Word: realism
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Steppes of History. After two stretches of imprisonment and banishment (one sentence was for complaining in a letter to his father of the inefficiency of the police), Herzen was wondering whether a "human being with any sense of his own dignity could live in Russia." Yet Herzen had the realism to understand, 75 years before Stalin, that an inefficient despotism is preferable to an efficient one. With a visionary eye he looked across the steppes of history and foresaw that the witless crudity of the Czar's bureaucrats might be less evil than a regime speaking in the name...
...McCleery has a formula, it is "selective realism," i.e., showing "with either delicacy or violence" what happens to a human being in a crisis. His favorite techniques are screen-filling closeups ("If an actor is talking, what's more important than his mouth...
Brook Watson and the Shark was Copley's only real contribution to European art. Actually the work of his London peers (Romney. Gainsborough. Reynolds, West) corrupted Copley's homespun realism. To compete in such fast and fashionable company, the old dog learned a pathetic array of new tricks. He kept on painting industriously until his death at 77, but his ice-clear eye gradually veiled, his granite-firm hand practiced soft flamboyance, his powers slipped away like spirits bored with too much worldliness, sick of success...
...King, then its Premier, still its most influential citizen, was given a royal welcome in Moscow last week. He came away aglow at the "astonishing hospitality. As for the leaders of the Soviet government I have been privileged to meet, I am able to see their dynamism, clairvoyance, realism, charming simplicity of manner, remarkable comprehension of international relations and understanding of the aspirations of the Asian peoples." He gratefully accepted a Soviet offer to build and staff a hospital in the Cambodian capital, and invited the Soviet leaders to visit his country. B. & K. as gratefully accepted...
...Editor Michalson's own attempt to answer the question: What is existentialism? The layman's suspicion that it is some kind of clandestine wedding between Nordic melancholy and Parisian pornography, he admits, comes close to truth. "For . . . there is in existentialism a shocking sensualism, an erotic realism, a tearful and throbbing meeting of skin against skin, which, so characteristically French, appreciates propinquity of heart and fingertip." At the same time existentialism contains "a sentiment of constantly living over cracking earth, or at the foot of live volcanos, or in a land where people fight two wars in every...