Heroic Struggle Research Articles

An epic of the heroic struggle of a people: Arved Viirlaid'sGraves without crosses

(1973). An epic of the heroic struggle of a people: Arved Viirlaid's Graves without crosses. Journal of Baltic Studies: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 148-154.

The Style and Structure of Milton's “Readie and Easie Way”

ABSTRACT The second edition of The Readie and Easie Way was published when all politically conscious Englishmen knew that a restoration was imminent. A recognition of this fact, and its near-tragic implications for Milton's cause, governs the style and structure of the pamphlet. When Milton contemplates the forces leading England to the Restoration, his coordinate, linear style implies that the situation is beyond rational control. When he proposes his ready and easy way, his more structured style generates an image of the politics of pure reason. These two styles alternate throughout the tract and create a pattern of futile but heroic political struggle. Periodically, Milton makes his serenely rational plan more detailed and socially comprehensive, but the intervals between these propositions are filled with denunciations of political reality, insinuations that no republican solutions are feasible at the moment. As this pattern unfolds, suggestions of political fantasy, suggestions that Milton realizes his plan is all too ready and easy, become more and more prominent in the positive or rational sections. The tract concludes with a sentence in which the style of reasoned presentation is gradually replaced by the style of futility. Realism defeats the fulfillment of wishes, but does not quite extinguish political commitment.

The Party's Concern for the Development of Secondary Specialized Educational Institutions

The grandiose scale of development of the USSR national economy in 1971-1975 projected in the Directives of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress opens vivid new pages in the chronicle of the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to implement the Leninist general line of our Party. The creative programs of the new five-year plan are permeated with the Party's highest goal: "Everything in the name of man, everything for the good of man."

The Great Struggle for Liberation

Abstract This article describes briefly the Chinese women's inferior status under the traditional feudal system, their bitter sufferings under the Kuomintang tyrannical rule, their heroic struggle for freedom and emancipation, and their new life in the Liberated Areas. Although rapid changes have taken place since this article was written in autumn 1948, it still serves to throw light on the vital role of the Chinese women in the great people's struggle for liberation.

The Questing Fear: Christian Allegory in John Updike's "The Centaur"

Updike prefaces this tragic allegory with a quotation from John Barth, which the theologian depicts man as a hybrid creature on the boundary between heaven and earth. As a centaur Chiron himself is also a hybrid creature, a monster whose hominoid and equine elements interlock.'' It is Chiron's task to reconcile the poles of this dichotomy, to re-unite man and animal, man and god, body and soul, earth and heaven, as they were united the golden age of Greek myth. It is fitting that during this task he suffers from excruciating pain the abdomen where his human and animal halves meet. By the time we learn that this pain does not fact come from terminal cancer of the bowel, we are ripe for the novel's implication that Chiron's sickness is a symbol of his crisis of faith, of the agony he suffers his heroic struggle to overcome death's horror and the earth's evil. At the moment when he conquers this crisis of faith, there is a momentous change within him: he realizes that spring buds from the of winter, that Christ was born king in the pit of the year, and that human joy is the enduring glory which emerges from earthly purgatory and promises paradise. Mythically this restoration is reflected the restoration of potency to castrated Uranus (heaven) and fertility to sterile Gaia (earth) (266). That is, his sickness has been his fear that God was dead or at best unreachable, that an anvil could fall forever from Sky and never strike Earth (265). Now he exults the joy of those around him, for joy is divine, and it is as if

Local Soviets and the State Conference

The chronicle of the Great October Socialist Revolution is filled with many pages of heroic struggle for Soviet power by the working class and toiling peasantry under the leadership of the Communist Party. The principal stages and basic turning points of the revolutionary movement in the Russia of 1917 are matters of continuing interest to researchers. However, certain events of considerable importance in the growth of the class self-awareness of the laboring population and in the shaping of the army of the socialist revolution have not had their due attention. To this day, for example, there has been little study of the relationship of class forces at the time of the convening by the Provisional Government of the so-called State Conference of August 12-15th, 1917. The authors of monographs devoted to the events of the summer ot 1917 (1) have touched upon this question, but it has not had study on its own. This kind of thing often gives rise to errors of two types. On the one hand, examination of organization of counterrevolutionary rebellion by the Kadets is limited solely to the rising undertaken by General L. G. Kornilov. On the other hand, the revival of activity by the Soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies and their passage to a revolutionary position are interpreted as a process that supposedly began only in the autumn of 1917 (after the Kornilov mutiny). With this interpretation of events, the objective causes and subjective factors that accounted for the failure of Kornilov's counterrevolutionary conspiracy and the mass-scale Bolshevization of the Soviets in the fall of 1917 remain unexplained.

The Crisis of East Germany

a year has passed since the uprising in Eastern Germany, which the Manchester Guardian justly termed of the decisive events of our time. Now that the fog of rumours, exaggerations, denials and misrepresentations has cleared away, it seems possible to see the sensational happening of June 17 in their proper perspective. It was evident from the outset that such a revolt of the masses could not fully succeed as long as Russian troops were stationed in the Eastern zone. But even though it was doomed to failure in certain respects, must we concede that the whole heroic struggle was in vain? Or are we permitted to consider the 17th June as a turning point not only for Eastern Germany but for the whole area behind the Iron Curtain? A sober examination of the situation as it appeared in December, 1953, may provide the answer to these questions. No doubt, most of the key figures of the regime in the Soviet zone are still around, although the workers had made it clear on June 17 that they wanted a change from top to bottom. The symbolic head of the German Democratic Republic, Wihelm Pieck, was demonstratively re-elected in October for another term by the two houses of the East German parliament. Pieck, one of the last survivors from the early days of German communism, is old and not in good health. He had been absent during the critical June days. Originally, only a brief extension of his first term had been planned, but finally it seemed desirable to retain this figurehead for another four years, and the occasion of his re-election was used for some oratorical fireworks. Pieck will continue to reside in the old Hohenzollern palace in Niederschonhausen, but the real decisions will be made elsewhere. It is most unlikely that Otto Grotewohl will ever make them, although he, too, has been retained after the June revolt. The Minister President of the German Democratic Republic does not enjoy an independent position comparable to that of Chancellor

Stanislaw Kalinowski and the Swider Geophysical Observatory

No. 10 of the Travaux de l'Observatoire Géophysique a Swider, Poland, is the first publication of the Observatory for seven years; geophysicists will welcome this reappearance of the journal, more especially in view of the great sufferings of Poland during the War, and the continuing difficulties there. But they will mourn the loss, reported in this issue of the Travaux, of the founder and director of the Observatory, Stanislaw Kalinowski, whose death occurred early last year, at the age of seventy. Many who were present at the Edinburgh assembly of the International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics, which he attended with his daughter, will cherish recollections of his ardent interest in the science of geomagnetism, which he served so long and so well, particularly through the founding of the Swider Observatory in 1921, and through the magnetic survey of Poland which he conducted from that base. This issue of the Travaux, prepared by his hand, besides giving hourly values of the magnetic elements at Swider for the year 1936, summarizes the results obtained for the daily variation of the magnetic elements over the period 1921–35; it also contains a vivid account of the fortunes of the Observatory during the Second World War. An introduction to the publication, written by another hand, gives a moving account of his own heroic struggles, amidst afflictions that would have crushed many a younger man, to defend his Observatory from Nazi avidity and to maintain its work. He never lost faith in the overthrow of the conquerors of Poland, and made plans for the end of the War and the future of the Observatory. It is good to know that State provision has now been made for the Observatory, and that it has been newly named after its distinguished founder.

The engineer, practical idealist: President's address

THE Institute, meeting here in convention on the “stern and rock bound coast” of New England, finds itself on historic ground. In this region are located many battle fields, of arms and of intellect, that have left their deep impress on our civilization. The battle fields of arms are marked by monuments that are now shrines of an appreciative people. The battles of the intellect, though often accompanied by bloodshed, are not so well remembered. Bunker Hill is fresher in our minds than are Salem and Roger Williams, yet Williams' heroic struggle for freedom of thought paved the way for that later struggle marked by the shaft on Bunker Hill.

Insect Behaviour 1

IT was on a Harmas (an untilled, pebbly bit of land) in Provence that Fabre, after heroic struggles, opened his “laboratory of living entomology, ” where, undisturbed, he might “pry into life.” “Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the occupations have made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, artificers handling goldbeaters' skin, and many more.” What a place for studying those inborn capacities for effective behaviour which we label instinctive! What disclosures this inimitable observer gives us—the sounds of the midsummer night from the tinkling of toads to the death-wail of the surprised cicada, the green grasshopper's strange banquet off her fertilising capsule, the quick and fatal bite which the “devilkin” or Empusa gives on the back of the butterfly's neck; the beautifully finished cupolas made by Eumenes wasps out of minute pebbles and mortar, and stored with half-paralysed caterpillars, the food for the grub which hatches out of the egg cleverly suspended from the roof; the way the glow-worm deals with snails, first chloroforming them and then drinking them, for the flesh has to be liquefied into a broth before it can be used. Fabres words suggest that the liquid passes up the hollow mandibles to the mouth, but there seems some doubt on this point, as may be seen by comparing the recent observations of Miss Kathleen Haddoh with those of Prof. Bugnion.