"--although he later qualifies this, worrying about the resurgence of Stalinism and some lack of democratic institutions in Titoism...
Shrieking, the bird heroic flew...
...fight for survival inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write an opera that would embody their struggle. His hugely ambitious choice for a story: Tolstoy's War and Peace. What he finally produced in 1943, however, was written in an almost schizoid style-part introspective love story, part heroic showpiece-that was difficult to grasp, easy to misunderstand. Stalin's commissars gave only grudging approval, demanded more pageantry and patriotic fervor. At his death in 1953, the composer was still rewriting the work. He never saw it fully staged...
...BENGALI INHERITANCE (Pantheon; 225 pages; $6.95) is also based on the gold standard. Hong Kong Senior Inspector Richard Chan is a heroic young pro whose district is the last resting place of a 24-karat fortune. The loot has been missing since 1945, when the Fascist collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose perished in an air crash. Bird-dogging the musty trail of the treasure, Detective Chan takes on a slew of Oriental cutthroats, as well as the colonial snobs who disdainfully regard him as a subgumshoe. Ceylonese Author Owen Cela is obviously no stranger to the refractions of cultural prejudice...
Actually, Woddy Allen's formula is more sophisticated than just that. He generally takes some basic slapstick and Marx Brothers stuff, slathers it with the savoir-faire of the horny ethnic loser, and hurls the whole concoction into an unlikely context, usually the heroic fantasy world of the shlemeil. What he does is magnify the possibilities of the social banana peel. A Jewish herd blowing a date in the Bronx is one thing, but a Jewish herd posing as a Cuban dictator in bed with a sultry revolutionary who tells him he looks a lot like a Jewish herd...