VANDALISM AND CULTURE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 46, 29 April 1942, Page 6

VANDALISM AND CULTURE

AMERICAN EXHIBITION OPENS IN MOSCOW The Moscow Central Library of Foreign Literature has opened an exhibition of American literature. This includes the works of Theodore Dreiser, Ppton Sinclair, Stcnbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine CaldAvell, Eugene O'Neill. Richard Wright Mark Twain, Jack London and others. Exhibits include portraits, illustrations and bibliographical lists of American litreaturc translated into Russian. The library regularly receives periodicals and books from the U.S.A. It is expecting a large consignment of bocks, mainly on philology, literature and popular science, in the near future. Germans Destroyed Tolstoy's Home Yasnaya Polyana, home of the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, which has just been recaptured by Soviet troops, was razed to the ground by the Germans. On the writer's estate, to which thousands of Soviet people came every year to pay homage, nothing was spared by the drunken Nazi soldiers. Even the trees, which Tolstoy loved so well, were hacked down and torn up by the roots. The Germans also destroyed a cob lage at Istra in which the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, lived, and the Tchnakovsky Museum aj Klin. Life in the Moscow Universities There are far fewer students now in the Moscow Universities and High Schools than before the Avar. The greater part of them have gone to the froint. Many who only six months ago were sitting quietly over their studies are now well-known airmen, tank destroyers and officers. A large number of women students have gone as Avar nurses. Consequently, many of Moscow's schools are closed. Closed- also is the central wing of the oldest Moscow University, which has been bombed by the Germans and is now being rapidly rebuilt. In a number of other colleges, however, studies went on through the whole time of the great battle for Moscoav. A feAV days ago a visit Avas paid to the students of the Moscoav Pedagogical Institute, which is the foremost Russian training college for teachers. No changes been made in the syllabus of the Institute in general, but most subjects have been adjusted to the practical needs of the Avar. The classes in anatomy are supplemented by lectures on aid to and care for the Avounded. Lectures on the doctrine of DanA'in haA r e been superseded by lectures on Nazi racial theory. Particular attention is devoted in the history classes to the history of the SlaA r onic peoples and their struggle against German domination. The German "Bottle Party" It is an interesting commentary on the recent Reich collection of bottles to contain "winter warmers" for the troops that drunkenness is spreading at an extraordinary rate among the German soldiers. All the German military in Poland drink to excess, and older people who remember the 1914-18 Avar and the German occupation decfire that the drunkenness today is out of all comparison with that of those times. The Suppression of all Decency German nurses in children's hospitals and creches in Poland recently had to reproA-e the parents of German children staying in the hospitals. Apparently the German parents haA r e been committing the heinous offence of giA'ing fruit to Polish children in the Avard, as by order of the German authorities they nro not alloAvcd fruit. On the other hand, a German child out for a walk Avith his father happened to hear another child talkins; Polish, and ran up and struck it: of course, his father publicly praised his ■conduct as Avorthy of a German.