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96e3b336ef79945e8664593742f0acf8 | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0824-silberman-autism-speaks-20150824-story.html | Op-Ed: Autism Speaks needs to do a lot more listening | Op-Ed: Autism Speaks needs to do a lot more listening
For a couple of decades now, Americans have been engaged in a wide-ranging and often heated conversation about autism. About what causes it, whether there’s more of it than there used to be, and whether it can be cured. About whether autism is a disorder, a disability or a different way of being. About whether the condition is overdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, and which early interventions are most helpful for children.
All this talk is an improvement over the painful silence that prevailed through most of the 20th century, when psychiatrists wrongly blamed autism on “refrigerator mothers,” making it a source of shame for families. But there’s one way in which things haven’t changed much: The people most often sidelined or excluded from the public discussion are autistic themselves. It is often assumed that the experts, or the parents of people on the autism spectrum, will do the talking in their stead.
Case in point: Autism Speaks, an organization that raises tens of millions of dollars each year by hosting walks and star-studded events like an annual concert in Hollywood called Light Up the Blues. The motto of Autism Speaks is
“It’s time to listen,” yet disability rights groups have accused the organization of refusing to do just that. See, for example, the Twitter hashtag #BoycottAutismSpeaks.
Imagine a world in which the leadership of the NAACP was all-white; now consider that not a single autistic person serves on the board of Autism Speaks. This absence makes itself felt.
As people on the spectrum have struggled to overcome years of stigma and negative stereotyping, the group has framed their condition in terrifying and dehumanizing terms. Its 2009 video “I Am Autism,” which debuted at the United Nations, portrayed autism as a creepy stalker: “I know where you live, and guess what? I live there too. I hover around all of you… I work faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer and diabetes combined... I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams.”
The group’s co-founders, former NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, have repeatedly referred to children on the spectrum (including their grandson, Christian) as “missing,” as if they’d been kidnapped. The group’s PR messaging has also reinforced the misconception that autism is a destroyer of marriages, though research shows that divorce rates are no higher for the parents of autistic kids.
But there’s more at stake here than political correctness. As one of the largest private sponsors of autism research in the world, Autism Speaks helps set the global scientific agenda.
Founded in 2005 at the height of parental anxiety about vaccines, the organization has lavished most of its funding on research uncovering prenatal risk factors for autism. It has not truly committed to serving the needs of autistic people and their families.
In 2011, the organization launched an effort with the Beijing Genomics Institute to map the whole genomes of 10,000 individuals from families with two or more autistic children, at a cost of $50 million. Meanwhile, only a tiny fraction of the money raised on walks organized by Autism Speaks goes to ensuring that autistic people who have already been born will be able to live happy, healthy, secure and productive lives.
Autism Speaks’ myopia is symptomatic of a larger problem in the United States. Less than 2% of the studies funded by the National Institutes of Health in 2010 were devoted to improving the lives of adults on the spectrum. The private funding allocated by groups like the Simons Foundation is similarly skewed. And the Government Accountability Office reported in June that funding for research on autistic adults actually declined between 2008 and 2012.
John Elder Robison, the autistic author of the bestselling autobiography “Look Me in the Eye” and an upcoming book, “Switched On,” has criticized this imbalance.
“Two-thirds of the human lifespan is spent as an adult. With autism being a lifelong issue, we should be balancing our research accordingly,” he writes. “The hundreds of millions we have spent on autism research in the past decade have had precious little beneficial effect on families and individuals living with autism today. We need to recognize that the job of research isn’t done until autistic people are actually seeing a benefit.”
Among the areas of research that are perpetually underfunded in the U.S., says disability rights advocate Lydia Brown, are ways of facilitating inclusive education, developing strategies for preparing autistic teenagers for the workforce, studying problems in sensory integration, helping autistic people to live more independently in their communities, improving access to healthcare, reducing discrimination in employment and housing, and ending the abuse of autistic people by their service providers.
Autistic activist Julia Bascom writes that people on the spectrum are no longer willing to be “spectators in their own stories.” To coin a phrase, it really is time to listen.
Steve Silberman is the author of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.”
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42b2ca8a4240827825f7c1ed7984e630 | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0902-schwartz-mobility-accessibility-20150902-story.html | Op-Ed: Why a car-centric transportation plan is folly for L.A. | Op-Ed: Why a car-centric transportation plan is folly for L.A.
The knock on L.A.'s Mobility Plan 2035 is that it will slow down traffic. After the City Council approved the blueprint, the community group Fix the City wrote that “MP2035 is not a mobility plan, it is a plan designed to create immobility.” It has a point. The city wants to redesign several thoroughfares to accommodate bikes and buses. As a result, grades for some streets’ “level of service” — the flow of automobile traffic — are likely to fall.
Here’s the thing: Mobility, in the form of faster vehicle operating speed, isn’t the key to a superior transportation system.
After more than 40 years as a transportation engineer, I’m very aware that most of the traditional measures of transportation efficiency focus on mobility, often expressed as “delay per capita” or “dollars wasted while waiting in traffic.” But what really matters is access.
Access — to shopping or work — can be improved by increasing the speed with which we travel between destinations or by decreasing the distance separating them. But we have to choose. Mobility and proximity are in combat with one another. The more mobility we create, the more distant destinations grow — because free-flowing traffic encourages sprawl. The closer destinations are to one another, the slower transportation gets — because density leads to congestion.
Which choice is superior?
In 2012, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan published a study that compared speed to proximity in 38 U.S. metropolitan areas. The initial results were ambiguous. Houston, for example, bested Philadelphia on average speed but lost on proximity. Los Angeles lost to New York on both speed and proximity.
Overall, however, the study concluded that the value of increased proximity is roughly 10 times as important in improving accessibility as its cost in reduced speed. Put another way, it’s 10 times more efficient, in economic terms, to shorten the distance separating home from work (or home from supermarket) than to increase the speed at which it’s possible to travel from one to the other.
Consider two families. One lives in a walkable neighborhood. To get to the nearest drugstore, half a mile away, they could take a three-minute drive or a 10-minute walk. The other family lives in an auto-centric area where the nearest drugstore is five miles away. When the roads are clear, it takes 15 minutes to drive there. The second family has greater mobility; its members travel each mile faster. The first, though, has superior access. Closer beats faster.
There’s no reason to believe that mobility drives prosperity. On the contrary, throughout the developed world, higher mobility is correlated with a lower gross domestic product, while “inefficient” roads, in terms of vehicle speed, tend to serve economically productive areas.
Another study, this one from Texas A&M, found that for every 10% increase in traffic delays, per-capita GDP increased 3.4 %. This doesn’t mean that lower mobility directly enhances economic productivity, but it does suggest that places with a lot of congestion are more economically vibrant than those without.
And that seems to be an eternal relationship. Last year, a group of anthropologists found that density-fueled congestion, as measured by population per street mile, was powerfully associated with prosperity in the ancient cities of pre-Columbian Mexico (though the prosperity of the 4,000 archaeological sites was measured in monument building and house size rather than GDP). Congestion implies more, and more frequent, social interactions, and social interactions are essential for all forms of productivity, from harvesting crops to selling razor blades to performing music.
So if Mobility Plan 2035 will slow down traffic, that’s worth applauding. To the degree that it will increase the presence of bicycles and pedestrians on Los Angeles’ streets, it promises to be a “mobility” plan that actually promotes access. By making a commitment to transportation alternatives — walking and cycling — Los Angeles, once the archetype for automobile dependence, has bound itself to a new kind of urban model.
Sam Schwartz has served as New York City’s traffic commissioner and the New York City Department of Transportation’s chief engineer. He is the author, with William Rosen, of “Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars.”
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b719abdae8df30544410682fc6a7d625 | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1009-mcmanus-column-shutdown-obama-boehner-20131009-column.html | The uncompromiser in chief | The uncompromiser in chief
If you wanted to hear words of sweet conciliation, the White House was the wrong place to go this week.
“We’re not going to pay a ransom for America paying its bills,” President Obama said Tuesday, sticking to his demand that Congress pass a spending bill and raise the federal debt ceiling without conditions. “I’m not budging.”
Instead, Obama doubled down on his favorite metaphor for Republicans’ demands: the GOP as a band of terrorists.
He described their strategy as “hostage-taking” and “extortion.” Breaching the debt ceiling, he warned, would be “insane, catastrophic, chaos,” the fiscal equivalent of using a nuclear weapon. And he dismissed Republican proposals for a new “supercommittee” as a nonstarter unless the GOP reopened the government first.
In other words, the standoff over federal spending and the debt ceiling doesn’t look headed for a quick resolution.
There were sound reasons for the president’s over-the-top rhetoric. Substantively, he’s right about the debt ceiling; once Congress has voted to spend federal money, it has an obligation to allow the Treasury to pay the bills.
But Obama is also trying to solve a problem that’s partly his own fault. In 2011, the president negotiated with Republicans over a similar rise in the debt ceiling and agreed to a bargain that gave the GOP some of the spending cuts it demanded in return.
That deal taught Republican leaders that the debt ceiling could be used as leverage to win concessions on other issues. To borrow the president’s metaphor: In that case, terrorism worked.
Republicans would put it differently: They bargained hard, and Obama blinked. As recently as last week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was assuring colleagues that Obama would fold in this showdown, just as he did before. White House aides say one big reason for Obama’s adamancy this time is that he doesn’t want the precedent he set in 2011 — reluctantly, at the start of a presidential campaign — to become, well, an entitlement. And he needs to convince skeptical Republicans like Ryan that this time, he won’t negotiate.
There are tactical reasons as well that are pushing Obama to dig in his heels. For one thing, public opinion polls suggest he’s winning; more voters blame Republicans for the standoff than blame either congressional Democrats or the president. That may not last; if a debt ceiling crisis causes real economic harm, voters will blame everyone involved. But for the moment, it gives Obama added leverage, and he’s using it.
Pressure is rising from the business community too. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent millions last year to support mostly Republican candidates, issued a statement Tuesday asking Congress to act quickly on the debt ceiling “to avoid inflicting substantial and enduring damage on the U.S. economy.”
Equally important, Republicans in Congress are divided, while Obama and his Democrats are uncharacteristically united. House Republicans have rolled out a series of changing (and steadily diminishing) demands, from defunding Obamacare to delaying its implementation to launching the Keystone XL oil pipeline to, well, anybody’s guess.
On Tuesday, when House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) made a new proposal for negotiations, he didn’t even try to describe what the GOP was hoping to win. “There’s nothing on the table, there’s nothing off the table,” Boehner said. He just wanted “to have a conversation.”
Meanwhile, several House and Senate Republicans said they’re ready to vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling with no conditions. The lesson for Obama is that the other side may be crumbling and the Democrats’ best course is to stand back and watch them crumble.
So how does the standoff end?
As Oct. 17 approaches — the date on which the Treasury says it will run low on cash — the pressure on both sides to stop playing chicken will increase. At that point, despite his uncompromising rhetoric, Obama may find it in his interest to negotiate with the same people he’s now calling hostage-takers — something almost every government does, even when it’s real terrorists they’re talking about.
The deal that’s negotiated is unlikely to satisfy the tea party. The president might, for instance, agree to a short-term increase in the debt ceiling in tandem with a commitment to negotiate later over long-term spending cuts.
And it also won’t solve the problem in the long run.
“We’ll kick the can down the road again,” a Republican strategist predicted — meaning a short-term spending bill and a short-term debt ceiling increase.
Both sides will claim victory; they always do. But the long-term problems of the federal budget won’t be solved, and the next round of the fiscal standoff will begin the next day.
doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
Twitter: @DoyleMcManus
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3a7fee01c2963708075b4de4f9ff2f10 | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1015-mahoney-california-exit-exam-20151015-story.html | Op-Ed: Goodbye and good riddance to California’s high school exit exam | Op-Ed: Goodbye and good riddance to California’s high school exit exam
The California high school exit exam is dead. The short and purposeless life of the exam began in 2001 when it was first administered to ninth-grade volunteers. It ended last week when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that not only suspended the test but also nullified the results for anybody who had finished high school but failed to pass it.
Once hailed as a meaningful way to raise academic standards, the exam left the world without a trace, erased like the errant smudge of a No. 2 pencil.
The exam is preceded to the grave by a century’s worth of forgotten and abandoned education initiatives that headline-seeking politicians once promised were going to make our schools great again. (Remember class size reduction? Remember how every kid in Los Angeles was supposed to get an iPad?) It is survived by zombie ideas that refuse to die despite overwhelming evidence that they should. (Can we forget about using standardized tests to evaluate teachers?)
I admit I don’t mourn the test’s passing, but I can’t help but feel angry about the way it ended.
It’s not the granting of diplomas to students who can’t do eighth-grade math that bothers me. It’s what the test and its demise represent.
I don’t mourn it because it was a lame test to begin with. All those countries that whip us on international assessments have a rigorous end-of-high-school test. Here in California, we ignored the “rigor” part, aligning our test to eighth-grade math and 10th-grade English. Students who failed the first try in 10th grade could take the test six more times in high school, and in recent years the pass rate for all seniors edged above 95%.
In this land of opportunity, students who met all other graduation requirements could keep taking the test years after high school; even twentysomethings could have another go at the math we expect 13-year-olds to understand. But for some students, infinite second chances weren’t enough.
It was only fair, argued the authors of the test-kill bill, to give diplomas to the more than 30,000 former students who needed only to pass the exam.
Well, fair is fair. So give them diplomas. Give them all trophies too. Perhaps we should also give diplomas to the dropouts who quit school because they figured they had no chance of passing the exam? This is America, after all.
But it’s not the granting of diplomas to students who can’t do eighth-grade math that bothers me. It’s what the test and its demise represent.
Any teacher who has been in the classroom for more than a few years has seen costly education initiatives promoted and then dropped when they didn’t deliver promised results. We’ve all been in crowded auditoriums where expensive consultants repackaged common sense about student success as bold new insight.
A key survival skill for teachers is learning to nod politely and say what a great idea that is, and then to go back into classroom and do the very best that we can for our students.
But it was hard to ignore the high school exit exam. Every year, my colleagues who taught 10th grade had to shape their lessons to fit that ridiculous test. At my daughter’s school, ninth-graders were supposed to come for a practice exam while sophomores did the real thing. After years of insisting that what matters in school is learning, not grades and tests scores, I told her she could stay home those mornings.
The test informed our curriculum and our school rankings. Now it’s gone. But that’s not the end of the story. State education officials are now considering whether to create a new exit exam aligned to Common Core standards. If they go ahead, I want to suggest a couple of questions for Exit Exam 2.0:
1. Why should anybody take this test seriously after the state retroactively gave everybody a pass on the last one?
2. Who benefited most from the untold millions the state spent to purchase and administer the old exit exam?
Question 1 is rhetorical. Question 2 has a painfully obvious solution, but just in case your high school was teaching test prep instead of logical thinking, the answer is the testing company.
For full credit, the test taker should also note that nearly every education reform in recent memory has started out or ended up as a way to transfer money intended for public education into the pockets of corporations and consultants.
I can’t change the answers, but I hope that our esteemed education leaders will understand why we lowly classroom teachers don’t get excited about the next big thing that is really going to make a difference this time.
And as long as the state is so good at throwing away money, it could at least buy us straight-face masks to wear when we tell our students next spring to try hard on the new-and-improved exam because it really matters, kids.
Michael Mahoney is a high school English and journalism teacher who lives in Sacramento.
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
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6d92f4b7bb2ae9012d6e215d54aeafe8 | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1020-hasen-red-blue-election-law-20151020-story.html | Op-Ed: When it comes to election law, red America and blue America are not at all alike | Op-Ed: When it comes to election law, red America and blue America are not at all alike
We already know that Americans’ access to abortion services, healthcare and firearms varies according to where they live. In California, it’s relatively simple for women to obtain an abortion, and in Texas, it’s quite hard; the reverse is true for guns. Some states accepted Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act, helping the poor obtain health coverage, and others did not.
Increasingly, location also affects how difficult it is to cast a vote. When it comes to election law, red America and blue America are not at all alike.
Since 2000, and especially in the last few years, states dominated by Democrats have tended to pass laws that make it easier to register and vote, while states dominated by Republicans have done the opposite.
This month, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill making voter registration automatic for eligible Californians who request a driver’s license or state ID from the Department of Motor Vehicles. California joins liberal Oregon in this endeavor. A number of other blue states are also looking to remove barriers to registration.
Where you live should not affect your ability to register and vote in a federal election.
Meanwhile, North Carolina has abolished same-day voter registration and pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds, and cut back on early voting. (It is awaiting a decision in a federal lawsuit contesting these and other changes.) Alabama recently closed a number of motor vehicle offices in counties dominated by African Americans, making it even harder to obtain the type of photo identification necessary to cast a valid vote in that state. And Kansas required documentary proof of citizenship to register, apparently leaving lots of eligible voters in the lurch.
It is easy to praise Democrats for taking the high road, but let’s not lose sight of partisan motivations on both sides: Conservatives and liberals alike believe that making registration and voting easier helps Democrats because constituencies that lean blue — including the poor and racial minorities — tend to have lower participation rates. One study found that unregistered voters would have favored President Obama over Mitt Romney by 73% to 27% in the 2012 election.
That said, where you live should not affect your ability to register and vote in a federal election. Why should a Californian have a much easier time voting for president than a North Carolinian?
The best solution would be to nationalize our election process. We should have uniform standards for elections, automatic registration with anti-fraud checks and national voter identification provided by the federal government.
But I am not naive, and I do not expect a national overhaul of the election system any time soon. The same partisan forces that have led to the emergence of red-state election law and blue-state election law have blocked room for partisan compromise in Congress. Many Republicans abhor automatic registration and other means to make it easier to vote, and many Democrats are wary of anti-fraud checks. Further, state election officials don’t want to give up their grip on power.
A more practical avenue for guaranteeing access to the ballot is through the federal courts. Courts could read the Constitution’s equal protection clause to require that when a state passes a law that makes it harder for voters to register and vote, it has to prove that such a law is really necessary to meet its goals of preventing fraud or complying with otherwise sound election administration principles.
So far, courts have not read the equal protection clause so expansively. There have, however, been some attempts to aid voters who need help the most. For instance, when laws requiring voter ID have been shown to burden identifiable groups, some courts have created exemptions for them, and the litigation itself has spurred states to ease their strict rules. We have seen this happen in cases involving South Carolina, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Texas, though the Texas case is still in litigation.
Finally, and most realistically, a focus on technical standards could lead some states to move beyond the voting wars. The Pew Charitable Trust and its partners have worked in red and blue states alike to foster online voter registration. They have also encouraged cross-checks of state registration databases to make sure that voters are not registered to vote, and are not voting, in more than one place.
Perhaps surprisingly, some red states, seeing cost efficiencies and little risk of fraud, are moving quickly to adopt online registration. When rational discussion can overtake partisan bickering, improvements for voters are possible.
On certain issues, some variance in state laws makes sense given significant cultural and demographic differences among our 50 states: What works in Wyoming might not work in California. But diversity is a vice, not a virtue, when the right to vote is at issue. All eligible voters, and only eligible voters, should have the right to easily register and cast a ballot that will be accurately counted. Our democracy demands no less.
Richard L. Hasen is a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine and the author of the book “Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections.”
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677f845e9a80a5879436cc3753fc191d | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1028-goldfinger-earthquake-prediction-20151028-story.html | Op-Ed: A 99.9% chance of a big L.A. earthquake by 2019? Don’t bet on it. | Op-Ed: A 99.9% chance of a big L.A. earthquake by 2019? Don’t bet on it.
Last week, the media went big with a terrifying-sounding study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which put the probability of a magnitude-5.0 earthquake in the Los Angeles area before 2019 at 99.9%. Ninety-nine point nine!
That number alone is enough to raise the hackles of nearly all Earth scientists. There are few things that certain in this world — even next-day weather reports are rarely so exact — and earthquakes are notoriously unpredictable. Not in the sense of “tricky to predict” but in the sense of “we cannot predict them.”
In studying earthquakes, scientists have to contend with uncertainties piled on top of uncertainties.
Did JPL scientists invent new technology, or some new method, that could justify that number? No, they did not. I wish they had — such a tool would have great value — but they didn’t, and Californians should recognize this prediction for what it is: an extremely precise wild guess. The JPL study is best understood as an experiment that’s not ready for prime time.
For their paper, the JPL scientists relied on GPS records and a specialized type of radar imagery, which over time can give a broad picture of how the Earth is deforming. Both of these data sets show movement not just along known surface faults but deformation of the ground from subsurface faults we may or may not know about. Many studies around the world have used such data for decades to try to tease out what faults are doing beneath our feet.
The broad picture can tell us what is going where and how much energy may be accumulating in faults. What we don’t know — and this is crucial — is how much energy can be stored and how much is too much. Looking at a fault in this way is a bit like watching a battery charge, except we don’t know when we will get to 100% (the earthquake), or even if 100% is the relevant figure (maybe 90% or even 80% is sufficient for an earthquake). Adding yet more complication, the Los Angeles basin has hundreds of faults all interconnected and charging at different rates.
Because we can’t know where each fault is in its earthquake cycle (at least not yet), we have to fall back on history to try to forecast the probability of an earthquake in the future. Due to past behavior, we know that earthquakes are more probable in some regions than others, much like we know that the chance of snow in August is low, and much higher in December.
To forecast with real exactitude, though, a tremendous amount of data is necessary — far more data than is available for most faults, including the ones in the Los Angeles area. To fill in the gaps, as it were, the JPL scientists used a global, as opposed to site-specific, model of how earthquakes might occur over time, based on past earthquake sizes and how many of them have occurred around the world since seismographs were invented. The JPL paper claims the global model can be used to predict roughly how many earthquakes of a given size should occur in a given place.
Here’s the crux of the problem: There is no solid reason to think that any particular fault should follow a global pattern. There are many spots around the world that don’t fit the worldwide averages very well.
In studying earthquakes, scientists have to contend with uncertainties piled on top of uncertainties. It’s one thing to say Los Angeles is overdue for an earthquake; that might very well be true. It’s another thing entirely to say there’s a 99.9% chance of a major seismic event in the next four years.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with testing theories, but yet another problem with the 99.9% prediction is that it’s hard to verify, or falsify.
If we have a big earthquake in the next three years, will that mean the JPL model is a good one? Not necessarily. If there isn’t one, does that mean the model is worthless? Not necessarily.
Los Angeles has many faults and many earthquakes, and we just don’t have enough information to say exactly what’s going to happen. That said, preparing for the one that will come, sooner or later, is a 100% good idea.
Chris Goldfinger is director of the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Laboratory at Oregon State University.
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
MORE ON EARTHQUAKES:
Why a 99.9% earthquake prediction is 100% controversial
Editorial: A road map to a more earthquake-safe L.A.
USGS slams study’s claim of 99.9% chance of large L.A. earthquake
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60b0dc3b94839fc3aa4ffa36044c6868 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasily-Mishin | Vasily Mishin | Vasily Mishin
His successor, Vasily Mishin, attempted to maintain the program’s momentum, but he was not the effective manager or politically sophisticated operator that Korolyov had been.
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9fd8a94ce947333f299421510adc801d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasily-Nikitich-Tatishchev | Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev | Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev
Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev, (born April 19 [April 29, New Style], 1686, Pskov, Russia—died July 15 [July 26], 1750, Boldino, near Moscow), Russian economic administrator and historian who was the first to produce a comprehensive Russian history.
Tatishchev joined the army in 1704 and took part in the siege of Narva and the Battle of Poltava (1709). He spent much of his life as a government administrator of various mining and manufacturing enterprises. Tatishchev managed to collect much historical and geographic data on Russia during his wide-ranging travels through Germany, Sweden, and eastern Russia as a state cartographer.
Tatishchev’s great work, the Istoriya Rossiyskaya s samikh drevneyshikh vremyon, 5 vol. (1768–1848; History of Russia from the Most Early Times), relied on sources that have since to a great extent disappeared. It amassed a great volume of data based on original sources and was a pioneering work in its attempt to depict the development of the Russian state as the result of geographic and historical circumstances rather than as a result of divine providence.
Tatishchev is also known as the founder of the city of Yekaterinburg. He served as the governor of Astrakhan between 1741 and 1745.
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431d0da97300b3cf6311e5f38b400d71 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasily-Sokolovsky | Vasily Sokolovsky | Vasily Sokolovsky
Marshal Sokolovsky’s volumes on military strategy in the 1960s, while granting that nuclear war would be an unprecedented disaster for all, still committed the U.S.S.R. to a war-winning capability.
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68143bf4892ca3f2f21e7b079a3f94ca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasily-Vasilyevich-Smyslov | Vasily Vasilyevich Smyslov | Vasily Vasilyevich Smyslov
Vasily Vasilyevich Smyslov, (born March 24, 1921, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died March 27, 2010, Moscow, Russia), Russian chess master who won the world championship from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1957 and lost it to Botvinnik in a return match in 1958.
Smyslov was noted for his patient positional style and his precise endgame technique. His book Smyslov’s 125 Selected Games (1983) shows his subtle playing style and endgame artistry.
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9ac25ac04a1950715d57b1f42a0f391b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vassili-K-Blucher | Vassili K. Blücher | Vassili K. Blücher
Blücher, who used the pseudonym Galen in China, was a commander in the Red Army who had worked with Chiang in 1924 and 1925 in developing the Whampoa Military Academy and forming the National Revolutionary Army. Blücher returned to Guangzhou in May and helped refine plans for the Northern Expedition,…
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8fa6567bb1dad83255389d331d35a963 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasubandhu | Vasubandhu | Vasubandhu
Vasubandhu, (flourished 5th century ad), Indian Buddhist philosopher and logician, younger brother of the philosopher Asaṅga. His conversion from the Sarvāstivāda to the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition is attributed to Asaṅga. Vasubandhu refined classical Indian syllogistic logic by distinguishing the procedure for reaching inferences in formal debate (five steps) from the method in personal thought (three steps). He wrote several śāstras (“treatises”) holding that all seemingly external objects are only mental representations, and he is also reputed to be the author of the Abhidharmakośa, a systematization of Sarvāstivāda doctrine written before his conversion.
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c782cb23e7480e1e6f65ed55063e1e36 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vatsyayana | Vatsyayana | Vatsyayana
…era) and his 5th-century commentator Vatsyayana established the foundations of the Nyaya as a school almost exclusively preoccupied with logical and epistemological issues. The Madhyamika (“Middle Way”) school of Buddhism—also known as the Shunyavada (“Way of Emptiness”) school—arose, and the analytical investigations of Nagarjuna (c. 200), the great propounder of…
Vatsayana, the commentator on the sutras, referred to some logicians who held a theory of a 10-membered syllogism (the Greeks had three). The Vaisheshika-sutras give five propositions as constituting a syllogism but give them different names. Gautama also supports a five-membered syllogism with the following…
…upon about 400 ce by Vatsayana, who replied to the Buddhist doctrines, especially to some varieties of Shunyavada skepticism. Uddyotakara’s Varttika (c. 635) was written after a period during which major Buddhist works, but no major Hindu work, on logic were written. Uddyotakara undertook to refute Nagarjuna and Dignaga. He…
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7678f74b9b105f9580eee1a1ac8fc10e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Venantius-Fortunatus | Venantius Fortunatus | Venantius Fortunatus
Venantius Fortunatus, in full Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus, (born c. 540, Treviso, near Venice [Italy]—died c. 600, Poitiers, Aquitaine [France]), poet and bishop of Poitiers, whose Latin poems and hymns combine echoes of classical Latin poets with a medieval tone, making him an important transitional figure between the ancient and medieval periods.
Probably in fulfillment of a vow to St. Martin of Tours, Fortunatus crossed the European continent, visiting Metz, Paris, and Tours and forming friendships with churchmen and officials. In 567 he reached Poitiers, where Radegunda, former queen consort of Chlotar I, had founded a monastery. Impressed by her holiness and that of Agnes, the abbess, he became a priest and subsequently bishop of Poitiers.
The extant works of Fortunatus are the Vita S. Martini (“Life of St. Martin”), written at the prompting of his friend Gregory of Tours; his prose biographies of saints (including the Vita Radegundis); and 11 books of poems (with an appendix of 34 poems). His early poems are courtly; they include addresses to bishops and officials, panegyrics, an epithalamium, epigrams, and occasional poems. While showing a pleasing facility, their dominant characteristic is a strongly rhetorical flavour. The influence of rhetoric persists in his religious poetry written at Poitiers (along with epigrams and epistles in his earlier vein), and it is especially effective in the poem celebrating the installation of Agnes as abbess. Of his six poems on the subject of the Cross, two are splendid hymns in which the religious note finds its noblest expression: these poems, the Pange lingua and the Vexilla regis, have been translated into English by John Mason Neale as “Sing My Tongue the Glorious Battle” and “The Royal Banners Forward Go.”
Fortunatus is venerated as a saint in some Italian and French dioceses, where his feast day is celebrated on December 14.
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841b77a73d40649919e4dcda1ee2af55 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Venedikt-Yerofeyev | Venedikt Yerofeyev | Venedikt Yerofeyev
…leave the Soviet Union; and Venedikt Yerofeyev, whose grotesque latter-day picaresque Moscow-Petushki—published in a clandestine (samizdat) edition in 1968—is a minor classic.
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f92f4cb1cf7c89c9dc24f698655085a6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Venus-Williams | Venus Williams | Venus Williams
Venus Williams , in full Venus Ebony Starr Williams, (born June 17, 1980, Lynwood, California, U.S.), American tennis player who—along with her sister Serena—redefined the sport with her strength and superb athleticism.
Like her sister Serena, Venus was introduced to tennis on the public courts in Los Angeles by her father, who early on recognized her talent and oversaw her development. She turned professional in 1994 and soon attracted attention for her powerful serves and ground strokes. In 1997 she became the first unseeded U.S. Open women’s finalist in the open era; she lost to Martina Hingis. In 2000 Williams won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and she successfully defended her titles in 2001.
At the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Williams captured the gold medal in the singles competition and claimed a gold medal with her sister in the doubles event. In 2002 Serena defeated Venus in the finals of the French Open, the U.S. Open, and Wimbledon, but in 2005 Venus captured the Wimbledon championship. She struggled with injuries and competed in only a few tournaments the following year but went on to win her fourth Wimbledon in 2007. In 2008 Venus defeated Serena for a fifth career Wimbledon title, placing her fifth all-time in women’s Wimbledon singles championships. That same year the Williams sisters won their second Olympic gold medal in tennis doubles, this time in Beijing. The following year they met again at the finals of Wimbledon, though this time Serena prevailed.
In the ensuing years, Venus’s play declined, though in 2016 she won her 49th tournament. She did not return to a Grand Slam singles final until the 2017 Australian Open, where she lost to Serena. Later that year Venus reached the finals at Wimbledon but was defeated.
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528ddb5a49bb0e0ae81dbd152057fb98 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vera-Miles | Vera Miles | Vera Miles
…and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), to their small hometown of Shinbone in the American West. They are there to pay their respects to their old friend Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who is being buried in a pauper’s grave. Stoddard, who rode to fame as a tenderfoot lawyer credited…
…Gavin) and her sister (Vera Miles) launch a frantic search that eventually takes them to the Bates home. There they fend off an attack by Norman’s mother, who, dressed as the long-deceased Mrs. Bates, in reality is Norman. A psychiatrist later determines that Norman suffers from a split personality…
…icy blonde in a role Vera Miles had to turn down when she became pregnant. Vertigo is considered Hitchcock’s most personal film, with Scottie’s obsessive remaking of Judy into the character of Madeleine being a metaphor for Hitchcock’s direction of the lead actresses in his films. Vertigo is also noted…
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c6ef1bcac8ad5f25430d1c110071ad97 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vercors | Vercors | Vercors
Vercors, pseudonym of Jean Marcel Bruller, (born Feb. 26, 1902, Paris, France—died June 10, 1991, Paris), French novelist and artist-engraver, who wrote Le Silence de la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea), a patriotic tale of self-deception and of the triumph of passive resistance over evil. The novella was published clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Paris and served to rally a spirit of French defiance.
Bruller was trained at the École Alsacienne and worked as a graphic artist and engraver until he was drafted into the French army after the outbreak of World War II. While recovering from a broken leg, he joined the Resistance, taking the nom de guerre Vercors (from the geographic region of that name). In 1941 he cofounded Éditions de Minuit, an underground press devoted to boosting morale among the French and maintaining a literary resistance movement. Thousands of copies of Le Silence de la mer, the first book published by the press, circulated throughout occupied France. It was later widely translated and in 1948 was made into a motion picture.
Vercors, an outspoken leftist, continued to write fiction, plays, and essays, but he never matched the initial success of Le Silence de la mer. His later works included Le Sable du temps (1946; “The Sand of Time”), Plus ou moins homme (1950; “More or Less Man”), Sylva (1961), Tendre Naufrage (1974; “Tender Castaway”), Les Chevaux du temps (1977; “The Horses of Time”), and a collection of memoirs.
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08e74888abec007db283a4ae4b0d1bb9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vere-Bird | Vere Bird | Vere Bird
…the 1976 legislative elections to Vere Bird, who favoured regional integration. In 1978 Antigua reversed its position and announced it wanted independence. The autonomy talks were complicated by the fact that Barbuda, long a dependency of Antigua, felt that it had been economically stifled by the larger island and wanted…
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20d8109c7ac4a4048a37b9b4dabbc2a7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vic-Morrow | Vic Morrow | Vic Morrow
…led by Artie West (Vic Morrow) terrorize students and teachers alike. On Dadier’s first day, fellow teacher Lois Hammond (Margaret Hayes) is nearly raped by a student. Dadier beats her assailant, but he and math teacher Joshua Edwards (Richard Kiley) are attacked by Artie and his gang in retaliation.…
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72b42d40353d294feb1a9f6ff1ccb648 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vicente-Escudero | Vicente Escudero | Vicente Escudero
Vicente Escudero, (born Oct. 27, 1892, Valladolid, Spain—died Dec. 4, 1980, Barcelona), Gypsy dancer widely respected for his mastery of flamenco dance and for his adherence throughout his public career to an authentic style rarely distorted or commercialized.
Known in his youth for his dancing in the cafés of Spain, Escudero performed in Paris in 1920 with his longtime partner Carmita Garcia at the Olympia Theatre. From 1922 to 1932 he toured widely in Europe, dancing with Anna Pavlova in 1931, and in 1932 he first danced in the United States. He appeared as Carmelo in La Argentina’s production of the ballet El amor brujo (Madrid, Teatro Español, 1934). In 1954 he returned to Paris, and he toured the United States later that year, in 1959, and in 1961. He then retired from dancing, although he continued lecturing on flamenco.
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68d8ac24399ff71501a068a3bcdcbd51 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vicente-Espinel | Vicente Espinel | Vicente Espinel
Vicente Espinel, in full Vicente Martínez Espinel, (baptized December 28, 1550, Ronda, Málaga, Spain—died February 4, 1624, Madrid), Spanish writer and musician remembered chiefly for his picaresque novel La vida del Escudero Marcos de Obregón (1618; “Life of Squire Marcos of Obregón”), upon which the French novelist Alain-René Lesage based parts of his Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History of Gil Blas of Santillane).
After his expulsion from the University of Salamanca in 1572, Espinel entered the army and led a roguish life very much like that of his character Marcos, visiting Italy, Flanders, and the Netherlands. He returned to Spain in 1584 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1587. Espinel revived the décima, an octosyllabic 10-line stanza that became widely used in Spanish verse in a form known as the espinela. Espinel was also once mistakenly thought to have added the fifth string to the Spanish guitar.
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e68f16ff3559b31544614322b4a4bc22 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Alexander-Haden-Horsley | Sir Victor Horsley | Sir Victor Horsley
Sir Victor Horsley, (born April 14, 1857, London—died July 16, 1916, Amārah, Iraq), British physiologist and neurosurgeon who was first to remove a spinal tumour (1887). He also made valuable studies of thyroid activity, rabies prevention, and the functions of localized areas of the brain.
By removing the thyroid glands of monkeys, he was able to establish (1883) the gland’s role in determining the body’s rate of growth, development, and metabolism and to implicate thyroid malfunction as the cause of myxedema (a condition characterized by dry, waxy swelling) and cretinism. As secretary to a government commission (1886) appointed to study the effectiveness of Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, Horsley corroborated Pasteur’s results and led the campaign to eradicate the disease in England. He developed operative techniques that made brain surgery a practical reality and, by 1890, was able to report 44 successful operations. He was knighted in 1902. He died of heatstroke while serving as field surgeon for the British Army in Mesopotamia during World War I.
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acf7503434531c0d98ea573eae63c674 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Babes | Victor Babes | Victor Babes
…was named for Romanian pathologist Victor Babes, who discovered the organisms in the late 19th century in the red blood cells of cattle.
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46452f08a4cea2a7428ae7fc8e365527 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Balaguer | Victor Balaguer | Victor Balaguer
Victor Balaguer, in full Victor Balaguer i Cirera, (born Dec. 11, 1824, Barcelona, Spain—died Jan. 14, 1901, Madrid), Catalan poet and Spanish politician and historian.
Balaguer was a precocious youth; his first dramatic essay, Pépin el Jorobado; o, el hijo de Carlomagno (1838; “Pippin the Hunchbacked; or, The Son of Charlemagne”), was staged in Barcelona when he was 14. At 19 he was publicly “crowned” after the production of his second play, Don Enrique el Dadivoso (1843; “Don Henry the Bountiful”); several other Romantic historical plays followed. From 1843 to 1868 he led the Liberal Party in Barcelona and did much to promote the growth of local patriotism in Catalonia.
In 1857 Balaguer wrote his first poem in Catalan and thereafter adopted the sometime pseudonym of Trovador de Montserrat (“Troubadour of Montserrat”); in 1861 he was proclaimed mestre en gay saber (“master of poetical knowledge”), in a revival of an honour given to medieval troubadours. He moved to Madrid to pursue a political life and, during the troubled times centring on the interrupted reign of Isabella II, was alternately in and out of favour of those in power. He finally put aside Catalan nationalism, took the side of the dynasty, and eventually rose, through several offices, to the position of senator in the Spanish legislature.
In his later years Balaguer sought to explain away the severe criticism of Castile that he had earlier expressed in his Historia de Cataluña y de la Corona de Aragón (1860–63; “History of Catalonia and of the Crown of Aragon”). This narrative, like his Historia política y literaria de los trovadores (1878–79; “Political and Literary History of the Troubadours”), was politically partial in favour of Catalan nationalism and was also often factually inaccurate. As a poet, Balaguer was reminiscent of Manuel José Quintana in his patriotic songs, of José Zorrilla y Moral in his historical ballads, and of Lord Byron in his lyrical poems.
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866156df4d539ab611f630425bea5b46 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Baltard | Victor Baltard | Victor Baltard
…halls (10 originals, designed by Victor Baltard and built between 1854 and 1866, and two 1936 reproductions) and their neighbourhood were designated for renewal. The renewal projects were delayed for several years, however, by bitter disagreements over how the area should be used. The old market halls were used temporarily…
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f4a350ff318d70d78d5527b3d5bb8890 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Cousin | Victor Cousin | Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin, (born Nov. 28, 1792, Paris—died Jan. 13, 1867, Cannes, Fr.), French philosopher, educational reformer, and historian whose systematic eclecticism made him the best known French thinker in his time.
At the École Normale in 1811 Cousin was influenced by his studies of the philosophers P. Laromiguière, E.B. de Condillac, and John Locke. He was soon impressed also by the Common Sense school in Scottish philosophy and by François Maine de Biran and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, whose assistant he later became. After teaching briefly at the École Normale, Cousin travelled in Germany (1817–18), where he met and was influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. In 1820, after antiliberal political feeling grew in France, Cousin was deprived of his assistantship, and the École Normale was closed in 1822. He then went to Germany, where for six months he was imprisoned (1824–25) on a political charge still not identified. In the early 1820s he wrote Fragments philosophiques (1826), completed editions of the works of the Greek Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus and of René Descartes, and began his translation of the works of Plato.
Reinstated at the reopened École Normale (1826) in 1828, Cousin lectured on philosophy and won unprecedented popularity. For the next 20 years he dominated the field in France. He became a member of the council of public instruction (1830), of the Académie Française (1831), and of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (1832). In 1832 he was named a peer of France and two years later was made a director of the École Normale. After a visit to Germany to study educational methods, he drafted the bill (presented by the statesman François Guizot in 1833) that brought about landmark reforms in French primary education. When Guizot became prime minister in 1840, Cousin was appointed minister of public instruction.
In addition to lectures and official duties, Cousin wrote prolifically. Although he developed no philosophical system uniquely his own but, rather, assembled a system from the works of others, he managed to change the emphasis in French philosophy from Materialism to Idealism. Positing God as creator and using the concept to unify disparate aspects of the world, he nevertheless turned to historical events to find evidence for God’s work in the world and was consequently attacked, particularly by Roman Catholics, for denying divine revelation. He has also been criticized for his arbitrary and simplistic division of all philosophy into four systematic types: sensualism, Idealism, Skepticism, and mysticism. He saw some truth in each of them. Stressing the need to embrace the areas of sensation, reason, and emotion in his own work, he borrowed from others those elements that best served his own purpose.
Among his other writings are De la métaphysique d’Aristote (1835); Du vrai, du beau et du bien (1836; “On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good”); Cours d’histoire de la philosophie moderne (1841–46; Eng. trans. 1852); and Des Pensées de Pascal (1843; “Of the Pensées of Pascal”). Cousin also wrote a series of studies of 17th-century women: Jacqueline Pascal (1845); La Jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (1853), with copious supplements; Madame de Sablé (1854); and Madame de Chevreuse et Madame de Hautefort (1856).
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ba4406343ff7786b9525447698124a36 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Gollancz | Sir Victor Gollancz | Sir Victor Gollancz
Sir Victor Gollancz, (born April 9, 1893, London—died Feb. 8, 1967, London), British publisher, writer, and humanitarian who championed such causes as socialism and pacifism while managing a highly successful publishing business.
Born to a family of orthodox Jews of Polish origin, Gollancz attended St. Paul’s School and New College, Oxford. During his student years he evolved a personal religious outlook that was strongly influenced by Christian ethics. He left Oxford without a degree after the outbreak of World War I and was commissioned an officer, in which capacity he oversaw officer training courses at Repton, a well-known public school (1916–18). From 1920 to 1928 he worked in the publishing house of Benn Brothers, and in the latter year he founded his own firm, Victor Gollancz, Ltd. He quickly set the pattern that was to mark his entire career as a publisher, issuing both best sellers and works supporting his favoured causes. Among his better known authors were Harold Laski, John Strachey, A.J. Cronin, Dorothy Sayers, and John Le Carré.
Gollancz supported or headed numerous committees and organizations dedicated to social welfare, pacifism, abolition of capital punishment, and related goals. Through the Left Book Club, which he founded in 1936, he mobilized intellectuals and the public in the fight against fascism, and after World War II he was a leader in organizing relief efforts in Europe, especially in Germany, through the Save Europe Now campaign. At home his private and public work was credited with helping to lay the groundwork for the postwar Labour government and the creation of the modern British welfare state.
Among his own books were Shall Our Children Live or Die? (1942), In Darkest Germany (1947), Our Threatened Values (1947), and three volumes of autobiography, including My Dear Timothy (1952). Gollancz also compiled several inspirational anthologies, including A Year of Grace (1950; also published as Man and God, 1951) and From Darkness to Light (1956). He was knighted in 1965.
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cc879caefd5a7439d0964dcfbdf86251 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Houteff | Victor Houteff | Victor Houteff
…that continued the work of Victor Houteff (1885–1955), a Bulgarian emigrant to the United States and Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) layman who in a set of tracts entitled "Shepherd’s Rod" (1929) called for reform of the SDA church. Having been rebuffed by Adventist leaders, Houteff and his original followers settled near…
…which had been established by Victor Houteff several decades earlier. Houteff’s group eventually moved to a farm some 10 miles east of Waco, Texas, but by 1962 Roden and his followers had taken possession of the settlement, which was known as Mt. Carmel. There the Branch Davidians lived a simple…
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d5c48fed99ea501bb5ef01d85e592bc3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Laloux | Victor Laloux | Victor Laloux
…for which Henri Deglane and Victor Laloux erected, respectively, the Grand Palais and the Gare d’Orsay (renovated as the Musée d’Orsay, 1979–86). These monumental buildings are in a frothy Baroque style, though they incorporate much glass and iron. Reaction to this exuberance was expressed in the work of Auguste Perret,…
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910a06b85082f738e5062c0e22db8fba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Mature | Victor Mature | Victor Mature
Nick Bianco (played by Victor Mature) decides to testify against his former mob cronies in order to win release from prison and be reunited with his family. The caveat is that he must reintegrate himself into the mob and risk his life to bring the top criminals to justice.…
They befriend Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), a troubled doctor with a weakness for alcohol. However, the friendship between Wyatt and Holliday is threatened by the arrival of Doc’s former fiancée Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), whose presence causes a rivalry between the two men. When the Clantons kill Virgil, Doc…
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673573124fe020b1e06f174131172cb1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-McKusick | Victor McKusick | Victor McKusick
Victor McKusick, in full Victor Almon McKusick, (born Oct. 21, 1921, Parkman, Maine, U.S.—died July 22, 2008, Baltimore, Md.), American physician and genome researcher who pioneered the field of medical genetics.
McKusick was raised on a dairy farm in Maine. He attended Tufts University (1940–43) in Medford, Mass., before transferring to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (M.D., 1946) in Baltimore to train as a cardiologist. There he specialized in the study and treatment of heart murmurs. McKusick later published the influential textbook Cardiovascular Sound in Health and Disease (1958). An encounter with a heart patient whose malfunctioning aorta was symptomatic of Marfan syndrome, a rare inherited disease, triggered McKusick’s switch to genetics. In 1957 he founded the first medical genetics clinic at Johns Hopkins, serving as its director until 1975. McKusick also chaired the department of medicine at Johns Hopkins (1973–85), where he remained as a professor of medical genetics (1985–2007).
McKusick’s most significant research included identifying the gene that causes Marfan syndrome and pinpointing the genetic basis for a form of dwarfism known as McKusick-Kaufman syndrome, which is unusually common among the Amish people. He was the founding president (1988–91) of the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) and the creator of the multivolume reference work Mendelian Inheritance in Man (12 editions, 1966–98) and its Internet corollary (from 1987), the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM).
McKusick was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. He was the recipient of numerous honours, including Canada’s Gairdner Award (1977), the Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science (1997), the U.S. National Medal of Science (2001), and the Japan Prize in Medical Genomics and Genetics (2008).
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f6d0b8223e8581e9c73b61c0288f4674 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Popa | Victor Popa | Victor Popa
Victor Popa wrote about rural subjects, while G.M. Zamfirescu’s protagonists were typical Bucharest citizens, and D.D. Pătrăscanu wittily described political life.
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b06da6ca24fb580c616c2bcfd7217ccc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Riqueti-marquis-de-Mirabeau | Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau | Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau
Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, (born Oct. 5, 1715, Pertuis, Fr.—died July 13, 1789, Argenteuil), French political economist, the forerunner and later patron of the Physiocratic school of economic thought. He was the father of the renowned French revolutionary the Comte de Mirabeau.
After serving as an officer in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), Mirabeau left the army to devote himself to the study of political economy. In his first major work, Mémoire concernant l’utilité des états provinciaux . . . (1750; “Memorandum Concerning the Usefulness of the Provincial Estates . . .”), he criticized the highly centralized governmental system that had been set up by King Louis XIV and proposed that the provincial assemblies, which then existed in only a small part of France, be established throughout the kingdom. In his popular Ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (1756–58; “The Friend of Man, or Treatise on Population”), Mirabeau borrowed heavily from the ideas of Richard Cantillon, an earlier 18th-century British writer, in stressing the primacy of agriculture over commerce as a source of wealth. Mirabeau’s approach to economics had anticipated the doctrines that were being formulated by the Physiocratic school of François Quesnay, and the Marquis soon associated himself with the Physiocrats’ attempts to reform France’s antiquated, inefficient system of taxation. In his Théorie de l’impôt (1760; “Theory of Taxation”) he attacked the tax farmers (financiers who purchased from the crown the right to collect indirect taxes) and proposed that they be replaced with a system of direct taxes on land and on personal income. Although the tax farmers pressured the government into exiling Mirabeau to his estates at Bignon, he continued to devote his efforts to the advancement of Physiocracy.
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89ed9eb55fb32cdedbd1156e49ee5ee2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Sjostrom | Victor Sjöström | Victor Sjöström
Victor Sjöström, original name Viktor David Sjöström, Sjöström also spelled Seastrom, (born Sept. 20, 1879, Silbodal, Swed.—died Jan. 3, 1960, Stockholm), motion-picture actor and director who contributed significantly to the international preeminence of the Swedish silent film in the post-World War I era. Influenced by the novels of Selma Lagerlöf, whose art is rooted in sagas and folklore and imbued with a reverence for nature, Sjöström’s films were lyrically beautiful expressions of man’s relationship to nature and to society.
Trained as a stage actor, Sjöström directed and starred in his first film, Trädgårdsmästaren (The Gardener), in 1912. Other notable films were Ingeborg Holm (1913); Terje vigen (1917; Third Way, or A Man There Was [U.S.]), an experiment in the integration of setting and theme; and Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru (1918; The Outlaw and His Wife), in which he refined the technique of light diffusion and the use of significant details. With the release of Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) in 1921, the artistic excellence of the Swedish film was recognized throughout the world.
Emigrating to Hollywood in 1923, Sjöström directed pictures in which he further refined his visual techniques—e.g., He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926), The Divine Woman (1928), and The Wind (1928). Their pictorial beauty and realism were reminiscent of his finest Swedish films. Although his American films were critically acclaimed, they were not outstanding box-office successes.
In 1930 Sjöström returned to Sweden. Though he directed a few more films, it was primarily as the artistic director (1943–49) at Svensk Filmindustri, the main Swedish film studio, that he participated in the post-World War II Swedish film revival. He acted in several films, and one of his outstanding performances was that of the aged hero of Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (1957; Wild Strawberries).
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69482ebcf481890f4d7819ff6989e54f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Vasarely | Victor Vasarely | Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely, Hungarian Győző Vásárhelyi Hungarian form Vásárhelyi Győző, (born April 9, 1908, Pécs, Hungary—died March 15, 1997, Paris, France), Hungarian-born French painter of geometric abstractions who became one of the leading figures of the Op art movement.
Vasarely was trained as an artist in Budapest in the Bauhaus tradition. In 1930 he left Hungary and settled in Paris, where he initially supported himself as a commercial artist but continued to do his own work. During the 1930s he was influenced by Constructivism, but by the 1940s his characteristic style of painting animated surfaces of geometric forms and interacting colours had emerged. His style reached maturity in the mid-1950s and 1960s, when he began using brighter, more vibrant colours to further enhance the suggestion of movement through optical illusion. Representative works include Sirius II (1954), Ondho (1956–60), and Arny-C (1967–69).
Vasarely became a naturalized French citizen in 1959. Much of his work is housed in the Vasarely Museum at the Château de Gourdes, in southern France, and in the Vasarely Museum in Budapest. In 1970 he established the Vasarely Foundation, which in 1976 took up quarters near Aix-en-Provence in a building that he designed.
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938d4521ced28d10cbe6eac01d699eea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victor-Weybright | Victor Weybright | Victor Weybright
…was later taken over by Victor Weybright, who subsequently established the highly successful New American Library for the mass promotion of paperbacks in the world market.
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84db27dd79ca42658389b9d4c109ce07 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victoria-wife-of-Frederick-III-of-Prussia | Victoria | Victoria
Victoria, formally Empress Frederick, original name Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, German Kaiserin Friedrich, originally Viktoria Adelheid Maria Luise, (born November 21, 1840, London, England—died August 5, 1901, Schloss Friedrichshof, Kronberg, Germany), consort of the emperor Frederick III of Germany and eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Great Britain.
Well-educated and multilingual from childhood (spent largely at Windsor and Buckingham Palace), Victoria remained all her life strongly devoted to England and, even after her marriage to the Prussian crown prince, Frederick William, in 1858, spoke English habitually in her German household. Her English liberalism came to be shared by her husband (whom she tended to dominate) but was scorned by the conservative Prussians, especially the old emperor, William I, and Otto von Bismarck, with whom a mutual resentment developed. Within the constraints of her position, however, she encouraged philanthropic causes and the arts.
When her husband developed throat cancer and died only 99 days after becoming emperor (as Frederick III) in 1888, she lost all possibility of influencing a change of political climate. She was again subjected to estrangement, for her son, the new emperor William II, was thoroughly Prussianized. Although later somewhat reconciled to him, she semiretired to Kronberg in the Taunus hills, where she built a palatial country seat, Schloss Friedrichshof. She died there of cancer, outliving her mother by only six months.
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3d1ef4e351d82468b2160853f80c8836 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victorio | Victorio | Victorio
…Chiricahua leaders as Geronimo and Victorio. By the 1870s he had joined Victorio on the Apache reservation at Warm Springs, New Mexico, but in about 1877 they and their followers were moved by the U.S. government to an inhospitable reservation at San Carlos, Ariz. Victorio and many members of his…
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c963cfc9730ba6d54d68223c53a4aff1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victorius-of-Aquitaine | Victorius of Aquitaine | Victorius of Aquitaine
…called Victorian for the astronomer Victorius of Aquitaine, its first calculator (c. ad 465); Dionysian for Dionysius Exiguus, who revised Victorius’ figures in the 6th century; and Great Paschal because of its use in determining the date of Easter.
In 463 ce Victorius (or Victorinus) of Aquitaine, who had been appointed by Pope Hilarius to undertake calendar revision, devised the Great Paschal (i.e., Passover) period, sometimes later referred to as the Victorian period. It was a combination of the solar cycle of 28 years and the Metonic…
…for Pope Hilarius (461–468) by Victorius of Aquitaine. In 525, at the request of Pope St. John I, Dionysius Exiguus prepared a modified Alexandrian computation based on Victorius’ cycle. He discarded the Alexandrian era of Diocletian, reckoned from ad 284, on the ground that he “did not wish to perpetuate…
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8b81e83b85eb14d105dc05fa84383f07 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vidkun-Abraham-Lauritz-Jonsson-Quisling | Vidkun Quisling | Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Quisling, in full Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling, (born July 18, 1887, Fyresdal, Norway—died October 24, 1945, Akershus Fortress, Oslo), Norwegian army officer whose collaboration with the Germans in their occupation of Norway during World War II established his name as a synonym for “traitor.”
Quisling entered the army in 1911 and served as military attaché in Petrograd (St. Petersburg; 1918–19) and in Helsinki (1919–21). He assisted in relief work in Russia under the famous Arctic explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen and later for the League of Nations. In the absence of diplomatic relations between Britain and Soviet Russia, he represented British interests at the Norwegian legation in Moscow (1927–29). As minister of defense in an agrarian government (1931–33), he gained notoriety for repressing a strike by hydroelectrical workers. He resigned from the government in 1933 to form the fascist Nasjonal Samling (National Union) Party, which stood for suppression of Communism and unionism, but he never gained a seat in the Storting (parliament).
At a meeting with Adolf Hitler in December 1939, Quisling urged a German occupation of Norway; after the German invasion of April 1940, he proclaimed himself head of the government. Although his regime came under widespread bitter attack and collapsed within a week, he continued to serve in the occupation government and was named “minister president” in February 1942 under Reich commissioner Josef Terboven.
Quisling’s attempts to convert the church, schools, and youth to National Socialism aroused fervent Norwegian opposition. He was held responsible for sending nearly 1,000 Jews to die in concentration camps. After the liberation of Norway in May 1945, he was arrested, found guilty of treason and other crimes, and executed.
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fa224ee48d75f91e563081d4d3844506 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vidyadhara | Vidyādhara | Vidyādhara
Dhanga’s grandson Vidyadhara (reigned 1017–29), often described as the most powerful of the Candella kings, extended the kingdom as far as the Chambal and Narmada rivers. There he came into direct conflict with the Turkic conqueror Maḥmūd of Ghazna when the latter swept down from Afghanistan in…
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af4d97fd2f05f173385b8fce15a5cbc8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vigdis-Finnbogadottir | Vigdís Finnbogadóttir | Vigdís Finnbogadóttir
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, (born April 15, 1930, Reykjavík, Iceland), Icelandic teacher, cultural figure, and politician who served as president of Iceland from 1980 to 1996. She was the first woman in the world to be elected head of state in a national election.
Finnbogadóttir was born into a wealthy and well-connected family. Her mother chaired Iceland’s national nurses association, and her father was a civil engineer. After graduating from Reykjavík College in 1949, Finnbogadóttir attended the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in France and the University of Uppsala in Sweden. She also studied in Denmark and at the University of Iceland, where she later taught French, drama, and theatre history.
From 1972 to 1980 Finnbogadóttir served as director of the Reykjavík Theatre Company (Leikfélag Reykjavíkur) and participated in an experimental theatre group. During that period, she presented French lessons and cultural programming on Iceland State Television, a task that enhanced her national reputation and popularity. During the summer tourist season, she also served as a guide and translator for the Icelandic Tourist Bureau. She became a member of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Affairs in Nordic Countries in 1976 and was elected its chair in 1978.
In 1980, despite being a divorced single mother (she adopted a daughter in 1972), Finnbogadóttir was drafted as a candidate for the presidency of Iceland; she was narrowly elected, with 33.6 percent of the national vote, over three male opponents. She was subsequently reelected three times (1984, 1988, and 1992) before retiring in 1996. Although the Icelandic presidency is largely a ceremonial position, she took an active role in promoting the country as a cultural ambassador and enjoyed great popularity.
Finnbogadóttir subsequently served as president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (1997–2001). Known for her efforts to promote linguistic diversity, she became UNESCO’s goodwill ambassador for languages in 1998.
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c123d9628fad00d6be3f8fa0fd3751c1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vikram-Seth | Vikram Seth | Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth, (born June 20, 1952, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India), Indian poet, novelist, and travel writer known for his verse novel The Golden Gate (1986) and his epic novel A Suitable Boy (1993).
Vikram Seth is an Indian author and poet. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, on June 20, 1952. He is known for his novels The Golden Gate (1986) and A Suitable Boy (1993).
Seth has written about a wide variety of topics, including music, travel, work environments, and family. In his book The Golden Gate (1986), Seth discusses homosexuality and Catholic belief.
Seth’s most lauded works are the travel book From Heaven Lake (1983), the verse novel The Golden Gate (1986), and the epic novel A Suitable Boy (1993). The Golden Gate is based on Charles Johnston’s translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833).
Seth has written primarily poetry. He published his first volume of poetry, called Mappings, in 1980. Since then, Seth has published novels and travelogues, too. His most famous travelogue, From Heaven Lake, was published in 1983. In 1986 Seth published The Golden Gate. The novel combines poetry and narrative: it is a story told entirely through verse.
The son of a judge and a businessman, Seth was raised in London and India. He attended exclusive Indian schools and then graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford (B.A., 1975). He received a master’s degree in economics from Stanford University in the U.S. in 1978 and later studied at Nanjing University in China. In 1987 he returned to India to live with his family in New Delhi.
Although Seth’s first volume of poetry, Mappings, was published in 1980, he did not attract critical attention until the publication of his humorous travelogue From Heaven Lake (1983), the story of his journey hitchhiking from Nanking to New Delhi via Tibet. The poetic craft of The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985) foreshadows the polish of The Golden Gate, a novel of the popular culture of California’s Silicon Valley, written entirely in metred, rhyming 14-line stanzas and based on Charles Johnston’s translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the work Seth successfully harnesses contemporary situations to a demanding 19th-century form; the young professional characters discuss nuclear weapons, Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and the perils of overwork. Seth continued to use controlled poetic form in his 1990 collection All You Who Sleep Tonight, and he also wrote the 10 stories of Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992) in tetrametre couplets. Later poetry collections included The Poems, 1981–1994 (1995) and Summer Requiem (2015).
He turned to prose in A Suitable Boy, which depicts relations between four Indian families. The book’s compelling narrative and great length invited critical comparisons to Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Dickens; a miniseries adapted from A Suitable Boy appeared in 2020. His next novel, An Equal Music (1999), is a love story set in the world of professional musicians.
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b09e740c6cf3e5e0465563d62b60dd77 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viktor-Amazaspovich-Ambartsumian | Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian | Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian
Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian, (born Sept. 5 [Sept. 18, New Style], 1908, Tbilisi, Georgia, Russian Empire—died Aug. 12, 1996, Byurakan Observatory, near Yerevan, Arm.), Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist best known for his theories concerning the origin and evolution of stars and stellar systems. He was also the founder of the school of theoretical astrophysics in the Soviet Union.
Ambartsumian was born of Armenian parents. His father, a prominent philologist, encouraged the development of his aptitude for mathematics and physics. In 1925 he entered the University of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg State University) with the intention of devoting his life to research in astrophysics, and in the following year he published a paper on solar activity, the first of 10 papers he published while an undergraduate. After graduating in 1928, Ambartsumian became a graduate student in astrophysics under the direction of A.A. Belopolskii at Pulkovo Observatory near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
From 1931 to 1943 he lectured at the University of Leningrad, where he headed the Astrophysical Department. In 1932 he advanced his theory of the interaction of ultraviolet radiation from hot stars with the surrounding gas, a theory that led to a series of papers on the physics of gaseous clouds. His statistical analysis of stellar systems in 1934–36, in which for the first time their physical properties were taken into account, was found to be applicable to many related problems, such as the evolution of double stars and star clusters. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in 1939 and was appointed a deputy rector of the University of Leningrad in 1941–43. His theory of the behaviour of light in a scattering medium of cosmic space, put forward in 1941–43, became an important tool in geophysics, space research, and particularly astrophysics, such as in studies of interstellar matter.
In 1943 Ambartsumian joined the Armenian Academy of Sciences in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and began teaching at Yerevan State University. In 1946 he organized the construction near Yerevan of the Byurakan Astronomical Observatory, where he began another successful period of activity as the observatory’s director. In 1947 he discovered a new type of comparatively recent stellar system, which he named stellar association. The most important result of his study is the conclusion that the process of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy that contains the Sun and its planetary system still continues and, specifically, that most stars have their origin in changing systems of groups of stars.
Later, Ambartsumian studied the phenomena in the atmosphere of stars that are changing in physical characteristics, such as luminosity, mass, or density. He saw these changes as being connected with the direct release of interstellar energy in the outer layers of the stars. He also investigated nonstationary processes in galaxies. These investigations are of great importance, both for the problem of the evolution of galaxies and for the study of still-unknown properties of matter.
His textbook Theoretical Astrophysics (1958) went through many editions and translations. It contains examples of his unique and fruitful approaches to stubborn astronomical problems. In addition, he studied radio signals coming from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. He was led to conclude that these radio signals represent not colliding systems of stars, as according to a widely accepted interpretation, but the subatomic process of fission within galaxies. Therefore, according to his view, “radio galaxies” may represent systems of stars, interacting in close proximity, that were formed from superdense formations of stellar material. In support of this view, he pointed out the presence of jets, condensations, and streamers that are bluish in colour; found around certain galaxies, these are characteristics of an early stage in stellar development. Ambartsumian’s later works include Problemy sovremennoi kosmogonii (1969; “Problems of Modern Cosmogony”) and Filosofskie voprosy nauki o Vselennoi (1973; “Philosophical Problems of the Study of the Universe”).
Ambartsumian’s thought-provoking manner of presentation drew large audiences to his lectures at international symposia, where he enlivened even his most abstrusely mathematical lectures with quotations from classic and contemporary poets.
The Soviet government presented many decorations and awards to Ambartsumian. In 1947 he was elected president of the Armenian S.S.R. Academy of Sciences and a member of the Parliament of Soviet Armenia, and from 1950 he served in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. In 1953 he was elected to full membership in the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In 1948–56 he was vice president, and in 1961–63 president, of the International Astronomical Union. In 1968 he became president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, and he participated in activities of many foreign academies and scientific societies. He was awarded two Stalin prizes and five Orders of Lenin, among many other honours. He continued to head the Byurakan Observatory until 1988.
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947ecdd1fe91a088a79c910a55aa52a4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viktor-Ivanovich-Chukarin | Viktor Ivanovich Chukarin | Viktor Ivanovich Chukarin
Viktor Ivanovich Chukarin, (born November 9, 1921, Krasnoarmeyskoye, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.—died August 25, 1984, Lviv, Ukraine), first of the great Soviet gymnasts, who won 11 medals in international competition.
Chukarin graduated in 1950 from the Institute of Physical Culture in Lvov (now Lviv), where in 1963 he became an assistant professor. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Fin., he won gold medals as a member of the gymnastic team and for the long horse, the side horse, and individual combined events. At the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, he again won gold medals with his team and for the parallel bars and individual combined events. He also won silver medals for the rings and parallel bars in the 1952 Games and for the floor exercises in the 1956 Games. He was U.S.S.R. gymnastics champion (1949–51, and 1955) and won single events in 1948, 1952, 1954, and 1956.
Chukarin served as coach of the gymnastics team of Armenia from 1961 and of Ukraine from 1972. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1951. His book Put K Vershinam (“The Road to the Peaks”) was published in 1955.
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eb2fa74094a176f6468465c2800c0913 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viktor-Meyer | Viktor Meyer | Viktor Meyer
Viktor Meyer, (born Sept. 8, 1848, Berlin—died Aug. 8, 1897, Heidelberg, Baden), German chemist who contributed greatly to knowledge of both organic and inorganic chemistry.
Meyer studied under the analytic chemist Robert Bunsen, the organic chemist Emil Erlenmeyer, and the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1867 and where he later succeeded Bunsen (1889–97). Meyer earlier had served as professor of chemistry at the Zürich Polytechnic Institute (1872–85) and the University of Göttingen (1885–89).
Devising a method of determining the vapour densities of inorganic substances at high temperatures (1871), Meyer found that diatomic molecules of iodine and bromine dissociate into atoms upon heating. In 1872 he discovered the aliphatic nitro compounds. Originator of the term stereochemistry, the study of molecules identical in chemical structure but possessing different spatial configurations (stereoisomers), Meyer discovered (1878) the oximes (organic compounds all containing the > C=NOH group) and demonstrated their stereoisomerism. He also coined the term steric hindrance to signify the energy barrier to rotation of different parts of an organic molecule brought about by the presence in the molecule of bulky side groups.
A keen observer, he converted the failure of a lecture demonstration into his discovery (1882) of thiophene, a sulfur-containing organic compound resembling benzene in its chemical and physical properties.
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f5945726710bd5b4503ab53d30a6ba45 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilem-Mathesius | Vilém Mathesius | Vilém Mathesius
Vilém Mathesius, (born August 3, 1882, Pardubice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died April 12, 1945, Prague, Czech.), Czech linguist and scholar of English language and literature. He was the founder (1926) and president of the Prague Linguistic Circle, famous for its influence on structural linguistics and for its phonological studies. Mathesius taught at Charles University in Prague, beginning in 1909 after he had received his degree in Germanic and Romance studies. He became its first professor of Anglistics in 1912 and was promoted to full professor in 1919.
Three periods of intellectual activity mark Mathesius’ life. Highlighting the first period is his 1911 lecture, “O potenciálnosti jevů jazykových” (“On the Potentiality of Language Phenomenon”), anticipating—it is sometimes claimed—the Saussurean distinction between “langue” and “parole” and emphasizing the importance of synchronic (nonhistorical) language study. He also published a two-volume history of English literature (Dějiny anglické literatury; 1910–15) and several Shakespearean studies. From 1926 to 1936 Mathesius’ interest turned to syntax and semantics. In phonology he did research on the functional load and combining capability of phonemes. From 1936 on, his interest was in functional syntax and the sentence.
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4af5be29812ee55eb220d427294fc922 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilhelm-Moberg | Vilhelm Moberg | Vilhelm Moberg
Vilhelm Moberg, (born Aug. 20, 1898, Algutsboda, Swed.—died Aug. 8, 1973, Väddö), Swedish novelist and dramatist, best-known for his novels of the Swedish emigration to America but concerned primarily with the people of the countryside from which he came and with the system that made life so miserable for them.
In his autobiographical novel, Soldat med brutet gevär (1944; When I Was a Child), Moberg considers it his calling to give a voice to the illiterate class from which he came. His most widely read and translated works include the Knut Toring trilogy (1935–39; The Earth Is Ours) and his four-volume epic of the folk migration from Sweden to America in the 1850s, Utvandrarna (1949–59; The Emigrants), Invandrarna (1952; Unto a Good Land), Nybyggarna (1956), and Sista brevet till Sverige (1959). The last two volumes were combined in the translation The Last Letter Home. During World War II, Moberg also wrote a novel eloquently attacking tyranny and oppression, Rid i natt! (1941; Ride This Night!), in which he dramatizes the necessity of men acting in the cause of freedom and justice.
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3636e110fc13ae1dcf88fa6f0264626f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilhjalmur-Stefansson | Vilhjalmur Stefansson | Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, (born November 3, 1879, Arnes, Manitoba, Canada—died August 26, 1962, Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.), Canadian-born American explorer and ethnologist who spent five consecutive record-making years exploring vast areas of the Canadian Arctic after adapting himself to the Inuit (Eskimo) way of life.
Of Icelandic descent, Stefansson lived for a year among the Inuit in 1906–07, acquiring an intimate knowledge of their language and culture and forming the belief that Europeans could “live off the land” in the Arctic by adopting Inuit ways. From 1908 to 1912, he and the Canadian zoologist Rudolph M. Anderson carried out ethnographical and zoological studies among the Mackenzie and Copper Inuit of Coronation Gulf, in Canada’s Northwest Territories (now in Nunavut).
Between 1913 and 1918 Stefansson extended his exploration of the Northwest Territories. His party was divided into two groups: the southern one, under Anderson, did survey and scientific work on the north mainland coast from Alaska eastward to Coronation Gulf, while the northern group travelled extensively in the northwest, discovering the last unknown islands of Canada’s Arctic archipelago, Borden, Brock, Meighen, and Lougheed.
Stefansson’s knowledge of the Canadian Arctic led him to predict that the area would become economically important. In World War II he was an adviser to the U.S. government, surveyed defense conditions in Alaska, and prepared reports and manuals for the armed forces. From 1947 he was Arctic consultant at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He wrote a number of books, including My Life with the Eskimo (1913), The Friendly Arctic (1921), Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic (1939), and Discovery (1964).
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9ba8b08f641f3a82e0b4897f8615c3ce | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilma-Espin-Guillois | Vilma Espín Guillois | Vilma Espín Guillois
Vilma Espín Guillois, (born April 7, 1930, Santiago, Cuba—died June 18, 2007, Havana), Cuban revolutionary and women’s rights activist. As the wife of Raúl Castro, the younger brother of longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, she was for decades regarded as the unofficial first lady of Cuba and was the most politically powerful woman in the country.
Espín fought alongside Raúl and Fidel during the 1959 Cuban Revolution and married Raúl shortly after the overthrow of the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Because Fidel was divorced at the time he came to power, Espín assumed the first lady’s responsibilities, and she continued to fulfill the role even after her brother-in-law remarried. She went on to hold key positions in the Cuban Communist Party and was a member of the country’s influential Council of State. She also founded the Cuban Federation of Women and oversaw its development into a national organization for women’s rights. Espín frequently represented Cuba at the United Nations General Assembly. She officially became first lady in 2006 after an ailing Fidel ceded power to Raúl, who assumed the title of acting president.
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fe73f9f71892f83a9c5a2354e84d797e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilmos-Zsigmond | Vilmos Zsigmond | Vilmos Zsigmond
…Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, to bring the heightened cinematic consciousness of the French New Wave to the American screen. Their films frequently exhibited unprecedented political and social consciousness as well.
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0a4212723646e565fbe3fa2d54211fc4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincent-dIndy | Vincent d'Indy | Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d’Indy, in full Paul-Marie-Théodore-Vincent d’Indy, (born March 27, 1851, Paris, France—died Dec. 1, 1931, Paris), French composer and teacher, remarkable for his attempted, and partially successful, reform of French symphonic and dramatic music along lines indicated by César Franck.
D’Indy studied under Albert Lavignac, Antoine Marmontel, and Franck (for composition). In 1874 he was admitted to the organ class of the Paris Conservatoire, and in the same year his second Wallenstein Overture was performed. He considered French 19th-century music and the tradition of the Paris Opéra, of the Paris Conservatoire, and of French “decorative” symphony to be superficial, frivolous, and unworthy to compete with the Teutonic Bach-Beethoven-Wagner tradition. The character of his own music revealed meticulous construction but also a certain lyricism. His harmony and counterpoint were laboriously worked out, but in his later work, free and unorthodox rhythms came easily and fluidly.
D’Indy’s most important stage works were Le Chant de le Cloche (1883; “The Song of the Clock”), Fervaal (1895), Le Légende de Saint Christophe (1915; “The Legend of Saint Christopher”), and Le Rêve de Cinyras (1923; “The Dream of Cinyras”). Among his symphonic works, Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886; “Symphony on a French Mountaineer’s Chant”), with solo piano, based entirely on one of the folk songs d’Indy had collected in the Ardeche district, and Istar (variations; 1896) represent his highest achievements. His 105 scores also include keyboard works, secular and religious choral writings, and chamber music. Among the latter are some of his best compositions: Quintette (1924); a suite for flute, string trio, and harp (1927); and the Third String Quartet (1928–29). He also made arrangements of the hundreds of folk songs that he collected in the Vivarais.
In 1894 d’Indy became one of the founders of the Schola Cantorum in Paris. It was through courses at this academy that he spread his theories and initiated the revival of interest in Gregorian plainchant and music of the 16th and 17th centuries. D’Indy also published studies of Franck (1906), Ludwig van Beethoven (1911), and Richard Wagner (1930). In France, Paul Dukas, Albert Roussel, and Déodat de Sévérac were among his disciples. Outside France, particularly in Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, and Brazil, his influence was lasting upon composers interested in shaping folk music into symphonic forms.
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d23f71fdc49a6ea7ae6be0b5613e7bd7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincent-Sherman | Vincent Sherman | Vincent Sherman
Vincent Sherman, byname of Abraham Orovitz, (born July 16, 1906, Vienna, Georgia, U.S.—died June 18, 2006, Los Angeles, California), American director who was especially known for so-called “women’s pictures,” films that were geared to female audiences.
Sherman began his film career as an actor and appeared in several productions, most notably William Wyler’s Counsellor at Law (1933). In the late 1930s he started writing screenplays, and his credits included the crime dramas Crime School (1938) and King of the Underworld (1939), both of which starred Humphrey Bogart. In 1939 Sherman made the transition to directing with The Return of Doctor X, a horror film in which Bogart played a zombie. Saturday’s Children (1940) was a step up, a serious drama based on a Maxwell Anderson play; John Garfield and Anne Shirley starred as struggling newlyweds. Sherman explored various genres with his next films. The Man Who Talked Too Much (1940) was a courtroom drama, and the low-budget Underground (1941) was an early anti-Nazi picture. In All Through the Night (1941), Sherman again used World War II as a theme, though he abandoned drama for humour. The popular action-comedy featured Bogart as a gambler who outwits Nazi saboteurs (Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre).
Sherman’s first important movie was The Hard Way (1943), a gritty show-business melodrama with fine performances from Ida Lupino, Joan Leslie, and Jack Carson. Old Acquaintance (1943) was a popular drama starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins as feuding writers. Sherman reteamed with Davis on Mr. Skeffington (1944), which was another box-office hit for the duo. The soap opera featured Davis in an Academy Award-nominated performance as a narcissistic woman who enters into a loveless marriage with a financier (Claude Rains). Less popular was Pillow to Post (1945), a screwball comedy starring Lupino. Sherman next ventured into film noir with Nora Prentiss (1947). It starred Kent Smith as an unhappily married physician who fakes his death in order to start over with a nightclub singer (Ann Sheridan). Sheridan was also notable in The Unfaithful (1947), playing a woman who kills an intruder, allegedly in self-defense; it was loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Letter.
Sherman tried his hand at swordplay with Adventures of Don Juan (1949), which proved to be a fine vehicle for Errol Flynn. The Hasty Heart (1949), an adaptation of John Patrick’s play, was set in a military hospital during World War II; it starred Richard Todd, Patricia Neal, and Ronald Reagan. Backfire (1950) was a second-tier noir, with Virginia Mayo and Gordon MacRae.
In 1950 Sherman made two films with Joan Crawford: The Damned Don’t Cry!, which cast the actress as a poor woman whose dreams of wealth lead her to become a gangster’s moll, and Harriet Craig, a solid remake of Dorothy Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936), about a domineering woman who tries to control those around her, including her husband (Wendell Corey). Sherman and Crawford collaborated once more on Goodbye, My Fancy (1951), an adaptation of a Broadway romantic comedy about a congresswoman who returns to her alma mater, where she hopes to rekindle an old romance. In 1952 Sherman made the Clark Gable–Ava Gardner western Lone Star as well as Affair in Trinidad, the latter marking Rita Hayworth’s return to the screen after she retired to marry Prince Aly Khan; Glenn Ford costarred.
After Sherman fell under suspicion of holding communist sympathies, he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently “graylisted” by studios. He did not work again in Hollywood for five years, though in 1956 he codirected (uncredited) the Italian film Difendo il mio amore (Defend My Love). His credited return to the big screen was The Garment Jungle (1957), an exposé of efforts to keep a dressmaking company from unionizing; much of the film was helmed by Robert Aldrich, but he was fired and replaced by Sherman. After the British production The Naked Earth (1959), Sherman made The Young Philadelphians (1959), a soap opera starring Paul Newman as an ambitious lawyer.
Ice Palace (1960), from the Edna Ferber novel, was an ambitious period adventure set in Alaska, with Richard Burton and Robert Ryan. After the courtroom drama A Fever in the Blood (1961), Sherman directed The Second Time Around (1961), a pleasant western with Debbie Reynolds as a sheriff of a small Arizona town. The latter was Sherman’s last Hollywood film. His final feature, Cervantes (1967; also called Young Rebel), was a European film about the Spanish writer.
Sherman subsequently focused on television. He made a number of made-for-TV movies, including The Last Hurrah (1977), Women at West Point (1979), the widely panned biopic Bogie: The Last Hero (1980), and The Dream Merchants (1980), a bland version of Harold Robbins’s best seller about the rise of Hollywood. Sherman also directed episodes of such television series as 77 Sunset Strip, The Waltons, and Baretta. He retired from directing in 1983. His autobiography, Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director, was released in 1996.
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23982e71ab2a968c4886a139261ac37a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincent-van-Gogh/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
Largely on the basis of the works of the last three years of his life, van Gogh is generally considered one of the greatest Dutch painters of all time. His work exerted a powerful influence on the development of much modern painting, in particular on the works of the Fauve painters, Chaim Soutine, and the German Expressionists. Yet of the more than 800 oil paintings and 700 drawings that constitute his life’s work, he sold only one in his lifetime. Always desperately poor, he was sustained by his faith in the urgency of what he had to communicate and by the generosity of Theo, who believed in him implicitly. The letters that he wrote to Theo from 1872 onward, and to other friends, give such a vivid account of his aims and beliefs, his hopes and disappointments, and his fluctuating physical and mental state that they form a unique and touching biographical record that is also a great human document.
The name of van Gogh was virtually unknown when he killed himself: only one article about him had appeared during his lifetime. He had exhibited a few canvases at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris between 1888 and 1890 and in Brussels in 1890; both salons showed small commemorative groups of his work in 1891. One-man shows of his work did not occur until 1892.
Van Gogh’s fame dates from the early years of the 20th century, and since then his reputation has never ceased to grow. A large part of this reputation is based on the image of van Gogh as a struggling genius, working unappreciated in isolation. The dramatic elements of his life—poverty, self-mutilation, mental breakdown, and suicide—feed the drama of this mythology. The notion that his unorthodox talent was unrecognized and rejected by society heightens the legend, as it is just that sort of isolation and struggle that has come to define the modern concept of the artist. This mythical van Gogh has become almost inseparable from his art, inspiring artists to dramatize his saga in poems, novels, films, operas, dance ensembles, orchestral compositions, and a popular song. Wide and diverse audiences have come to appreciate his art, and the record-breaking attendance at exhibitions of his works—as well as the popularity of commercial items featuring imagery from his oeuvre—reveal that, within the span of a century, van Gogh has become perhaps the most recognized painter of all time. The unprecedented prices his works have attained through auction and the attention paid to forgery scandals have only increased van Gogh’s stature in the public imagination.
Because the most sensational events of van Gogh’s life—the conflicts with Gauguin, the mutilation of his left ear, and the suicide—are thinly documented and layered with apocrypha and anecdote, there is a trend in van Gogh studies to penetrate the layers of myth by reconstructing the known facts of the artist’s life. This scholarly analysis has taken many forms. Medical and psychological experts have examined contemporary descriptions of his symptoms and their prescribed treatments in an attempt to diagnose van Gogh’s condition (theories suggest epilepsy, schizophrenia, or both). Other scholars have studied evidence of his interaction with colleagues, neighbours, and relatives and have meticulously examined the sites where van Gogh worked and the locales where he lived. In light of van Gogh’s continually increasing popularity, scholars have even deconstructed the mythologizing process itself. These investigations shed greater light on the artist and his art and also offer further proof that, more than a century after his death, van Gogh’s extraordinary appeal continues to endure and expand.
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bc0b7a5b41b9d66f0fa1af1cb7542914 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincent-Voiture | Vincent Voiture | Vincent Voiture
Vincent Voiture, (born Feb. 24, 1597, Amiens, France—died May 26, 1648, Paris), French poet, letter writer, and animating spirit of the group that gathered at the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet.
Voiture completed his education in Paris and early made the acquaintance of the aged poet François de Malherbe and of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, whose zeal for reforming the French language he shared. Having attached himself to Gaston de France, duc d’Orléans, he followed him into exile in 1632 and was sent to Spain to negotiate on Orléans’ behalf. On his return to France in 1634, Voiture was elected to the French Academy.
Voiture excelled at writing occasional pieces of light verse, and his Lettres (published 1649) are full of witty and subtle allusions that were enjoyed by his narrow circle. His skillful use of stylistic conceits also appealed to the members of the Rambouillet salon. He was one of the two central figures in the “sonnets controversy,” which briefly divided the Parisian literary world between the admirers of Isaac de Benserade’s poem “Sonnet sur Job” and the admirers of Voiture’s sonnet “L’Amour d’Uranie avec Philis.” Voiture’s admirers eventually won the argument, but the acrimony that developed, together with the outbreak of the civil wars of the Fronde (1648–53), put an end to the Rambouillet society.
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3415ffb0b55e94b605803955d9fb1fe1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincente-Minnelli | Vincente Minnelli | Vincente Minnelli
Vincente Minnelli, original name Lester Anthony Minnelli, (born February 28, 1903, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died July 25, 1986, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture director who infused a new sophistication and vitality into filmed musicals in the 1940s and ’50s.
He was born to Italian-born musician Vincent Minnelli and French Canadian singer Mina Le Beau and given the less exotic name of Lester Anthony Minnelli; later in life he took his father’s name, restoring it to its Italian form. The Minnelli Brothers Mighty Dramatic Company Under Canvas traveled throughout the Midwest, and Lester was performing onstage as soon as he could stand. Eventually his mother and father settled in Delaware, Ohio, but Lester moved to Chicago after he graduated from high school, hoping to find work as an artist.
Minnelli’s first job was helping to design window displays at the giant department store Marshall Field & Company; he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at night. He next worked as a society photographer’s assistant and was always sketching to fine-tune his sense of design. Those talents landed him the position of chief costume designer with the Balaban and Katz movie-theatre chain, Chicago’s biggest exhibitor. The weekly revues he mounted to entertain the crowds in between screenings quickly helped establish Minnelli as a rising star in his field, and in 1931 he was summoned to New York City to work as a costume designer for Paramount-Publix, which had merged with Balaban and Katz.
Moonlighting for the musical revue Earl Carroll’s Vanities, Minnelli displayed adventurous costume and set designs, and in 1933 the newly established Radio City Music Hall hired him to costume its spectacular live shows. Soon he graduated to art director, staging ever more elaborate and inventive revues. Minnelli caught the eye of producers Lee and J.J. Shubert, who signed him in 1935 to both produce and design three Broadway musical revues for them over the following 18 months. His first, At Home Abroad (1935), received positive notices, as did his second effort, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, with a star-studded roster that included Josephine Baker, Bob Hope, and Eve Arden.
Minnelli’s third revue, The Show Is On (1936), was another smash hit, and in 1937 Paramount Pictures approached him with an offer to work as a producer and a director. He directed only a number in Artists and Models (1937), and he returned to the Shuberts until Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) producer Arthur Freed offered Minnelli the chance to join the studio in 1940 as a special consultant. He would receive a modest salary for helping to stage and codirect musical numbers, and he could return to Broadway any time he chose. He never did.
Minnelli aided the Freed unit on individual numbers in such high-profile musicals as Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Panama Hattie (1942), a Norman Z. McLeod project that MGM asked Roy Del Ruth and Minnelli to reshoot extensively. Although the final result was still disappointing, MGM executives liked what Minnelli had done with the musical numbers and decided to launch him as a solo director.
Cabin in the Sky (1943), made for the Freed unit for well under a million dollars, was an extraordinary first effort, a highly stylized adaptation of the hit Broadway show. Cabin in the Sky was also the first major studio film with an African American cast since The Green Pastures (1936). Gambler Little Joe Jackson (Eddie [“Rochester”] Anderson) is shot, but rather than dying, through the prayers of his wife, Petunia (Ethel Waters), he gets six more months on Earth, where an angel (Kenneth Spencer) and a devil (Rex Ingram) will battle over his soul. Cabin in the Sky featured many top African American performers: Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Roger Edens and Busby Berkeley helped oversee the musical numbers, some of which were newly penned for the film by composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. (Yip) Harburg.
Cabin in the Sky was greeted with a mixed response from both African American and white audiences upon its release. Indeed, its embrace of the conventions of Southern “folklore” steered a course perilously close to racism, a charge that has been leveled against the picture since its first release. Nevertheless, it was profitable and provided a rare showcase for Waters and Horne. I Dood It (1943), a flavourless musical with Red Skelton and Eleanor Powell, entailed far less controversy: both critics and audiences concurred that it simply was not very good.
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4f864953e3cc39d7a451836c1ef7fcfe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincente-Minnelli/Films-of-the-later-1940s-Meet-Me-in-St-Louis-The-Clock-and-The-Pirate | Films of the later 1940s: Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, and The Pirate | Films of the later 1940s: Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, and The Pirate
Minnelli then directed Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), regarded by many as one of the greatest film musicals and as Minnelli’s greatest film. It was a lavish adaptation of Sally Benson’s autobiographical stories about a St. Louis, Missouri, family in 1903–04. Judy Garland starred as Esther Smith, the teenaged daughter whose romance with the boy next door (Tom Drake) serves as the fulcrum for a sentimental but lovingly rendered tale of family togetherness that, in the midst of World War II, was embraced by moviegoers. The sprightly “The Trolley Song” was nominated for an Academy Award, but it was the heartbreaking “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that best captured the film’s bittersweet nostalgia. Meet Me in St. Louis smoothed Garland’s transition to adult roles, and an on-set romance bloomed between her and Minnelli.
Ziegfeld Follies (1945) was a $3 million all-star revue—with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Garland, Horne, and Skelton—for which Minnelli directed five production numbers, including the Astaire-Lucille Bremer showstopper “Limehouse Blues” and “A Great Lady Has an Interview,” in which Garland did a witty parody of MGM grande dame Greer Garson. This was the closest Minnelli ever came to re-creating one of his 1930s Broadway revues on film.
Minnelli was then asked to take over The Clock (1945), his first nonmusical picture. This wartime homefront romance originally was to have been directed by Jack Conway and then, when Conway took ill, Fred Zinnemann. But Garland insisted that Minnelli—who was not dating her at that moment—replace Zinnemann. A corporal (Robert Walker) from a small town is on a two-day leave in New York City before shipping out to fight in the war, and he meets a wised-up New Yorker (Garland) and falls desperately in love with her. The Clock remains one of the most charming of Hollywood’s World War II romances and one of Garland’s most enduring dramatic vehicles. Minnelli and Garland married after the picture wrapped.
Despite such unusual touches as a 16-minute dream ballet inspired by the paintings of Salvador Dalí, Yolanda and the Thief (1945) is generally considered one of Minnelli’s lesser musicals. Astaire played an American con man visiting the mythical Latin American country of Patria, with an eye to fleecing a convent-raised heiress (Bremer) by posing as the guardian angel to whom she has been praying for guidance. Yolanda did not work for audiences of the day and became Minnelli’s first flop.
Undercurrent (1946) was a melodrama starring Katharine Hepburn as a New England spinster who marries a suave wealthy industrialist (Robert Taylor) only to learn that he is mentally unbalanced and jealous of his black-sheep brother (Robert Mitchum). Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) was a biopic about songwriter Jerome Kern, for which Minnelli directed the three numbers that featured Garland (now four months pregnant with Liza Minnelli) as 1920s Broadway star Marilyn Miller.
Minnelli’s next project was an adaptation of the 1942 Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne stage success The Pirate (1948), set in the 1830s Caribbean. The Pirate starred Kelly as the dashing Serafin, a not-so-humble minstrel, and Garland as the wide-eyed Manuela, who believes Serafin to be Macoco, the scourge of the Caribbean and the lusty rogue of her dreams. After six months the film was finished but was far from ready for release. Garland had backslid into dependency on barbiturates, a problem that had long plagued her, and the combination of Minnelli’s complex vision and her own inability (and, at times, simple reluctance) to go back to work proved disastrous. Minnelli tinkered with the picture for another six months, running its cost up to more than $3.7 million—almost what Gone with the Wind (1939) had cost. But The Pirate was not as successful; it lost over $1.5 million, the biggest flop of Garland’s and Minnelli’s career. She had Minnelli taken off what would have been their next film collaboration, Easter Parade (1948).
With his marriage crumbling, Minnelli spent a year directing screen tests before taking on the challenging assignment of adapting Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. The result, released in 1949, featured Jennifer Jones as the pretentious, adulterous Emma Bovary, Van Heflin as her cuckolded husband, Charles, and Louis Jourdan as her seducer, Rodolphe; James Mason played Flaubert himself, on trial on obscenity charges, in a framing sequence. The erotically charged ballroom sequence was Minnelli at his expressive best, but many complained that the tale had been hopelessly gutted. Shot quickly and cheaply, Madame Bovary turned a profit and restored MGM’s faith in Minnelli.
Father of the Bride (1950) was a departure for Minnelli in its contemporary domestic setting. Spencer Tracy gave one of his great comic performances as the shell-shocked dad who finds the impending nuptials of his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) spiraling out of control, and Joan Bennett as the mother delivered her dry antidotes to his hysteria with superb timing. One of 1950’s biggest hits, Father of the Bride remains Minnelli’s funniest movie, and a sequel, Father’s Little Dividend (1951), also directed by Minnelli, followed.
An American in Paris (1951) was developed by Freed from George Gershwin’s orchestral suite. Kelly, who also choreographed the film, exhibited his trademark exuberance as Jerry Mulligan, an American artist studying in Paris who allows himself to be supported by a wealthy patron (Nina Foch) only to fall in love with a young perfume-shop clerk (Leslie Caron). An American in Paris offered such Gershwin gems as “ ’S Wonderful” and “I Got Rhythm.” But it was the film’s spectacular concluding number, a 17-minute ballet with sets designed in the style of French Impressionist paintings that cost a half million dollars and took four weeks to film, that ultimately transported moviegoers. It was one of Minnelli’s biggest hits, and the film received wide acclaim, culminating in six Oscars, including one for best picture. Minnelli garnered his first Oscar nomination for best director.
The newly divorced Minnelli devoted himself to The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), an exposé of Hollywood’s peculiar dreams and nightmares. Kirk Douglas starred as a manipulative movie producer (based rather obviously on David O. Selznick) who abuses those around him in his quest for screen perfection; he has an affair with the unproven star (Lana Turner) of his film to give her confidence and then dumps her as soon as shooting has finished. Minnelli indulged himself with a florid, expressionistic camera style that mirrored the violent emotions of the characters.
Minnelli made the short film “Mademoiselle,” the central segment of The Story of Three Loves (1953), an anthology about the varied miseries of romance. Caron played the pretentious governess of a young American (Ricky Nelson) visiting Rome; under the spell of a sorceress (Ethel Barrymore), he is transformed into a handsome adult (Farley Granger) who immediately falls in love with the governess.
Minnelli capped this fruitful period with the classic musical The Band Wagon (1953), a hilarious skewering of Broadway’s pretensions. Astaire starred as Tony Hunter, a washed-up movie-musical star whose desperation reluctantly lands him in a ridiculously overstuffed musical about Faust, engineered by pompous theatrical “genius” Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan). Michael Kidd’s choreography illuminates the production numbers—“That’s Entertainment,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and a clever parody of Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detective novels, “The Girl Hunt.” The Band Wagon received only three Oscar nominations, but over the years its reputation has soared, and it is considered one of the best screen musicals.
The Long, Long Trailer (1954) was a descent from the artistic height of The Band Wagon, but it became one of Minnelli’s biggest commercial successes. The film was a slapstick vehicle crafted for television superstars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (on summer hiatus from I Love Lucy), who play a husband and wife traveling across America in their 40-foot trailer.
Brigadoon (1954) was much more of a challenge for Minnelli. This Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical about a mythical land that materializes once every hundred years in the Scottish highlands was originally scheduled to be filmed on location, but MGM made Minnelli shoot it in the studio. Gene Kelly starred as the visiting New Yorker who falls in love with one of Brigadoon’s time-traveling residents (Cyd Charisse). Although it has its moments, Brigadoon failed to re-create the magic of the original, with Kelly’s decision to drop Agnes de Mille’s stage choreography proving particularly controversial. Minnelli would never again attempt a dance-oriented musical film.
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327d99f6fe60e32cba2b2a77098a5924 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincente-Minnelli/Films-of-the-later-1950s-Lust-for-Life-Gigi-and-Some-Came-Running | Films of the later 1950s: Lust for Life, Gigi, and Some Came Running | Films of the later 1950s: Lust for Life, Gigi, and Some Came Running
Minnelli’s next film was the psychological drama The Cobweb (1955), which starred Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, and Oscar Levant. In a private mental institution, the selection of new drapes for the library becomes the flashpoint for simmering tensions among the doctors and patients. Half an hour was cut without Minnelli’s input. Kismet (1955) followed; it was based on a Broadway musical with a fantasy Arabian setting. After Brigadoon, Minnelli needed strong persuasion by Freed and MGM production head Dore Schary before agreeing to direct the project. Howard Keel, Ann Blyth, Dolores Gray, and Vic Damone headed the cast.
Meanwhile, Minnelli’s mind had been on making Lust for Life (1956), a biography of the tormented artist Vincent van Gogh (Douglas). Anthony Quinn played the key role of van Gogh’s friend and mentor, Paul Gauguin. Lust for Life earned critical accolades, but the picture did indifferent business. Tea and Sympathy (1956) was adapted from the play by Robert Anderson, which was heavily rewritten by Anderson to comply with Production Code standards. The final result was a bowdlerized drama about a young man (John Kerr) who is seduced by the older wife (Deborah Kerr, no relation to John) of his instructor (Leif Erickson).
The romantic comedy Designing Woman (1957) starred Gregory Peck as a sportswriter and Bacall as a fashion designer. The film boasted wonderful sets and Minnelli’s meticulously re-created world of high fashion.
The musical Gigi (1958) was based on a novella by Colette about a French teenager (Caron) raised by courtesans and trained in the art of being a proper mistress to a gentleman. Filmed partly on location in Paris, Gigi offered the classic songs “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” “I Remember It Well,” and “Gigi.” The picture was as distinctively Minnelli as anything he had made. It was not his most inventive musical, but Gigi was a triumphant last gasp of the studio system that had alternately nurtured and restricted his soaring vision. It dominated the Oscars with nine wins, including one for best picture and Minnelli’s sole Oscar for best director.
The class satire The Reluctant Debutante (1958) seemed humble compared with the lavish Gigi, but this English comedy of manners was a fairly expensive production. An American teenager (Sandra Dee) visiting her father (Rex Harrison) and stepmother (Kay Kendall) in London is hurled into the debutante season. Some Came Running (1958) was mainstream entertainment, drawn from James Jones’s massive novel. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin starred with Shirley MacLaine in a tale about a prodigal son and ex-GI (Sinatra) returning to his stagnant Indiana hometown. Most critics felt Minnelli had improved on his source material. The film was a solid commercial success and has been cited by many critics as one of Minnelli’s best.
Home from the Hill (1960) was only moderately popular at the time, but it stands today as one of Minnelli’s strongest dramas. Mitchum gave one of his greatest performances, as hard-drinking patriarch Wade Hunnicutt, whose battles with his neurotic wife, Hannah (Eleanor Parker), are punctuated by bouts of philandering. George Peppard played Wade’s rakish illegitimate son, Rafe Copley, and a young George Hamilton played the timid “good” son, Theron.
The musical comedy Bells Are Ringing (1960) was tailored for the talents of Judy Holliday (in her last film). Holliday played Brooklynite Ella Peterson, an answering-service operator who cannot resist playing Cupid for her customers; she was joined by Martin as a blocked playwright. Few of the tunes became standards, but as delivered by Holliday and Martin, they efficiently propelled the functional plot. Bells Are Ringing also marked Minnelli’s final collaboration with Freed and the end of the last great creative burst of Minnelli’s career.
An expensive remake of the 1921 silent classic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) took years to film. Glenn Ford was miscast as an Argentine playboy, the role that had made the young Rudolph Valentino a star in the original film. (Minnelli had wished to cast Alain Delon in Ford’s role.) Despite the expressive use of colour, this is often cited as one of Minnelli’s worst movies, and it became one of the decade’s greatest box-office failures. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) came next; it was very loosely based on an Irwin Shaw novel about the travails of a movie crew filming on location in Rome. It starred Douglas as a former actor summoned by his onetime favorite director (Edward G. Robinson) to help salvage a troubled production. Minnelli’s previous moviemaking film with Douglas, The Bad and the Beautiful, is excerpted in Two Weeks in Another Town, but despite its merits in depicting the end of the studio system, the film lost millions for MGM.
However, MGM still was willing to offer a new contract to Minnelli and his newly formed Venice Productions. Venice’s first project was The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), a light romantic comedy about a widower (Ford) whose exuberant son (Ron Howard) helps him choose between three prospective stepmothers (Shirley Jones, Dina Merrill, and Stella Stevens).
Goodbye, Charlie (1964), a 20th Century-Fox production, became Minnelli’s first project outside the confines of MGM. Debbie Reynolds starred as Charlie, the female reincarnation of a philandering male screenwriter killed by a jealous husband (Walter Matthau). However, she has learned nothing from her previous life, much to the chagrin of her best friend (Tony Curtis). The Sandpiper (1965) was the final Venice production and Minnelli’s last MGM picture, ending over 20 years of collaboration. It was an ineffective drama, with Taylor miscast as a beatnik artist and Richard Burton as the married clergyman with whom she falls in love.
Minnelli then directed the screen version of Lerner’s Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). It was transformed into a star vehicle for Barbra Streisand as Daisy Gamble, a young woman who wants to stop smoking but when placed under hypnosis by Dr. Chabot (Yves Montand) is regressed into her previous life as a notorious 19th-century adventuress. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was a moderate success but did not lead to any offers to direct. Minnelli spent the next five years trying to launch several projects and writing I Remember It Well (1974), an autobiography. Minnelli and his daughter Liza finally fulfilled their dream of making a film together when exploitation movie king Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American-International Pictures agreed to finance the period fantasy A Matter of Time (1976).
Whether Minnelli might have created a final masterpiece with A Matter of Time will never be known, because the picture—which does have its striking moments and images—was taken out of his hands in postproduction and heavily edited by Arkoff. Director Martin Scorsese led many other filmmakers in protest when Hollywood became aware of the situation, and Minnelli repudiated the final-release version. Nevertheless, the picture ended Minnelli’s career. His final decade was plagued by serious illness.
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fb2b9430950150ccd29d87c659f51eb3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vincenzo-Carducci | Vincenzo Carducci | Vincenzo Carducci
Vincenzo Carducci, Spanish Vicente Carducho, (born 1578, Florence [Italy]—died 1638, Madrid), Italian-born painter.
Carducci was the brother of artist Bartolommeo Carducci, whom he accompanied to Spain in 1585. Vincenzo succeeded his brother in 1609 as court painter to Philip III. Trained by his brother in the style of Italian Mannerism, he was one of the leading artists in Madrid until the arrival of Velázquez. Vincenzo painted three battle scenes for the Buen Retiro palace (now in the Prado Museum), but he was chiefly a religious painter. He wrote the Diálogos de la Pintura (1633), an academic treatise on art.
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b974ae43e9d4a7395788a447edb22f61 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vinicius-de-Moraes | Vinícius de Moraes | Vinícius de Moraes
Vinícius de Moraes, Moraes also spelled Morais, (born October 19, 1913, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—died July 9, 1980, Rio de Janeiro), Brazilian poet and lyricist whose best-known song was “A Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”), which he cowrote with the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim.
The author of numerous volumes of lyrical poetry, Moraes began his literary career as an adherent of the Brazilian Modernism in vogue around 1930. A period of studying English literature at the University of Oxford and residence in the United States as vice-consul of Brazil in Los Angeles (1947–50) broadened the scope of his verse, which was further enriched by his interest in theatre and the film industry. The result was a gradual movement away from poetic experimentation and toward an increasingly prosaic treatment of everyday themes with the sensuous lyricism that became his hallmark.
In the 1960s Moraes joined with younger musicians in forming the bossa nova style, incorporating elements of Brazilian samba and international jazz. His later years involved intense musical collaboration and a prolific outpouring of popular song lyrics. His theatrical libretto Orfeu da Conceição (1956) formed the basis of the prizewinning film Orfeu negro (1958; Black Orpheus).
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026e72c9f3c7c94d023b281ff8c6ed33 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viola-Allen | Viola Allen | Viola Allen
Viola Allen, in full Viola Emily Allen, (born October 27, 1869, Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.—died May 10, 1948, New York, New York), American actress, especially famous for her Shakespearean roles and for her roles in Frances Eliza Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah, both extremely popular plays.
Born into a theatrical family, Allen made her debut at age 14 in New York City in the title role of Burnett’s Esmeralda. Between 1884 and 1886 she appeared in a variety of modern and Shakespearean plays with the best-known 19th-century actors and in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Shenandoah (1888–89). Later she toured in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals and George Colman the Younger’s The Heir at Law; starred in Hall Caine’s The Christian (1898); and formed her own Shakespearean theatre company (1903). In 1915 she made her only motion picture, The White Sister. Her final professional appearance was in 1918, at a benefit for war relief, but she remained active in support of theatrical and charitable organizations.
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5404fcdf00d233e1f376f96967bc158a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Violet-Martin | Violet Martin | Violet Martin
Violet Martin grew up in a genteel Protestant literary family living on a country estate, Ross House, in somewhat straitened finances. After her father’s death in 1872, the family lived in Dublin, where she attended Alexandra College. Edith Somerville’s father was a British army lieutenant…
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6c0cc6a055fdd216333138e94418981a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Kirkus | Virginia Kirkus | Virginia Kirkus
Virginia Kirkus, married name Virgina Kirkus Glick, (born Dec. 7, 1893, Meadville, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 10, 1980, Danbury, Conn.), American critic, editor, and writer, remembered for her original book review for booksellers, Kirkus Reviews.
Kirkus attended private schools and in 1916 graduated from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. After taking courses at Columbia University Teachers College, New York City, she taught in a private school in Delaware (1917–19). She then held a series of writing and editorial jobs in New York City and in 1922 published Everywoman’s Guide to Health and Personal Beauty. From 1925 to 1932 she headed the children’s books department of the Harper Brothers publishing firm.
In 1933 she launched the Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service, an innovative idea in the field of publishing and selling books. Arranging with publishers—only 20 or so at first but eventually nearly every firm of any size in the industry—to receive advance galley proofs of books, Kirkus read them and wrote out brief critical evaluations of their literary merit and probable popular appeal that were then sent to subscribing bookshops in the form of a bimonthly bulletin. Bookshop managers were thus given an informed and unbiased opinion on which to base their orders and promotions. The scheme was a success from the beginning, as Kirkus proved to be accurate in her evaluations some 85 percent of the time, particularly in identifying “sleepers”—books not likely otherwise to receive their due attention. In addition to her work in preparing the bulletins, which included reading upwards of 700 books a year, she also wrote A House for the Week Ends (1940), on her experiences in remodeling her Redding, Conn., home, and First Book of Gardening (1956). She retired in 1962. At the time of her death in 1980, Kirkus Reviews had 4,600 subscribers and reviewed 4,500 books a year.
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c6ec7ad0f28097b58377d7b8acbd9710 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Louisa-Minor | Virginia Louisa Minor | Virginia Louisa Minor
Virginia Louisa Minor, (born March 27, 1824, Caroline county, Va., U.S.—died Aug. 14, 1894, St. Louis, Mo.), American activist who was a tireless and shrewd campaigner for woman suffrage.
Little is known of Minor’s early life. In 1843 she married Francis Minor, a distant cousin and a lawyer, and they settled in St. Louis the following year. At the outbreak of the Civil War she became an active member of the St. Louis Ladies Union Aid Society, which shortly became the largest branch of the Western Sanitary Commission. The successful management by women of the complex activities of the society—collecting and distributing clothing and supplies, staffing army hospitals, helping in the field and even at the front—encouraged Minor’s belief that women deserved political equality.
As early as 1865, when enfranchisement of former slaves was a topic of public debate, Minor was the first woman in Missouri to suggest publicly that women be granted the vote. Early in 1867 she petitioned the Missouri legislature to that end but without success. In May of that year she organized in St. Louis, and became president of, the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri, said to have been the first organization anywhere devoted to the single aim of woman suffrage. She remained president of the group until 1871, when she resigned because the state group had voted to affiliate with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association rather than with the older National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), of which Minor was a member.
Minor made a notable impact on the NWSA in 1869 by proposing a legal stratagem for quickly attaining suffrage. She argued, simply, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution implicitly guaranteed the franchise to women. The association adopted her argument and used it widely. In October 1872 Minor attempted to register to vote in St. Louis, and when refused she brought suit against the registrar. The test case Minor v. Happersett (1874) was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the case was lost, it generated much publicity for the cause of woman suffrage.
In 1879 the NWSA organized a Missouri branch, and Minor was elected president. In 1890 she became president of the state branch of the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association. She resigned for health reasons in 1892.
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aa50c13ebc13dfb4e36f3814705fd51f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf | Virginia Woolf | Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen, (born January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex), English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre.
She was best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power.
Virginia Woolf was married to British man of letters, publisher, and internationalist Leonard Woolf. They met before 1904 and married in August 1912.
Virginia Woolf drowned herself in Sussex, England, on March 28, 1941, when she was 59 years old.
In addition to Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she wrote the novels The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob’s Room (1922), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). Her most famous essay was A Room of One’s Own (1929).
While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.
Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure and the first editor (1882–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice; she also had prominent social and artistic connections, which included Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt and one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 19th century. Both Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, and Leslie’s first wife, a daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, had died unexpectedly, leaving her three children and him one. Julia Jackson Duckworth and Leslie Stephen married in 1878, and four children followed: Vanessa (born 1879), Thoby (born 1880), Virginia (born 1882), and Adrian (born 1883). While these four children banded together against their older half siblings, loyalties shifted among them. Virginia was jealous of Adrian for being their mother’s favourite. At age nine, she was the genius behind a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, that often teased Vanessa and Adrian. Vanessa mothered the others, especially Virginia, but the dynamic between need (Virginia’s) and aloofness (Vanessa’s) sometimes expressed itself as rivalry between Virginia’s art of writing and Vanessa’s of painting.
The Stephen family made summer migrations from their London town house near Kensington Gardens to the rather disheveled Talland House on the rugged Cornwall coast. That annual relocation structured Virginia’s childhood world in terms of opposites: city and country, winter and summer, repression and freedom, fragmentation and wholeness. Her neatly divided, predictable world ended, however, when her mother died in 1895 at age 49. Virginia, at 13, ceased writing amusing accounts of family news. Almost a year passed before she wrote a cheerful letter to her brother Thoby. She was just emerging from depression when, in 1897, her half sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28, an event Virginia noted in her diary as “impossible to write of.” Then in 1904, after her father died, Virginia had a nervous breakdown.
While Virginia was recovering, Vanessa supervised the Stephen children’s move to the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London. There the siblings lived independent of their Duckworth half brothers, free to pursue studies, to paint or write, and to entertain. Leonard Woolf dined with them in November 1904, just before sailing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a colonial administrator. Soon the Stephens hosted weekly gatherings of radical young people, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes, all later to achieve fame as, respectively, an art critic, a biographer, and an economist. Then, after a family excursion to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid fever. He was 26. Virginia grieved but did not slip into depression. She overcame the loss of Thoby and the “loss” of Vanessa, who became engaged to Bell just after Thoby’s death, through writing. Vanessa’s marriage (and perhaps Thoby’s absence) helped transform conversation at the avant-garde gatherings of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group into irreverent, sometimes bawdy repartee that inspired Virginia to exercise her wit publicly, even while privately she was writing her poignant “Reminiscences”—about her childhood and her lost mother—which was published in 1908. Viewing Italian art that summer, she committed herself to creating in language “some kind of whole made of shivering fragments,” to capturing “the flight of the mind.”
Virginia Stephen determined in 1908 to “re-form” the novel by creating a holistic form embracing aspects of life that were “fugitive” from the Victorian novel. While writing anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, she experimented with such a novel, which she called Melymbrosia. In November 1910, Roger Fry, a new friend of the Bells, launched the exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which introduced radical European art to the London bourgeoisie. Virginia was at once outraged over the attention that painting garnered and intrigued by the possibility of borrowing from the likes of artists Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. As Clive Bell was unfaithful, Vanessa began an affair with Fry, and Fry began a lifelong debate with Virginia about the visual and verbal arts. In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East. After he resigned from the colonial service, Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. She continued to work on her first novel; he wrote the anticolonialist novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), a Bloomsbury exposé. Then he became a political writer and an advocate for peace and justice.
Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia’s mental health was precarious. Nevertheless, she completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. She based many of her novel’s characters on real-life prototypes: Lytton Strachey, Leslie Stephen, her half brother George Duckworth, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and herself. Rachel Vinrace, the novel’s central character, is a sheltered young woman who, on an excursion to South America, is introduced to freedom and sexuality (though from the novel’s inception she was to die before marrying). Woolf first made Terence, Rachel’s suitor, rather Clive-like; as she revised, Terence became a more sensitive, Leonard-like character. After an excursion up the Amazon, Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death. As possible causes for this disaster, Woolf’s characters suggest everything from poorly washed vegetables to jungle disease to a malevolent universe, but the book endorses no explanation. That indeterminacy, at odds with the certainties of the Victorian era, is echoed in descriptions that distort perception: while the narrative often describes people, buildings, and natural objects as featureless forms, Rachel, in dreams and then delirium, journeys into surrealistic worlds. Rachel’s voyage into the unknown began Woolf’s voyage beyond the conventions of realism.
Woolf’s manic-depressive worries (that she was a failure as a writer and a woman, that she was despised by Vanessa and unloved by Leonard) provoked a suicide attempt in September 1913. Publication of The Voyage Out was delayed until early 1915; then, that April, she sank into a distressed state in which she was often delirious. Later that year she overcame the “vile imaginations” that had threatened her sanity. She kept the demons of mania and depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life.
In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press, named for Hogarth House, their home in the London suburbs. The Woolfs themselves (she was the compositor while he worked the press) published their own Two Stories in the summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard’s Three Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the Wall, the latter about contemplation itself.
Since 1910, Virginia had kept (sometimes with Vanessa) a country house in Sussex, and in 1916 Vanessa settled into a Sussex farmhouse called Charleston. She had ended her affair with Fry to take up with the painter Duncan Grant, who moved to Charleston with Vanessa and her children, Julian and Quentin Bell; a daughter, Angelica, would be born to Vanessa and Grant at the end of 1918. Charleston soon became an extravagantly decorated, unorthodox retreat for artists and writers, especially Clive Bell, who continued on friendly terms with Vanessa, and Fry, Vanessa’s lifelong devotee.
Virginia had kept a diary, off and on, since 1897. In 1919 she envisioned “the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to,” organized not by a mechanical recording of events but by the interplay between the objective and the subjective. Her diary, as she wrote in 1924, would reveal people as “splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.” Such terms later inspired critical distinctions, based on anatomy and culture, between the feminine and the masculine, the feminine being a varied but all-embracing way of experiencing the world and the masculine a monolithic or linear way. Critics using these distinctions have credited Woolf with evolving a distinctly feminine diary form, one that explores, with perception, honesty, and humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self.
Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it, she plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles, with its protagonist Katharine in both. Night and Day (1919) answers Leonard’s The Wise Virgins, in which he had his Leonard-like protagonist lose the Virginia-like beloved and end up in a conventional marriage. In Night and Day, the Leonard-like Ralph learns to value Katharine for herself, not as some superior being. And Katharine overcomes (as Virginia had) class and familial prejudices to marry the good and intelligent Ralph. This novel focuses on the very sort of details that Woolf had deleted from The Voyage Out: credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings, and investigations of issues such as class, politics, and suffrage.
Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918. Her essay “Modern Novels” (1919; revised in 1925 as “Modern Fiction”) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations, Virginia’s Kew Gardens (1919), a story organized, like a Post-Impressionistic painting, by pattern. With the Hogarth Press’s emergence as a major publishing house, the Woolfs gradually ceased being their own printers.
In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk’s House, which looked out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows where the River Ouse wound down to the English Channel. Virginia could walk or bicycle to visit Vanessa, her children, and a changing cast of guests at the bohemian Charleston and then retreat to Monk’s House to write. She envisioned a new book that would apply the theories of “Modern Novels” and the achievements of her short stories to the novel form. In early 1920 a group of friends, evolved from the early Bloomsbury group, began a “Memoir Club,” which met to read irreverent passages from their autobiographies. Her second presentation was an exposé of Victorian hypocrisy, especially that of George Duckworth, who masked inappropriate, unwanted caresses as affection honouring their mother’s memory.
In 1921 Woolf’s minimally plotted short fictions were gathered in Monday or Tuesday. Meanwhile, typesetting having heightened her sense of visual layout, she began a new novel written in blocks to be surrounded by white spaces. In “On Re-Reading Novels” (1922) Woolf argued that the novel was not so much a form as an “emotion which you feel.” In Jacob’s Room (1922) she achieved such emotion, transforming personal grief over the death of Thoby Stephen into a “spiritual shape.” Though she takes Jacob from childhood to his early death in war, she leaves out plot, conflict, even character. The emptiness of Jacob’s room and the irrelevance of his belongings convey in their minimalism the profound emptiness of loss. Though Jacob’s Room is an antiwar novel, Woolf feared that she had ventured too far beyond representation. She vowed to “push on,” as she wrote Clive Bell, to graft such experimental techniques onto more-substantial characters.
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c7eb2fbc8570e33280f1d04e8172eff5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
Woolf’s experiments with point of view confirm that, as Bernard thinks in The Waves, “we are not single.” Being neither single nor fixed, perception in her novels is fluid, as is the world she presents. While Joyce and Faulkner separate one character’s interior monologues from another’s, Woolf’s narratives move between inner and outer and between characters without clear demarcations. Furthermore, she avoids the self-absorption of many of her contemporaries and implies a brutal society without the explicit details some of her contemporaries felt obligatory. Her nonlinear forms invite reading not for neat solutions but for an aesthetic resolution of “shivering fragments,” as she wrote in 1908. While Woolf’s fragmented style is distinctly Modernist, her indeterminacy anticipates a postmodern awareness of the evanescence of boundaries and categories.
Woolf’s many essays about the art of writing and about reading itself today retain their appeal to a range of, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “common” (unspecialized) readers. Woolf’s collection of essays The Common Reader (1925) was followed by The Common Reader: Second Series (1932; also published as The Second Common Reader). She continued writing essays on reading and writing, women and history, and class and politics for the rest of her life. Many were collected after her death in volumes edited by Leonard Woolf.
Virginia Woolf wrote far more fiction than Joyce and far more nonfiction than either Joyce or Faulkner. Six volumes of diaries (including her early journals), six volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of collected essays show her deep engagement with major 20th-century issues. Though many of her essays began as reviews, written anonymously to deadlines for money, and many include imaginative settings and whimsical speculations, they are serious inquiries into reading and writing, the novel and the arts, perception and essence, war and peace, class and politics, privilege and discrimination, and the need to reform society.
Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters.
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1aff02223832d4704153575465650350 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viriathus | Viriathus | Viriathus
…under the brilliant leadership of Viriathus; however, after Viriathus was assassinated about 140 bce, Decius Junius Brutus led a Roman force northward through central Portugal, crossed the Douro River, and subdued the Gallaeci. Julius Caesar governed the territory for a time. In 25 bce Caesar Augustus founded Augusta Emerita (Mérida
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dcdc1efa8155b606c3ca0f15924a9b08 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vissarion-Grigoryevich-Belinsky | Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky | Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, (born May 30 [June 11, New Style], 1811, Sveaborg, Fin., Russian Empire—died May 26 [June 7], 1848, St. Petersburg, Russia), eminent Russian literary critic who is often called the “father” of the Russian radical intelligentsia.
The son of a provincial doctor, Belinsky was expelled from the University of Moscow (1832) and earned his living thereafter as a journalist. His first substantial critical articles were part of a series that he wrote for the journal Teleskop (“Telescope”) beginning in 1834. These were called “Literaturnye mechtaniya” (“Literary Reveries”), and they established his reputation. In them he expounded F.W.J. Schelling’s Romantic view of national character, applying it to Russian culture.
Belinsky was briefly managing editor of the Moskovsky nablyudatel (“Moscow Observer”) before obtaining a post in 1839 as chief critic for the journal Otechestvennyye zapiski (“National Annals”). The influential essays he published there on such writers as Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol helped shape the literary and social views of other Russian intellectuals for decades to come. By 1840 Belinsky had moved from the idealism of his early essays to a Hegelian view that art and the history of a nation are closely connected. He believed that Russian literature had to progress in order to help the still-embryonic Russian nation develop into a mature, civilized society. His theory of literature in the service of society became an article of faith among Russian liberals and was the distant progenitor of the Soviets’ doctrine of Socialist Realism.
In 1846 Belinsky joined the review Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), for which he wrote most of his last essays. In 1847 he wrote a famous letter to Gogol, denouncing the latter’s Bybrannyye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (“Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends”) as a betrayal of the Russian people because it preached submission to church and state.
Belinsky’s perceptive praise of such writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Ivan Goncharov helped establish their early reputations. He laid the foundation for modern Russian literary criticism in his belief that Russian literature should honestly reflect Russian reality and that art should be judged for its social as well as its aesthetic qualities.
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92fcc2072e2f8a6ed92120e931084706 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vitaly-Ginzburg | Vitaly Ginzburg | Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Ginzburg, in full Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, (born October 4 [September 21, Old Style], 1916, Moscow, Russia—died November 8, 2009, Moscow), Russian physicist and astrophysicist, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003 for his pioneering work on superconductivity. He shared the award with Alexey A. Abrikosov of Russia and Anthony J. Leggett of Great Britain. Ginzburg was also noted for his work on theories of radio wave propagation, radio astronomy, and the origin of cosmic rays. He was a member of the team that developed the Soviet thermonuclear bomb.
After graduating from Moscow State University (1938), Ginzburg was appointed to the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in 1940, and from 1971 to 1988 he headed the institute’s theory group. He also taught at Gorky University (1945–68) and at the Moscow Technical Institute of Physics (from 1968).
In the late 1940s, under the leadership of physicist Igor Tamm, he worked with colleagues Andrey Sakharov and Yury Romanov to build a thermonuclear bomb. The first design, proposed by Sakharov in 1948, consisted of alternating layers of deuterium and uranium-238 between a fissile core and a surrounding chemical high explosive. Known as Sloika (“Layer Cake”), the design was refined by Ginzburg in 1949 through the substitution of lithium-6 deuteride for the liquid deuterium. When bombarded with neutrons, lithium-6 breeds tritium, which can fuse with deuterium to release more energy. Ginzburg and Sakharov’s design was tested on August 12, 1953, and more than 15 percent of the energy released came from nuclear fusion. Ginzburg received the State Prize of the Soviet Union in 1953 and the Lenin Prize in 1966.
Ginzburg conducted his prizewinning research on superconductivity in the 1950s. First identified in 1911, superconductivity is the disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids when they are cooled below a characteristic temperature, which is typically very low. Scientists formulated various theories on why the phenomenon occurrs in certain metals termed type I superconductors. Ginzburg developed such a theory, and it proved so comprehensive that Abrikosov later used it to build a theoretical explanation for type II superconductors. Ginzburg’s achievement also enabled other scientists to create and test new superconducting materials and build more powerful electromagnets.
Another significant theory developed by Ginzburg was that cosmic radiation in interstellar space is produced not by thermal radiation but by the acceleration of high-energy electrons in magnetic fields, a process known as synchrotron radiation. In 1955 Ginzburg (with I.S. Shklovsky) discovered the first quantitative proof that the cosmic rays observed near Earth originated in supernovas. Upon the discovery in 1967 of pulsars (neutron stars formed in supernova explosions), he expanded his theory to include pulsars as a related source of cosmic rays.
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3ec931c9bdb2e05a9b7ea393393ced09 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vito-Genovese | Vito Genovese | Vito Genovese
Vito Genovese, byname Don Vitone, (born Nov. 27, 1897, Rosiglino, Italy—died Feb. 14, 1969, Springfield, Mo., U.S.), one of the most powerful of American crime syndicate bosses from the 1930s to the 1950s and a major influence even from prison, 1959–69.
Genovese immigrated from a Neapolitan village to New York City in 1913, joined local gangs, and in the 1920s and ’30s was Lucky Luciano’s second-in-command in narcotics and other rackets. In 1937 he escaped to Italy to avoid prosecution on a murder charge and became a friend of Benito Mussolini, financing several Fascist operations while engaged in narcotics smuggling to the United States.
At war’s end he befriended U.S. military occupation authorities and bossed the black market operations in Italy until federal agents returned him to the United States to face trial on the earlier murder charge. A key witness, Peter La Tempa, however, was murdered (poisoned) in 1945 while in protective custody, and Genovese was set free on June 11, 1946. He gradually reestablished his power in New York City, arranging the murder of several rivals (such as Willie Moretti in 1951 and Albert Anastasia in 1957 and allegedly the attempt on Frank Costello in 1957), and commanded the gunmen-racketeers in the narcotics trade. He was effectively “boss of all the bosses” in the New York area.
Finally, in 1958, the federal government indicted him for smuggling and distributing narcotics, and in 1959 he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison for 15 years. From prison (first at Atlanta, then at Leavenworth) he continued to rule and to order the killing of rivals. He died of a heart attack at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, Springfield, Mo., in 1969.
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60b7b6dfc7b5e68136a3ae3c05f030ab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vittorino-da-Feltre | Vittorino da Feltre | Vittorino da Feltre
Vittorino da Feltre, original name Vittore dei Ramboldini, (born 1378, Feltre [Italy]—died February 2, 1446, Mantua), Italian educator who is frequently considered the greatest humanist schoolmaster of the Renaissance.
After 20 years as a student and teacher at the University of Padua, Vittorino was asked, in 1423, to become tutor to the children of the Gonzaga family, the rulers of Mantua. He agreed to do so if he could set up a school away from the court and, hence, from political influence. In addition to his royal charges, about 70 other children enrolled in his school, La Giocosa (“The Pleasant House”). These included boys of other noble families and poor boys chosen for their ability.
The central features of the curriculum were the languages and literature of Rome and Greece. Other subjects included arithmetic, geometry, and music, as well as games and physical exercises, for the school followed the Greek ideal of development of the body as well as the mind. Vittorino saw education, however, as a pathway to the Christian life. His pupils pictured him as a successful teacher who loved them, cared for their health and character, and adapted his methods to their abilities. Further, he used no corporal punishment. La Giocosa was possibly Europe’s first boarding school for younger students.
Vittorino not only educated future Italian rulers and professional men but also taught many Latin and Greek scholars who came to him from the East—thus fostering the translation of the Greek manuscripts that served to inspire the Renaissance.
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0467aeec05ca4b26fbf421257173d182 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vittorio-Orlando | Vittorio Orlando | Vittorio Orlando
Vittorio Orlando, in full Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, (born May 19, 1860, Palermo, Italy—died December 1, 1952, Rome), Italian statesman and prime minister during the concluding years of World War I and head of his country’s delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.
Educated at Palermo, Orlando made a name for himself with writings on electoral reform and government administration before being elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1897. He served as minister of education in 1903–05 and of justice in 1907–09, resuming the same portfolio in 1914. He favoured Italy’s entrance into the war (May 1915), and in October 1917, in the crisis following the defeat of Italy’s forces at the Battle of Caporetto by the Austrians, he became prime minister, successfully rallying the country to a renewed effort.
After the war’s victorious conclusion, Orlando went to Paris and Versailles, where he had a serious falling out with his allies, especially President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, over Italy’s claims to formerly Austrian territory. On the question of the port of Fiume, which was contested by Yugoslavia after the war, Wilson appealed over Orlando’s head to the Italian people, a maneuver that failed. Orlando’s inability to get concessions from the Allies rapidly undermined his position, and he resigned on June 19, 1919. On December 2 he was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies. In the rising conflict between the workers’ organizations and the new Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini, he at first supported Mussolini, but when the leader of the Italian Socialist Party, Giacomo Matteotti, was assassinated by the Fascists, Orlando withdrew his support. (The murder marked the beginning of Mussolini’s dictatorship over Italy.) Orlando opposed the Fascists in local elections in Sicily and resigned from Parliament in protest against Fascist electoral fraud (1925).
Orlando remained in retirement until the liberation of Rome in World War II, when he became a member of the consultative assembly and president of the Constituent Assembly elected in June 1946. His objections to the peace treaty led to his resignation in 1947. In 1948 he was elected to the new Italian Senate and in the same year was a candidate for the presidency of the republic (an office elected by Parliament) but was defeated by Luigi Einaudi.
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8678070a3432d79e453295f57d3dc7e8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vittorio-Podrecca | Vittorio Podrecca | Vittorio Podrecca
…of the Little Ones of Vittorio Podrecca, which introduced the marionette pianist and the soprano with heaving bosom that have been widely copied ever since.
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451bccbfdd5c1165cd92281fb9dda297 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viv-Richards | Viv Richards | Viv Richards
Viv Richards, in full Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards, (born March 7, 1952, St. John’s, Antigua), West Indian cricketer, arguably the finest batsman of his generation.
The son of Malcolm Richards, Antigua’s leading fast bowler, Viv Richards followed in a family tradition that included two brothers who also played cricket for Antigua. Richards began his Test (international) match career for the West Indies team at age 22 in 1974. In the course of a career that encompassed 121 Test matches and lasted until 1993, he distinguished himself as one of the most feared and productive batsmen of all time. Though he did so in an era when some of the game’s most dominant fast bowlers thrived, he defiantly and famously refused to wear a batting helmet. In the process of scoring 8,540 runs and averaging more than 50 runs per innings in Test competition, Richards recorded 24 centuries (100 runs in a single innings), leading the West Indian team that he captained from 1985 to 1991 to sweeping international success. Richards was also an “off-spin” bowler and took 32 wickets in Test competition. But it was as a batsman that the “Master Blaster,” who also had a distinguished career in English county cricket, will always be remembered. Richards was knighted by the Antiguan government in 1999. His autobiography, Sir Vivian: The Definitive Autobiography, written with Bob Harris, was published in 2000.
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73e5fa606202c1bfbad860cacda711f5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vivien-Leigh | Vivien Leigh | Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh, original name Vivian Mary Hartley, (born November 5, 1913, Darjeeling, India—died July 8, 1967, London, England), British actress who achieved motion picture immortality by playing two of American literature’s most celebrated Southern belles, Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois.
The daughter of a Yorkshire stockbroker, she was born in India and convent-educated in England and throughout Europe. Inspired by the example of her schoolmate Maureen O’Sullivan, she embarked upon an acting career, enrolling at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1932. That same year she married her first husband, British barrister Herbert Leigh Holman, and adopted his middle name as her professional name. After her film debut in Things Are Looking Up (1934), she appeared in several more British “quota quickies” before making her first stage appearance in The Green Sash (1935). Although she possessed a weak stage voice at this point in her career, her stunning stage presence and beauty were impossible to ignore, and in 1935 she was signed to a contract by movie mogul Alexander Korda. During her initial burst of film stardom Leigh began an affair with British leading man Laurence Olivier, then married to actress Jill Esmond. The two lovers would subsequently appear together on stage and screen, notably in Korda’s Fire Over England (1937) and 21 Days (filmed 1937, released 1940; also released as 21 Days Together).
In 1938 Olivier and Leigh traveled to Hollywood, he to star in Samuel Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights (1939), she to audition for the highly coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in the David O. Selznick production of Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller Gone with the Wind (1939). Much to the surprise of industry insiders, she won the role over hundreds of candidates. Her unforgettable screen portrayal of Mitchell’s resilient heroine earned her not only international popularity but also an Academy Award. She capped this professional high point with her 1940 marriage to Olivier; the newlyweds subsequently costarred in the historical drama That Hamilton Woman (1941), acclaimed by Sir Winston Churchill as his all-time favourite film.
Pregnant during production of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1944 (released 1946), Leigh suffered an on-set accident that resulted in a miscarriage. While some film historians have traced her subsequent struggle with manic-depressive psychosis to this incident, other reports indicate that she evinced signs of her illness as early as the late 1930s. Despite her fragile health (she also suffered from tuberculosis), she continued to work in films and on stage in England and America. Throughout the 1940s she toured extensively with the Old Vic and Stratford companies in classical productions. She earned a second Academy Award for her searing portrayal of the tragically delusional Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the screen version of the Tennessee Williams play.
Leigh’s mental and physical instability, aggravated by her deteriorating marriage to Olivier (they divorced in 1960), made it increasingly difficult for her to work in the late 1950s and early ’60s. She rallied long enough to deliver excellent screen performances in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965), and to star in a 1963 Broadway musical adaptation of Tovarich, a disastrous production for which Leigh nonetheless won a Tony Award. She ended her career on a note of triumph in the 1966 New York staging of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov. Leigh was in the midst of rehearsals for a stage production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance when she was found dead in her London apartment.
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f7e09cd9f406538ea0040c19bc6250b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Kuts | Vladimir Kuts | Vladimir Kuts
Vladimir Kuts, (born Feb. 7, 1927, Aleksino, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.—died Aug. 16, 1975, Moscow, Russia), Soviet distance runner who held the world record in the 5,000-metre race (1954–55, 1957–65), the 10,000-metre race (1956–60), and the three-mile race (1954).
An officer in the Soviet army and a member of the Communist Party from 1955, Kuts won gold medals for both the 5,000- and 10,000-metre races at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. He was the European champion in the 5,000-metre race in 1954 and was also Soviet champion at that distance and in the 10,000-metre race (1953–57). After 1957, illness forced him to retire from running, but he continued as a coach.
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0b9d74df903c3d602ea6ab1257b65a55 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Mikhaylovich-Komarov | Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov | Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov, (born March 16, 1927, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died April 24, 1967, Kazakhstan), Soviet cosmonaut, the first man known to have died during a space mission.
Komarov joined the Soviet air force at the age of 15 and was educated in air force schools, becoming a pilot in 1949. He graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, Moscow, in 1959 and was the pilot (October 12–13, 1964) of Voskhod 1, the first craft to carry more than one human being into space.
Komarov became the first Russian to make two spaceflights when he blasted off alone on April 23, 1967, in Soyuz 1. During the 18th orbit he attempted a landing. Reportedly, the spacecraft became entangled in its main parachute at an altitude of several miles and fell back to Earth. Komarov’s body was cremated, and his ashes were entombed in the wall of the Kremlin.
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7249c52fa972bf9bcf1853c2fe0aa596 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov, in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, (born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland), Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish, intricate literary effects.
Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. His father, V.D. Nabokov, was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia and was the author of numerous books and articles on criminal law and politics, among them The Provisional Government (1922), which was one of the primary sources on the downfall of the Kerensky regime. In 1922, after the family had settled in Berlin, the elder Nabokov was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting; although his novelist son disclaimed any influence of this event upon his art, the theme of assassination by mistake has figured prominently in Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov’s enormous affection for his father and for the milieu in which he was raised is evident in his autobiography Speak, Memory (revised version, 1967).
Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he first studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he graduated with first-class honours in 1922 and subsequently wrote that his almost effortless attainment of this degree was “one of the very few ‘utilitarian’ sins on my conscience.” While still in England he continued to write poetry, mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry, The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In Nabokov’s mature opinion, these poems were “polished and sterile.”
Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in Germany and France, and, while continuing to write poetry, he experimented with drama and even collaborated on several unproduced motion-picture scenarios. A five-act play written 1923–24, Tragediya gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn), was published posthumously, first in 1997 in a Russian literary journal and then in 2008 as a stand-alone volume. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre. His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. His first novel, Mashenka (Mary), appeared in 1926; it was avowedly autobiographical and contains descriptions of the young Nabokov’s first serious romance as well as of the Nabokov family estate, both of which are also described in Speak, Memory. Nabokov did not again draw so heavily upon his personal experience as he had in Mashenka until his episodic novel about an émigré professor of Russian in the United States, Pnin (1957), which is to some extent based on his experiences while teaching (1948–58) Russian and European literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
His second novel, King, Queen, Knave, which appeared in 1928, marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter. His chess novel, The Defense, followed two years later and won him recognition as the best of the younger Russian émigré writers. In the next five years he produced four novels and a novella. Of these, Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were his first works of importance and foreshadowed his later fame.
During his years of European emigration, Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. All his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology). But until his best seller Lolita, no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. During the period in which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films (now forgotten). His wife, the former Véra Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in 1925, worked as a translator. From the time of the loss of his home in Russia, Nabokov’s only attachment was to what he termed the “unreal estate” of memory and art. He never purchased a house, preferring instead to live in houses rented from other professors on sabbatical leave. Even after great wealth came to him with the success of Lolita and the subsequent interest in his previous work, Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son, Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel.
The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. Thus, The Defense seemingly is about chess, Despair about murder, and Invitation to a Beheading a political story, but all three works make statements about art that are central to understanding the book as a whole. The same may be said of his plays, Sobytiye (“The Event”), published in 1938, and The Waltz Invention. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov’s best novel in Russian, The Gift, the story of a young artist’s development in the spectral world of post-World War I Berlin. This novel, with its reliance on literary parody, was a turning point: serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov’s art.
Nabokov’s first novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), do not rank with his best Russian work. Pale Fire (1962), however, a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant, extends and completes Nabokov’s mastery of unorthodox structure, first shown in The Gift and present also in Solus Rex, a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed. Lolita (1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery. Ada (1969), Nabokov’s 17th and longest novel, is a parody of the family chronicle form. All his earlier themes come into play in the novel, and, because the work is a medley of Russian, French, and English, it is his most difficult work. (He also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, mostly written in Russian and translated into English.)
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8d23c8dc67046a63769b1e4ad8ae0abc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Putin | Vladimir Putin | Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin, in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, (born October 7, 1952, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]), Russian intelligence officer and politician who served as president (1999–2008, 2012– ) of Russia and also was the country’s prime minister (1999, 2008–12).
Putin studied law at Leningrad State University, where his tutor was Anatoly Sobchak, later one of the leading reform politicians of the perestroika period. Putin served 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer for the KGB (Committee for State Security), including six years in Dresden, East Germany. In 1990 he retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned to Russia to become prorector of Leningrad State University with responsibility for the institution’s external relations. Soon afterward Putin became an adviser to Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. He quickly won Sobchak’s confidence and became known for his ability to get things done; by 1994 he had risen to the post of first deputy mayor.
In 1996 Putin moved to Moscow, where he joined the presidential staff as deputy to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s chief administrator. Putin grew close to fellow Leningrader Anatoly Chubais and moved up in administrative positions. In July 1998 Pres. Boris Yeltsin made Putin director of the Federal Security Service (FSB; the KGB’s domestic successor), and shortly thereafter he became secretary of the influential Security Council. Yeltsin, who was searching for an heir to assume his mantle, appointed Putin prime minister in 1999.
Although he was virtually unknown, Putin’s public-approval ratings soared when he launched a well-organized military operation against secessionist rebels in Chechnya. Wearied by years of Yeltsin’s erratic behaviour, the Russian public appreciated Putin’s coolness and decisiveness under pressure. Putin’s support for a new electoral bloc, Unity, ensured its success in the December parliamentary elections.
On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly announced his resignation and named Putin acting president. Promising to rebuild a weakened Russia, the austere and reserved Putin easily won the March 2000 elections with about 53 percent of the vote. As president, he sought to end corruption and create a strongly regulated market economy.
Putin quickly reasserted control over Russia’s 89 regions and republics, dividing them into seven new federal districts, each headed by a representative appointed by the president. He also removed the right of regional governors to sit in the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. Putin moved to reduce the power of Russia’s unpopular financiers and media tycoons—the so-called “oligarchs”—by closing several media outlets and launching criminal proceedings against numerous leading figures. He faced a difficult situation in Chechnya, particularly from rebels who staged terrorist attacks in Moscow and guerilla attacks on Russian troops from the region’s mountains; in 2002 Putin declared the military campaign over, but casualties remained high.
Putin strongly objected to U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In response to the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, he pledged Russia’s assistance and cooperation in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorists and their allies, offering the use of Russia’s airspace for humanitarian deliveries and help in search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, Putin joined German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French Pres. Jacques Chirac in 2002–03 to oppose U.S. and British plans to use force to oust Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq.
Overseeing an economy that enjoyed growth after a prolonged recession in the 1990s, Putin was easily reelected in March 2004. In parliamentary elections in December 2007, Putin’s party, United Russia, won an overwhelming majority of seats. Though the fairness of the elections was questioned by international observers and by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the results nonetheless affirmed Putin’s power. With a constitutional provision forcing Putin to step down in 2008, he chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor.
Soon after Medvedev won the March 2008 presidential election by a landslide, Putin announced that he had accepted the position of chairman of the United Russia party. Confirming widespread expectations, Medvedev nominated Putin as the country’s prime minister within hours of taking office on May 7, 2008. Russia’s parliament confirmed the appointment the following day. Although Medvedev grew more assertive as his term progressed, Putin was still regarded as the main power within the Kremlin.
While some speculated that Medvedev might run for a second term, he announced in September 2011 that he and Putin would—pending a United Russia victory at the polls—trade positions. Widespread irregularities in parliamentary elections in December 2011 triggered a wave of popular protest, and Putin faced a surprisingly strong opposition movement in the presidential race. On March 4, 2012, however, Putin was elected to a third term as Russia’s president. In advance of his inauguration, Putin resigned as United Russia chairman, handing control of the party to Medvedev. He was inaugurated as president on May 7, 2012, and one of his first acts upon assuming office was to nominate Medvedev to serve as prime minister.
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4fb73f4b8cfd633f35f1e983f8165310 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-tsar-of-Bulgaria | Vladimir | Vladimir
Boris’s eldest son and heir, Vladimir (889–893), abandoned his father’s policy and became the instrument of a pagan reaction and a leader of the opponents of Slavic letters and literature. Boris then returned to active politics. With the aid of loyal boyars and the army, Boris drove his son from…
When his eldest son, Vladimir, fell under the influence of the old boyars and attempted to reestablish paganism, Boris led a coup that overthrew him. After Vladimir was deposed and blinded, Boris convened a council that confirmed Christianity as the religion of the state and moved the administrative capital…
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7a6d578daa6cb2220fb08aaca2964506 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Vidric | Vladimir Vidrić | Vladimir Vidrić
…writers of that time include Vladimir Vidrić and Vladimir Nazor. The leading figure of the early Modernist phase until World War I was Antun Gustav Matoš. He edited the anthology Mlada hrvatska lirika (1914; “The Young Croatian Lyric”), which marked the zenith of such verse. Between the wars, avant-garde poetry…
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12f1ee9efa710af1c5940ca65a27f87f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladislav-II | Vladislav II | Vladislav II
Vladislav II (ruled 1140–73) participated in the campaigns of Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) in Italy. He was named king and crowned by the emperor at Milan in 1158.
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a67f7d528351e90feeccade2b93959e1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladko-Macek | Vladko Maček | Vladko Maček
Vladko Maček, also called Vladimir Maček, (born July 20, 1879, Jastrebarsko, near Zagreb, Cro.—died May 15, 1964, Washington, D.C., U.S.), nationalist and leader of the Croatian Peasant Party who opposed Serbian domination of Yugoslavia. He served as deputy prime minister in the Yugoslav government from 1939 to 1941.
Maček became a member of the Croatian Peasant Party in 1905, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1920 he was elected to serve as a member of the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly. In 1928 Maček took over the leadership of the party, which was in the process of changing from a social and agrarian movement into a nationalist party dominated by middle-class intellectuals who were opposed to the Serbian-dominated government of Yugoslavia. He fought for a federal system, and, when he refused to submit to King Alexander, who had assumed dictatorial powers (1929), he was twice imprisoned (1929–30, 1933–34). Under the ensuing regency of Prince Paul, parliamentary elections were held, and Maček’s candidates won an overwhelming victory in the Croatian region in 1935 and again in 1939.
In August 1939 Maček negotiated a compromise agreement with the government of Dragisa Cvetković whereby Croatia would become autonomous with its own parliament. Croatia would also be represented in the central government at Belgrade, which Maček entered as deputy prime minister in the same month. During World War II he reluctantly agreed to Yugoslavia’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact (Germany, Italy, and Japan) on March 25, 1941, in exchange for German guarantees. Two days later a military coup replaced Paul’s regency with King Peter II, and Maček remained in the new administration. After the conquest of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers (April 1941), he stayed in the country but refused the German invitation to head a puppet government and withdrew from politics. When the communists took over the country in 1945, he fled to Paris and eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where he wrote In the Struggle for Freedom (1957).
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5382c60cf13b45f5fca006a610be75d3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vojislav-Marinkovic | Vojislav Marinković | Vojislav Marinković
Vojislav Marinković, (born May 13 [May 1, old style], 1876, Belgrade, Serbia—died Sept. 18, 1935, Belgrade), influential statesman and eloquent spokesman for Serbia and later Yugoslavia in the early 20th century.
Marinković entered the Serbian Parliament as a Progressive (1906), represented Serbia at the Paris Conference (1913) for the financial settlement of the Balkan Wars, and became minister of national economy (1914–17). As the leader of the Progressives from 1915, he took part in the drafting of the Corfu Declaration calling for a South Slav state in 1917. In 1919, when Yugoslavia attained nationhood, he became its first minister of trade and merged the Progressives with the second most powerful political party in the new state, the Democratic Party. As minister of the interior (1921–22), Marinković organized the electoral law. He later served twice as minister of foreign affairs (1924, 1927–32) and as prime minister from April 4 to July 29, 1932.
As foreign minister Marinković signed a treaty of friendship with France (1927), ratified the Nettuno Conventions concluded in 1925 to improve economic and cultural relations with Italy (1928), represented Yugoslavia at the assemblies of the League of Nations, and was a member of the League Council (1929–32) and its president (1930). At the League of Nations in Geneva in 1931, he so energetically opposed the formation of an Austro-German customs union that the Austrians had to disavow their signature to the agreement. Marinković also took part in the negotiations for establishing the Balkan Entente and for the new statute of the Little Entente; but both were signed (1934 and 1933, respectively) after his resignation.
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36d85f9888d5226eb7287c706081ae7d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vojislav-Seselj | Vojislav Seselj | Vojislav Seselj
…power at the expense of Vojislav Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka; SRS), then the largest neofascist party in Serbia. Although the SPS had won 65 percent of the vote in elections to the Serbian assembly in 1990, deteriorating economic conditions and perceived threats to Serbian enclaves in Croatia…
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1e1af9529e38430bf52d1a8868ca6287 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vologeses-III | Vologeses III (or II) | Vologeses III (or II)
Vologeses III (or II), (died ad 147, ?), one of the rival claimants to the throne of the Parthian king Pacorus II.
He first presented himself as the ruler of Parthia in 105/106 and seems to have been able to persist in his claim throughout the reign of Osroes (c. 109/110–c. 128/129). On the death of Osroes, Vologeses was able to overcome another rival, Mithradates IV, and to secure the greater part of the Parthian realm, which he ruled until his death.
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7b39f784559142d04a4ad958bef1c9e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vsevolod-Vyacheslavovich-Ivanov | Vsevolod Ivanov | Vsevolod Ivanov
Vsevolod Ivanov, in full Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov, (born February 24 [February 12, Old Style], 1895, Lebyazhye, Russia—died August 15, 1963, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Soviet prose writer noted for his vivid naturalistic realism, one of the most original writers of the 1920s.
Ivanov was born into a poor family on the border of Siberia and Turkistan. He ran away from home to become a clown in a traveling circus and later was a wanderer, labourer, and itinerant entertainer. He served in the Red Army during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution.
In 1920 Ivanov went to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he became associated with the Serapion Brothers, a literary group whose members admired and imitated the Romanticism of the early 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. He also came under the influence of Maxim Gorky. His graphic stories of the civil war—Partizany (1921; “Partisans”), Bronepoezd 14–69 (1922; Armoured Train 14–69), Tsvetnyye vetra (1922; “Coloured Winds”)—quickly established his reputation as a writer. Set in Asiatic Russia, the stories have a distinctive regional flavour.
A change in official literary policies in the late 1920s required Ivanov to revise his works to harmonize with the new principles. In 1927 he reworked Armoured Train 14–69— which had been severely criticized for neglecting the role of the Communist Party in the partisan movement—into a play, correcting this flaw. The drama enjoyed immediate success and has become one of the classics of the Soviet repertory. In his works composed at this time Ivanov had to temper much of the naturalism, which was considered a negative quality, that had produced such powerful effects in his earlier work. Moreover, his own attitude had changed; he turned from the affirmation of physical and instinctual life to psychological analysis. His major later works include a collection of tales, Taynoye taynykh (1927; “The Secret of Secrets”), and an autobiographical novel, Pokhozhdeniya fakira (1934–35; The Adventures of a Fakir).
During World War II Ivanov worked as a war correspondent for the newspaper Izvestiya. His wartime experiences provided material for a new collection of stories and a novel, neither favourably received by Soviet critics. His subsequent work is generally regarded as inferior to the early, unrevised stories.
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fb1ad7ebf924dc72e5c9de5b7a50050f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vyasa | Vyasa | Vyasa
Vyasa, (Sanskrit: “Arranger” or “Compiler”) also called Krishna Dvaipayana or Vedavyasa, (flourished 1500 bce?), legendary Indian sage who is traditionally credited with composing or compiling the Mahabharata, a collection of legendary and didactic poetry worked around a central heroic narrative. In India his birthday is celebrated as Guru Purnima, on Shukla Purnima day in the month of Ashadha (June–July).
According to legend, Vyasa was the son of the ascetic Parashara and the dasyu (aboriginal) princess Satyavati and grew up in forests, living with hermits who taught him the Vedas (ancient sacred literature of India). Thereafter he lived in the forests near the banks of the river Sarasvati, becoming a teacher and a priest, fathering a son and disciple, Shuka, and gathering a large group of disciples. Late in life, living in caves in the Himalayas, he is said to have divided the Vedas into the four traditional collections, composed Puranas, and, in a period of two and a half years, composed his great poetic work, the Mahabharata, supposedly dictating it to his scribe, Ganesha, the elephant god.
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a0a35eb21eb21ac517b822704f4161f4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vytautas-the-Great | Vytautas the Great | Vytautas the Great
Vytautas the Great, Lithuanian Vytautus Didysis, Polish Witold Wielki, (born 1350, Lithuania—died Oct. 27, 1430, Trakai, Lith.), Lithuanian national leader who consolidated his country’s possessions, helped to build up a national consciousness, and broke the power of the Teutonic Knights. He exercised great power over Poland.
Vytautas was the son of Kęstutis, who for years had waged a struggle with his brother Algirdas for control of Lithuania. The conflict between the two branches of the family continued into the next generation, as Vytautas vied with Algirdas’ son Jogaila. Both Vytautas and his father were captured by Jogaila in 1382 and Kęstutis was murdered while a prisoner. Vytautas, however, escaped and two years later was able to make peace with Jogaila, who returned to Vytautas the family lands seized earlier. In an effort to consolidate his position and widen his power, Jogaila married the 12-year-old Polish queen Jadwiga and was crowned king of Poland in Kraków on Feb. 15, 1386, as Władysław II Jagiełło.
Vytautas then waged an intermittent struggle for power with Jogaila and on occasion sought further assistance from the Teutonic Order. Vytautas’ popularity grew until his cousin was forced to adopt a conciliatory position. Jogaila offered to make Vytautas his vice regent over all of Lithuania. The offer was accepted, and in August 1392 a formal compact was signed. As time was to show, Vytautas by this act became supreme ruler of Lithuania in fact if not in law.
Vytautas began his rule by subduing and banishing rebellious and ineffective nobles and trying to conquer the Mongols in the east. His forces, however, were defeated by the Mongols in the Battle of the Vorskla River in present-day Russia on Aug. 12, 1399 (see Vorskla River, Battle of the).
In this same period, union between Poland and Lithuania was proclaimed in a treaty concluded at Vilnius in January 1401. Under the terms of the treaty, the Lithuanian boyars promised that in the event of Vytautas’ death they would recognize Jogaila as grand prince of Lithuania, and the Polish nobility agreed that if Jogaila died they would not elect a new king without consulting Vytautas.
Vytautas and Jogaila then turned their attention westward, and there followed a series of wars with the Teutonic Order, which recognized Švitrigaila (Swidrygiełło), a brother of Jogaila, as grand prince of Lithuania. Vytautas was able to drive Svidrigaila out of the country, but the Teutonic Order was able to retain control of a portion of Lithuania. Early in 1409 Vytautas concluded a treaty with Jogaila for a combined attack on the Order, and on June 24, 1410, the Polish-Lithuanian forces crossed the Prussian frontier. In the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg) on July 15, 1410, the Teutonic Knights suffered a blow from which they never recovered. German supremacy in the Baltic area was broken and Poland-Lithuania began to be regarded in the West as a great power.
In 1429 Vytautas revived his claim to the Lithuanian crown, and Jogaila reluctantly consented to his cousin’s coronation as king, but before the ceremony could take place Vytautas died.
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a2ecb5e7bc273bbfb62966f2755f0eb9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-A-Dwiggins | W.A. Dwiggins | W.A. Dwiggins
W.A. Dwiggins, in full William Addison Dwiggins, (born June 19, 1880, Martinsville, Ohio, U.S.—died Dec. 25, 1956, Hingham, Mass.), American typographer, book designer, puppeteer, illustrator, and calligrapher, who designed four of the most widely used Linotype faces in the United States and Great Britain: Caledonia, Electra, Eldorado, and Metro.
After studying with Frederic Goudy in Chicago, Dwiggins moved in 1906 to Hingham, Mass., where he earned his living doing advertising and lettering. He served as acting director of Harvard University Press in 1917–18 and then turned to book design. He was associated in various capacities with the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, Yale University Press, and the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf, whose house style he helped to establish. Each of the hundreds of books he designed carried a brief colophon on the history of the type employed; there was an attempt to use contemporary typographic decoration; and the bindings, using designs made of repeated decorative units like early printers’ fleurons, were extremely popular.
Dwiggins also designed many deluxe editions for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club, illustrated a number of works, and wrote such books as Layout in Advertising (1928), Marionette in Motion (1939), and Millennium 1 (1945).
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1719d21e24820f78f603761d02b68b86 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-F-Albright | W.F. Albright | W.F. Albright
W.F. Albright, in full William Foxwell Albright, (born May 24, 1891, Coquimbo, Chile—died Sept. 19, 1971, Baltimore, Md., U.S.), American biblical archaeologist and Middle Eastern scholar, noted especially for his excavations of biblical sites.
The son of American Methodist missionaries living abroad, Albright came with his family to the United States in 1903. He obtained his doctorate in Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University. While there he studied under Paul Haupt, whom he succeeded in 1929 as W.W. Spence professor of Semitic languages, a position he held until his retirement in 1958.
Appointed fellow of the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, in 1919, Albright served as the school’s director for 12 years (1920–29, 1933–36). Among his excavations were Gibeah of Saul, Tell Beit Mirsim (Kirjath-Sepher), and, in association with others, Beth-zur and Bethel in Palestine and Baluah, and Petra in Jordan. In 1950–51 he was chief archaeologist of excavations made by the American Foundation for the Study of Man at Wadi Bayhan (Beihan), Hajar Bin Humaid, and Timna in Arabia. Albright early stressed the value of archaeology and of topographical and linguistic studies for biblical history and in making pottery and potsherd identification a reliable scientific tool.
Albright’s scientific writings greatly influenced the development of biblical and related Middle Eastern scholarship and include The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible (1932–35), The Vocalization of the Egyptian Syllabic Orthography (1934), The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim (1932–43), From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940–46), Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (1942–46), and The Bible and the Ancient Near East (1961).
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331b03382da344e1c70990de72d53acf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-H-Shiers | W. H. Shiers | W. H. Shiers
Shiers, as mechanics. They landed at Darwin, Northern Territory, on December 10. Afterward, the brothers were knighted and received a £10,000 prize.
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e8c1075e7c469dd4a65b280e393d08a3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-H-Zachariasen | W. H. Zachariasen | W. H. Zachariasen
Zachariasen published The Atomic Arrangement in Glass, a classic paper that had perhaps the most influence of any published work on glass science. Zachariasen’s work placed the understanding of glass structure and its relationship to composition on its modern footing. The principles of his atomic…
…in 1932 by the physicist W.H. Zachariasen, glass is an extended, three-dimensional network of atoms that form a solid which lacks the long-range periodicity (or repeated, orderly arrangement) typical of crystalline materials.
According to Zachariasen, in order for a given oxide AmOn to form a glassy solid, it must meet the following criteria: (1) the oxygen should be linked to no more than two atoms of A, (2) the coordination number of the oxygen about…
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f74c9d2e31f623b61756085e3132fba7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-Jason-Morgan | W. Jason Morgan | W. Jason Morgan
Parker of Britain and W. Jason Morgan of the United States resolved these issues. McKenzie and Parker showed with a geometric analysis that, if the moving slabs of crust were thick enough to be regarded as rigid and thus to remain undeformed, their motions on a sphere would lead…
…the 1960s the American geologist W. Jason Morgan, one of the several outstanding pioneers in plate tectonics, recognized that transform faults are zones where opposing lithospheric plates slip past one another. Morgan proposed that opposing plates along an oceanic ridge crest offset by fracture zones are divided by the spreading…
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518c1bb030d5940eb82ead177983d939 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-K-Kellogg | W. K. Kellogg | W. K. Kellogg
W. K. Kellogg, (born April 7, 1860, Battle Creek, Mich., U.S.—died Oct. 6, 1951, Battle Creek), American industrialist and philanthropist who founded (1906) the W.K. Kellogg Company to manufacture cereal products as breakfast foods. His cereals have found widespread use throughout the United States.
Kellogg established the firm after working with his brother John Harvey Kellogg, a physician who directed the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where cereal products were advocated as health foods. The company originally made only toasted cornflakes but later added other products. In 1930 Kellogg established the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which has donated large sums of money in support of efforts at social improvement, particularly programs of child welfare.
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3db64e07756157312075e2b21eeeff29 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-S-Merwin | W.S. Merwin | W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin, in full William Stanley Merwin, (born September 30, 1927, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 15, 2019, Haiku, Hawaii), American poet and translator known for the spare style of his poetry, in which he expressed his concerns about the alienation of humans from their environment.
After graduating from Princeton University (B.A., 1947), Merwin worked as a tutor in Europe and as a freelance translator. He was playwright in residence at the Poet’s Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1956 to 1957 and poetry editor of The Nation (1962).
Critical acclaim for Merwin began with his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), which was selected for publication by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. His early poems included both lyrical works and philosophical narratives based on myths and folk tales. His subsequent collections included Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), and The Moving Target (1963). The poems of The Lice (1967) reflect the poet’s despair over human mistreatment of the rest of creation. Merwin won a Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders (1970).
The Compass Flower (1977) and Finding the Islands (1982) diverge into more positive territory, though many critics dismissed the love poems that heralded the change in tone as unsuccessful. The love poems in The Rain in the Trees (1988), however, were lauded as more realistic. Travels (1993) turns to the danger and discovery possible in an alien place, while The River Sound (1999) juxtaposes shorter poems in Merwin’s usual style with longer narrative pieces that experiment with rhyme. Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005), winner of the National Book Award, groups work from his earlier career with new verse to effectively trace the evolution of his style from structured to free-flowing. Merwin explored personal childhood memories as well as such universal themes as mortality in The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which earned a Pulitzer Prize. Much of his oeuvre was published by the Library of America (LOA) as the two-volume The Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin (2013). Merwin was only the second living writer to be so surveyed by the LOA. The Moon Before Morning (2014) contains poems exploring time and the beauty of nature. The poems in Garden Time (2016)—many of which focus on memories—were written as Merwin lost most of his eyesight.
Merwin’s translations, often done in collaboration with others, range from plays of Euripides and Federico García Lorca to the epics The Poem of the Cid and The Song of Roland to ancient and modern works from Chinese, Sanskrit, and Japanese. Translations of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio (2000) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2001) won praise for their skillful adherence to the original language of the works. Selected Translations (2013) sampled widely from that body of work.
Merwin wrote several memoirs, including Summer Doorways (2006), a series of recollections from his youthful days at Princeton and abroad. In his novel-in-verse, The Folding Cliffs (1998), Merwin addressed an abiding interest in Hawaii, his longtime home, using the travails of a wide range of characters to evoke the ravages of colonialism. The poet had purchased a barren former pineapple plantation in Haiku, on Maui, in 1977. He slowly restored the land, using ecologically sustainable methods, and the property eventually hosted nearly 500 species of palm tree. The Merwin Conservancy, founded in 2010, endeavoured to create a database mapping and cataloguing the collection, which received permanent protection from the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust in 2014. Merwin documented his experiences creating and stewarding the collection in the volume What Is a Garden? (2015).
In 1994 he was awarded the first annual Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” From 1999 to 2000 Merwin served—with Rita Dove and Louise Glück—as special poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, which was celebrating its bicentennial. He served as poet laureate from 2010 to 2011. He was the subject of the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning (2014).
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779ad3b194d60b236c20d4c2ba467ce5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-S-Van-Dyke/Powell-and-Loy-Eddy-and-MacDonald | Powell and Loy, Eddy and MacDonald | Powell and Loy, Eddy and MacDonald
Manhattan Melodrama was the first film to pair Powell and Loy, and they became one of Hollywood’s most popular on-screen duos. They next worked on The Thin Man (1934), which was Van Dyke’s deft adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s popular detective novel. It wisely downplayed the book’s rather haphazard detective work in favour of warm byplay between Powell and Loy, who were cannily cast as Nick and Nora Charles. Yet another box-office success, the film earned Van Dyke his first Academy Award nomination for best director. Hide-Out (1934) was also a crime comedy. Robert Montgomery was cast as a gangster who retires to the country to recover from a gunshot wound and ends up falling in love with a farm girl (O’Sullivan). Forsaking All Others—Van Dyke’s fifth release of 1934—paired Joan Crawford and Gable in a plodding romantic comedy. Much better was the musical Naughty Marietta (1935; uncredited), the first teaming of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. It received an Oscar nomination for best picture.
After the popular Crawford romance I Live My Life (1935), Van Dyke made Rose-Marie (1936), the second Eddy-MacDonald musical. An even bigger hit than the first, it was perhaps the best of their showcases. San Francisco (1936; uncredited) proved that MacDonald could hold her own opposite the studio’s biggest star, Gable, in a primarily dramatic role. The classic film, which was set during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, was MGM’s most-profitable release of the year and earned a best picture Oscar nomination. In addition, Van Dyke received his second nomination for best director, and Spencer Tracy, who played Father Tim Mullen, earned his first Oscar nod.
His Brother’s Wife (1936), however, was a turgid melodrama, with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor as lovers. Van Dyke had more success with The Devil Is a Sissy (1936), a dramedy that cast young stars Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, and Jackie Cooper as boys from differing backgrounds who end up attending the same school in New York. Love on the Run (1936) featured Gable and Franchot Tone as foreign correspondents and Crawford as the woman they both desire. Van Dyke’s sixth release of 1936, After the Thin Man, may have been even better than the popular original. In addition to Powell and Loy returning as Nick and Nora Charles, James Stewart appeared in a supporting role.
In 1937 Van Dyke directed Jean Harlow in Personal Property, but it was one of her weaker vehicles. The romantic comedy was perhaps most notable for being the last film the actress completed before her death. They Gave Him a Gun (1937) combined several genres, notably war drama and film noir, as Tone portrayed a meek clerk who takes up a life of crime after serving in World War I, despite the best efforts of his friend (Tracy) to save him. Van Dyke then returned to musicals with Rosalie (1937), a laboured production starring Eddy and Eleanor Powell, with songs by Cole Porter. Marie Antoinette (1938) was an overlong but solid biopic about the Austrian princess who became queen of France. The lavish drama was a showcase for Norma Shearer, though Robert Morley’s performance as Louis XVI drew much acclaim; both were nominated for Oscars.
Sweethearts (1938) was another pairing of Eddy and MacDonald, but the formula was showing signs of wear, despite the lavish Technicolor production values, the Victor Herbert score, and the screenplay by Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell; Robert Z. Leonard directed some scenes, but his work was not credited. In 1939 Van Dyke made his first western in years, but Stand Up and Fight was formulaic, with Taylor and Wallace Beery as the stubborn antagonists. It’s a Wonderful World (1939) was a screwball comedy inspired by Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934); Stewart starred as a fugitive on the run, and Claudette Colbert was a runaway poet (rather than a runaway heiress, as in Capra’s film). Although predictable, the film was popular with moviegoers, in part because of the outstanding character actors—Edgar Kennedy, Guy Kibbee, Hans Conried, and Nat Pendleton.
Van Dyke was then assigned Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939), which was not a very prestigious project for a director of his stature. However, his films of the previous year or two had been uneven, and that might have been an attempt to get him back on track. Whatever the motivation, the light comedy was a solid entry in the popular Andy Hardy series. Another Thin Man (1939) was a more-expected project, and Van Dyke spun another enjoyable confection; that installment included Nick and Nora Charles’s new baby.
I Take This Woman (1940) featured mismatched Tracy and Hedy Lamarr in a cloying story of unappreciated sacrifice; directors Frank Borzage and Josef von Sternberg also had worked on the production but left the project and were not credited. Van Dyke reunited with MacDonald and Eddy on Bitter Sweet (1940), which was based on the Noël Coward operetta. Although the film failed to match the success of their earlier collaborations, it was still a modest hit. With I Love You Again (1940), Van Dyke worked with another popular team, Powell and Loy, and the results were notable. The screwball comedy was as funny as many better-known 1930s classics. It centres on a dull businessman who, after being hit in the head, remembers that he was once a con man; the discovery makes his wife rethink her decision to divorce him.
Van Dyke took over for Robert Sinclair on Rage in Heaven (1941), but perhaps no director could have made that adaptation of James Hilton’s grim story work. Even with Ingrid Bergman and Montgomery in the cast, the picture was a disappointment. Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) was not quite up to the level of the three earlier entries in the series, but the reliable Powell-Loy chemistry still came through. The Feminine Touch (1941) was a passable marital farce, with Rosalind Russell, Don Ameche, and Kay Francis all strong in their somewhat underwritten roles. Dr. Kildare’s Victory (1942) was an effective entry in the popular series, with Lew Ayres making his final appearance as the doctor.
I Married an Angel (1942) was the last of the Eddy-MacDonald musicals, a slight bit of whimsy about a playboy who dreams that he has fallen in love with an angel; even the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tunes could not rescue the film. MacDonald returned for Cairo (1942), an espionage spoof that drew mixed reviews but was worth seeing for supporting players Dooley Wilson and Ethel Waters. Van Dyke’s final work was the box-office hit Journey for Margaret (1942), a sentimental World War II drama, with five-year-old Margaret O’Brien playing a survivor of the London blitz who is adopted by an American couple (Robert Young and Laraine Day).
Van Dyke was 51 when he was called to active service by the marines after Pearl Harbor. He served as a recruiter until he was unable to work because of failing health. Van Dyke, who was a Christian Scientist, declined medical treatment, and in 1943 he committed suicide.
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53c0701677395a424a7cee08b46c7ff3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Waclaw-Potocki | Wacław Potocki | Wacław Potocki
Wacław Potocki, (born 1621, Wola Łużeńska, Poland—died July 9, 1696, Łużna), Polish poet well known for his epic poetry and for his collection of epigrams.
Potocki, a country squire with little formal education, wrote most of his verse (about 300,000 lines) to please himself. A Unitarian, he was given a choice between exile and conversion to Roman Catholicism when a decree banished all Unitarians from Poland. He chose reluctantly to convert but his wife refused, and he spent many years fearing for her life.
Potocki authored a vigorous epic poem, Transakcja wojny chocimskiej (“The Conduct of the Chocim War”), finished in 1670. It was not published until 1850, as Wojna chocimska. The epic describes the defense in 1621 of the city of Chocim by 65,000 Poles and Cossacks against a Turkish army estimated at 400,000. Historically accurate, though it idealizes the Polish heroes, Wojna chocimska reveals Potocki’s gift for poetic condensation.
Potocki was also famous for his epigrams, collected in Ogród fraszek (“Garden of Rhymes,” written 1670–95; published 1907), which give a lively picture of ideas and manners among the gentry at a time of political and religious conflict.
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078022e4dc5d5a34e2746b929f4ec736 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walafrid-Strabo | Walafrid Strabo | Walafrid Strabo
Walafrid Strabo, (born c. 808, Swabia—died Aug. 18, 849, Reichenau, Franconia [now in Germany]), Benedictine abbot, theologian, and poet whose Latin writings were the principal exemplar of German Carolingian culture.
Walafrid received a liberal education at the abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance. After further studies under the celebrated Rabanus Maurus of Fulda Abbey, he was recommended in 829 as tutor to Charles the Bald, son of the Holy Roman emperor Louis I the Pious. Rewarded for his services at court by his appointment as abbot of Reichenau in 838, Walafrid became involved in the power struggle between Louis’s sons and, because of his support of the imperial claims of Lothar I, was banished in 839 by Louis the German. After Lothar’s defeat in 842, however, Walafrid was reinstated at Reichenau and served as Louis the German’s emissary to Charles the Bald.
Walafrid was esteemed by his contemporaries more for his theological thought and writings than for his poetry, on which modern interest chiefly focuses. His best-known theological work, Liber de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum (c. 841; “Book on the Origins and Development of Certain Matters in Church Practice”), is valuable for its data on Carolingian religious affairs and administration.
As a young monk at Reichenau about 826, Walafrid set to verse Visio Wettini (“The Vision of Wettin”), recording a mystical experience described by his first tutor. With its poetic images of hell, purgatory, and paradise, Visio Wettini anticipated Dante’s Divine Comedy. Later Walafrid wrote his most important poem, Liber de cultura hortorum (“Book on the Art of Gardening”), a lyrical piece describing 23 flowers and herbs, their mythological and Christian significances, and their healing properties. His other works include an important panegyric poem, De imagine Tetrici (“On the Statue of Theodoric”), and a revision of the Life of Charlemagne by the eminent Frankish historian Einhard. Because of its readability and accuracy, this account of Charlemagne is considered one of the outstanding biographies of the Middle Ages.
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