Word: realism
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Police said they first spotted the teacher, one Rudolf Friedman, as he muttered uncomplimentary remarks about socialist realism while strolling through Leningrad's Russian Museum. A well-dressed U.S. tourist approached him, enthusiastically shared his sentiments, and promised to send Friedman reproductions of avant-garde paintings from America. The picture Friedman liked best, said the cops indignantly, was a "chaos of black, red and blue splotches captioned / Need You Tonight." Soon, they said, the teacher was getting messages from the U.S. written in invisible ink. Just as Friedman prepared to deliver information "very remote from theoretical arguments about abstract...
...Inability to Laugh. Kafka's form was magic realism in which, as Politzer writes, "clefts and crags open to reveal depths beyond realistic detail." In breathless, frightened prose, Kafka built his ambivalent fears into ambiguities that empty the spirit. His heroes endure events that seem to mirror their experience, but in fact are tantalizing opposites that contradict everything they know. In The Trial Kafka's hero asserts his innocence until echoes of his own voice convince him of his guilt. Life becomes absurd in a universe whose nature is that guiltless men shall be punished. Kafka never knew...
...Kremlin last week was also rapping the knuckles of Soviet writers. Pravda, in a front-page editorial complained that too many Russian authors had "betrayed" the cause of socialist realism in favor of "all-forgiving liberalism or rotten, sentimental complacency." These "pseudo innovators," argued the editorial, "idly pursue Western fashions, which are profoundly alien to our world outlook, to our esthetic sense, and to our concept of what is wonderful and beautiful...
Perhaps no theater is large enough to hold the White Whale, and Welles intelligently lets audience imagination do the work of stage realism. He conceives of a turn-of-the-century acting troupe doing a sort of tryout rehearsal of a new drama, Moby Dick. A tall ladder serves for a mast, benches for longboats, and furled and swaying sails complete the Nantucket whaler Pequod. Pages of the novel are cut to stage cues, and the second and final act cuts to the mortal sea chase, which Director Douglas Campbell handles with brisk and believable intensity...
...plot of this old nightmare is too athletic to be staged successfully in an age dulled by realism, but in Stacton's retelling it moves as smoothly as the oiled gears of a stretching rack. The reader's disbelief is abruptly suspended-as from a gibbet-as the rich young widowed duchess runs off with her lover Antonio, and her brothers, the bloody Ferdinand and the scheming Cardinal, stalk her to earth for profit and incestuous love...