Ali > Recent Status Updates

They exchanged a few words, she smiled at him in the remembered fashion, from under her dark brows, with that bashful slyness of hers; and the contour of her prominent cheekbones, and the elongated eyes, and the slenderness of arm and ankle were unchanged, were immortal, and then she joined her husband who was getting his overcoat at the cloakroom,and that was all - but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the..

'Turgenev,' said Pnin, putting the hand back on the table, 'was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants, and Madam Pushkin said: 'You annoy me with your verses,Pushkin' - and in old age - to think only! - the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with a red noz!'

More often Zinoviev went to the other extreme of embarrassing obsequiousness, even by the standards of the emerging hagiography: "As mighty as the ocean; as stern and inaccessible as Mont Blanc; as tender as the southern sun; as great as the world; as humane as a child." For all his oratorical prowess, on the written page Zinoviev tended to be diffuse, the opposite of Stalin.

Every dictatorship needs a ubiquitous 'enemy,'who threatens it from within. For that role,Trotsky was tailor-made,a gift to Stalin,once he figured that out.It was not Trotsky,let alone Zinoviev or Kamenev,but Stalin's principal patron,Lenin-or at least,dictation attributed to Lenin-who would prove to be the gravest threat to the absolute power inherent in the general secretary position,and to Stalin's psychic balance

At meetings, Barmine noted, Stalin sat off to the side, smoked a pipe that he stuffed with cigarette tobacco, and doodled, but he accumulated power because of his 'strength of will, patience, slyness, ability to perceive human frailties and play upon them with contempt, and the supreme gift of pursuing a chosen goal inflexibly and without scruple.'