Word: stefan
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...sixth novel Read has traveled abroad and into history for a theme, attempting to write what could be thought of as his Brothers Karamazov, Polish-style. Stefan Kornowski−saint, sinner, intellectual−is Alyosha-Dmitri-Ivan all in one. The son of a ruined count, he moves into a shabby Warsaw apartment when the family country home is lost in the late 1920s. But while his sister, 17, goes to work in a jeweler's shop, Stefan, 15, manages the ultimate Dostoyevskian luxury: "Playing the role of the sort of person he ought to be." He dabbles...
...idles in ennui over his coy stories and precious plays, what can Stefan do to rouse himself from his cursed dilettantism? Like a true Karamazov, he contemplates an ideally perverse murder involving the princess's pubescent daughter. He is saved by, among other things, World War II, which−rest assured−he sits out in the U.S., selling books in a shop in Chicago while his wife and twins are killed by the Nazis. Twenty years later Stefan returns to Europe to commit a romantic crime, have a religious revelation...
...this air of Adele H.-like romantic seriousness lies this film's tongue-in-cheek genius. How does one squeeze into two hours, Borowczyk must have wondered, a novel (Stefan Zeromski's Dzieje Grzechu) that puts its heroine through so many wringers of wantonness? "Aha," the inspiration must have struck him, "play it like a real, noble love-story; make it feel like Dr. Zhivago." As the rousing Mendelsohn theme strikes up for the umpteenth time, we hardly register that Ewa has just consented to help her pimp assassinate the now rich Niepolomski. So what if she has to throw...
...shortage of food and consumer goods is only one reason for the prevailing grimness. More important, perhaps, is that the people feel betrayed by the government. Says Stefan Kisielewski, a former member of Parliament: "The problem is not just meat. It is a lack of confidence in our leaders." There is a widespread feeling that the Gierek government played a dirty trick on the people when last June it announced price hikes ranging from 30% on poultry to 69% on meat. Although many Poles concede that increases were necessary and long overdue, they expected them to be gradually imposed. Real...
...were rescinded in the wake of mass strikes, the arrest of several thousand rioting workers proved to be yet another government blunder. The subsequent trials of about 100 rioters served to unite workers, intellectuals, students and the still powerful Roman Catholic Church against the regime. In a recent sermon, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, 75, the revered Primate of Poland, lamented from the pulpit that "it is painful when workers must struggle for their rights from a workers' government...