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Task № 1

US-China climate deal boosts global talks but Republicans vow to resist

A secretly negotiated agreement between the US and China to lower greenhouse-gas output faced a wall of opposition on Wednesday from Republicans in Washington, who threatened to use their control of both houses of Congress to thwart the plan.

Under the deal, unveiled unexpectedly in Beijing early on Wednesday, China committed for the first time to cap its output of carbon pollution by 2030. Beijing also promised to increase its use of zero-emission energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to 20% by 2030.

The United States agreed to double the pace of the cuts in its emissions, reducing them to between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

The deal struck between President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, provides an important boost to efforts to reach a global deal to fight climate change at a United Nations meeting in Paris next year. The accord also removes the Republicans’ main rationale for blocking Obama’s efforts to cut carbon pollution – the claim that China is unwilling to undertake similar cuts.

But Republicans in the US Congress reacted strongly against the deal on Wednesday. The party already held a majority in the House of Representatives, and the midterm elections last week also delivered them control of the Senate, where the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said Obama would not be in the White House long enough to see the plan through.

“This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs,” he said.

In his first meeting with the incoming Republican majority, McConnell, who represents the coal state of Kentucky, said he was “distressed” at the deal, adding that the diplomatic breakthrough would have no effect on his disdain for international climate negotiations.

“As I read the agreement it requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emissions regulations are creating havoc in my state and around the country,” he said.

The Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, also attacked the deal, and suggested he would move legislation to further limit Obama’s ability to deliver the carbon pollution cuts he promised.

The White House has said the US can deliver the promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through existing regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules for power plants, which are the core of Obama’s climate agenda.

But Boehner said: “Republicans have consistently passed legislation to rein in the EPA and stop these harmful policies from taking effect, and we will continue to make this a priority in the new Congress.”

Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican and climate denier who is poised to take over the Senate environment and public works committee in January, said China’s end of the bargain was just a ploy to buy time.

“It’s hollow and not believable for China to claim it will shift 20% of its energy to non-fossil fuels by 2030 and a promise to peak its carbon emissions only allows the world’s largest economy to buy time,” he said. “As we enter a new Congress I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.”

President Obama hailed the deal at a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart at the Great Hall of the People. “As the world’s largest economies and greatest emitters of greenhouse gases we have special responsibility to lead the global effort against climate change,” he said. “I am proud we can announce a historic agreement. I commend President Xi, his team and the Chinese government for the commitment they are making to slow, peak and then reverse China’s carbon emissions.”

President Xi said: “We agreed to make sure international climate change negotiations will reach agreement as scheduled at the Paris conference in 2015 and agreed to deepen practical cooperation on clean energy, environmental protection and other areas.”

The early opposition in Washington raised questions about whether the US and China will be able to deliver on their respective commitments. Obama administration officials argue the new US target is achievable under existing laws.

But with Republicans in control of Congress, there is virtually no prospect of new climate legislation, and there could be delays that would weaken regulations put in place by the EPA before they come into force. “The US target looks like it’s going to be really tough to meet without new laws,” Michael Levi, an energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a blog post.

“The EPA power plant rules as they’re currently proposed are already spurring plenty of pushback; pressing them further will be a tall political and technical task. In particular, it’s near-impossible to imagine achieving these goals simply with actions taken during the Obama administration. President Obama’s administration may have developed and negotiated these numbers, but his successor will determine whether they’re achieved.”

China also faces technical challenges to reaching its targets.

The White House said in a statement that China could reach peak emissions even earlier than 2030 “based on its broad economic reform programme, plans to address air pollution and implementation of President Xi’s call for an energy revolution”.

But the White House acknowledged it would be more difficult for China to scale up to 20% energy from zero-emission sources by 2030.

“It will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 – more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States,” the White House said.

Some campaign groups also pointed out that the agreement – while ambitious – still did not go as far as scientists say is needed to limit dangerous warming.

The European Union has already endorsed a binding 40% greenhouse gas emissions reduction target by 2030.

Diplomats said they hoped that the US-China deal would provide momentum to climate negotiations.

Officials are to meet in Lima at the end of the month to begin the last phase of negotiations for a global deal to cut emissions in Paris. As part of those talks, countries will also be preparing to put forward their own targets for cutting emissions by early 2015.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, urged other countries to show their hand on emissions cuts: “We welcome the announcement today by the presidents of the United States and China on their respective post-2020 actions on climate change.

“The announcements to date cover around half of the global emissions. We urge others, especially the G20 members, to announce their targets in the first half of 2015 and transparently. Only then we can assess together if our collective efforts will allow us to fulfil the goal of keeping global temperature increases well below 2C.”

Tao Wang, climate scholar at the Tsinghua-Carnegie Center for Global Policy in Beijing, said: “It is a very good sign for both countries and injects strong momentum [into negotiations] but the targets are not ambitious enough and there is room for both countries to negotiate an improvement.

“That figure isn’t high because China aims to reach about 15% by 2020, so it is only a five percentage point increase in 10 years, and given the huge growth in renewables it should be higher.”

Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, which promotes sustainable resource management, said the announcements would “inject a jolt of momentum in the lead-up to a global climate agreement in Paris”.

“It’s a new day to have the leaders of the US and China stand shoulder to shoulder and make significant commitments to curb their country’s emissions,” he said.

Task 2

Putin: Military invasion in Ukraine ‘last resort’

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday called acting authorities in Ukraine illegitimate, but said a military intervention in Russia's western neighbor still remains a final resort.

Last month’s ouster of Putin’s counterpart, Viktor Yanukovych, was “an anti-constitutional coup and a military seizure of power,” the Russian president said.

Russia deployed last week its troops to Ukraine’s pro-Russian Crimean Peninsula and threatened a larger armed invasion to protect Russian nationals and speakers in the country.

“If mayhem breaks out in eastern Ukraine and people ask for help, Russia reserves the right to react, but this is a last resort,” Putin said at a press conference. “It’s a humanitarian mission, we don’t aspire to enslave anyone.”

Putin also said that Yanukovych, who has fled to Russia, remains Ukraine’s legitimate president.

“The Ukrainian parliament is partly legitimate, but all other authorities aren’t,” he said.

Astarte Syriaca: The Epitome of the Rossettian Pre-Raphaelite Love Goddess

One of the grandest and most elaborate portraits of Jane Morris created during the latter part of Rosetti's career, Astarte Syriaca, epitomizes the ideal of the voluptuous, sensual woman -- the muse. After the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddall in 1862, Rosetti returned to the subject matter of the female figure with greater intensity and captured his models with an obsessive sense of sensuality that heralded a novel theme in his work. The painting, Venetian in style as a result of Rosetti's multiculturalism, received mixed criticism due to its strong, often disturbing, erotic content (Rossetti Archive, Astarte Syriaca [for a picture]). Indicative of the nature of his relationship with Jane Morris, Rosetti's treatment of color and feminine subject matter allocates a sense of melancholy within the work, a sentiment that consequently divulges his own tragic love for Jane, the second great muse of his life.

Rosetti renders Jane as Venus Astarte in the painting. Depicted as an icon of desire and sensual perfection, Venus's direct gaze, bare shoulder, and strong stance reveal the strength of her own sexuality. Behind her torch-bearing attendants, a crescent moon shines in symbolic representation of her relation to the cosmos and the divine immortality of her womanly beauty. Rosetti introduces this idea in the first line of the accompanying sonnet of the same name, as he makes an allusion to the figure of the "woman clothed with sun" from the Book of Revelation 12:1, thus revealing his perception of the divine and cosmic power within the beauty of the female (Rossetti Archive). He describes her physical features in an idealized manner that implies the realization of these divine orders upon an encounter with such beauty:

And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean Love-Freightened lips and absolute eyes that wean. The pulse of hearts to the spheres' dominant tune. The image of the spheres here refers to the Pythagorean music of the spheres, and the weaning of the pulse of hearts implies that desire itself can instigate a realization of the cosmic order, the ultimate mystery (Rossetti Archive). Thus, as a composition that references religious iconographic imagery, Astarte Syriaca depicts "the very epitome of the Rossettian Pre-Raphaelite love goddess" (Wood 102) through the idealization of the woman.

Мальдивы. Все ли так прекрасно?

Все мы привыкли ассоциировать Мальдивы с прекрасным. Но так ли это на самом деле? Это место имеет не только шикарные отели, прозрачные воды и пляжные места с картинок. Интересные факты о Мальдывах раскроют вам другие стороны этого сказочного места, о которых даже и не догадываются туристы.

На самом деле среди атоллов существует некий остров, на который местное население сбрасывает 400 тонн различных отходов каждый день. Большую часть этого мусора составляют пластиковые бутылки, которые буйные ветра и сильные воды распространяют далеко за пределы этого места.

Ebola death toll up 200 since Friday, WHO figures show

WHO says 5,160 people have died in eight countries, up from 4,960 on Friday, as outbreak appears to be spreading in Mali

The World Health Organisation said on Wednesday that 5,160 people had died of Ebola in eight countries out of 14,098 cases of infection.

The WHO has acknowledged that the number of deaths is probably far higher, given that the fatality rate in the current outbreak is known to be about 70%.

The toll has risen from 4,960 deaths and 13,268 cases on Friday.

The outbreak appeared to be spreading in Mali, with four Ebola cases – all fatal – confirmed or suspected in that country.

The deadliest Ebola outbreak in history continues to affect Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone the most.

The WHO said 2,836 deaths had been recorded in Liberia, out of a total of 6,822 cases. In Sierra Leone, 1,169 people had died from 5,368 cases. In Guinea, there were 1,142 deaths from 1,878 cases.

Nigeria had eight deaths and 20 cases, while Senegal had one case and no deaths. Both totals remained unchanged in the latest WHO figures and both countries have been declared Ebola free.

In Mali, the WHO reported three additional Ebola deaths, but said they were not linked to the only other case and death recorded in the country – that of a two-year-old girl from Guinea.

There has been one case of infection in Spain, where an infected nurse has recovered.

In the US, four Ebola cases have been recorded and one person – a Liberian – had died from the virus.

Ebola, one of the deadliest known viruses, is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person showing symptoms such as fever or vomiting.

People caring for the sick or handling the bodies of people infected with Ebola are particularly exposed. The WHO said 564 healthcare workers were known to have contracted the virus, and 320 of them had died.

Task 3

Утечки из «облака»: как себя защитить?

Недавно новость об утечке личных фотографий знаменитостей мгновенно подняла на уши весь Интернет: анонимные хакеры раздобыли и выложили в Сеть фотографии обнаженных знаменитостей, включая голливудскую актрису Дженнифер Лоуренс. Конечно, подобные «сливы» случались и ранее, но в данном случае особой пикантности ситуации придало то, что некоторые утекшие снимки были похищены прямиком из аккаунтов знаменитостей в облачном хранилище Apple iCloud.

Есть основания полагать, что несанкционированный доступ к ряду аккаунтов знаменитостей стал возможен благодаря подбору пароля методом перебора. Конечно, сервис iCloud и другие подобные интернет-ресурсы защищены от подобного метода взлома, но, как показывает история, всегда можно найти лазейку. Собственно, в случае с iCloud именно так и могло произойти: если пытаться «достучаться» до хранилища при помощи сервиса Find My iPhone, то ограничения на количество и частоту попыток ввода пары «логин-пароль» можно легко обойти, получая, таким образом, возможность подбирать секретное слово сколь угодно долго. Именно это, судя по всему, и было сделано злоумышленниками, которые использовали для подбора пароля специальную программу, свободно доступную на сайте GitHub.

Судя по тому, в каком количестве и как быстро хакерами был раздобыт доступ к аккаунтам, многие знаменитости использовали не очень сложные пароли и явно игнорировали двухфакторную аутентификацию - метод идентификации пользователя при помощи запроса данных двух разных типов (например, постоянного пароля акаунта и специального смс-кода).

К счастью, уже 1 сентября уязвимость в защите облачного сервиса Apple была устранена, в результате чего после несколько неудачных попыток ввода пароля, в том числе при помощи описанного алгоритма, атакуемый аккаунт стал блокироваться. В официальном пресс-релизе представители компании фактически признали тот факт, что некоторые фотографии были украдены из iCloud-аккаунтов, но не подтвердили слухи о том, что несанкционированный доступ к ним был получен вследствие каких-либо уязвимостей. Кража содержимого, если верить документу, была осуществлена посредством целенаправленных атак на логины, пароли и секретные вопросы.

Кстати, это не первый случай, когда злоумышленники атакуют владельцев девайсов Apple, используя для этого возможности iCloud и Find My iPhone. Весной этого года стало известно о том, что заблокированный при помощи Find My iPhone смартфон можно легко разблокировать, не вводя никаких паролей и кодов, а летом ряд пользователей облачного сервиса столкнулись с тем, что их устройства внезапно оказались заблокированы, а на экране появлялось сообщение с требованием выкупа за разблокировку.

Истинная причина подобных утечек — это игнорирование пользователями простейших правил цифровой безопасности. Мы привыкли доверять своим устройствам и облачным сервисам, забывая о том, что даже самая крепкая дверь беззащитна перед взломщиками, если на ней нет надежного замка. Этого же мнения придерживается и Кристиан Функ, старший антивирусный эксперт Kaspersky Lab, давший семь советов о том, как защитить себя и свои данные от любых утечек:

1. Защищай свои аккаунты только сложными паролями, не используй при этом один и тот же пароль для разных сервисов.

2. Установи на свои устройства надежное защитное программное обеспечение: защитив доступ к смартфону, планшету и компьютеру, ты тем самым защитишь доступ к своим аккаунтам и, в частности, к облачным хранилищам.

3. Обязательно используй двухфакторную аутентификацию, если она доступна.

4. Дважды задумывайся перед тем, как выгрузить данные в облачное хранилище. Помни: ценную информацию, связанную с работой или личной жизнью, не стоит хранить в «облаке».

5. Телефон очень легко потерять, поэтому не стоит хранить в нем информацию, утечка которой стала бы для тебя проблемой. Если же тебе необходимо хранить ценные данные в памяти устройства, позаботься о том, чтобы они были надежно зашифрованы.

6. Многие устройства автоматически сохраняют в «облаке» то, что попадает в их память, особенно это касается фотографий и видеороликов. Так что всегда будь в курсе, что, как и куда сохраняет твое мобильное устройство.

7. Не стоит отдавать кому-то свой телефон или даже просто пересылать свои фото, если ты не уверена в том, что этот человек не станет жертвой взлома или намеренно не устроит «слив» твоих данных.

Task № 4

Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House.

García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers – Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them – who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

García Márquez was considered the supreme exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as magic realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magic realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Castro became such a close friend that García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement mounted. Soon he called Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell more than 20 million copies. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. His father, a postal clerk and telegraph operator, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the oldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents. It influenced his writing; it seemed inhabited, he said, by the ghosts his grandmother conjured in the stories she told.

García Márquez moved to Bogotá as a teenager. He studied law there but never received a degree; he turned instead to journalism.

The late 1940s and early ’50s in Colombia were a period of civil strife known as La Violencia. The ideological causes were nebulous but the savagery was stark: as many as 300,000 deaths. La Violencia would become the background for several of his novels.

García Márquez eked out a living writing for newspapers in Cartagena and then Barranquilla, where he lived in the garret of a brothel and saw a future in literature. “It was a bohemian life: finish at the paper at 1 in the morning, then write a poem or a short story until about 3, then go out to have a beer,” he said in an interview in 1996. “When you went home at dawn, ladies who were going to Mass would cross to the other side of the street for fear that you were either drunk or intending to mug or rape them.”

He read intensely – the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.

“I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague of idea of the ten thousand years of literature that have gone before,” García Márquez said. But, he added, “I’ve never tried to imitate authors I’ve admired. On the contrary, I’ve done all I could not to imitate them.”

As a journalist he scored a scoop when he interviewed a sailor who had been portrayed by the Colombian government as the heroic survivor of a navy destroyer lost at sea. The sailor admitted to him that the ship had been carrying a heavy load of contraband household goods, which unloosed during a storm and caused the ship to list enough to sink. His report, in 1955, infuriated Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the country’s dictator, and García Márquez fled to Europe. He spent two years there as a foreign correspondent.

García Márquez was less impressed by Western Europe than many Latin American writers, who looked to the Old World as their cultural fountainhead. His dispatches often reflected his belief that Europeans were patronizing toward Latin America even though their own society was in decline.

He echoed these convictions in his Nobel address. Europeans, he said, “insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”

García Márquez alternated between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s. While working for newspapers and magazines in Venezuela, he wrote a short-story collection, “Big Mama’s Funeral,” which incorporates the kind of magical elements he would master in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency.

In 1961 he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell in which he wrote no fiction, that García Márquez began “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. “When I was finished writing,” he recalled, “my wife said, ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’”

With the book’s publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the family never owed a penny again. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was sold out within days.

In following the rise and fall of the Buendía family through several generations of war and peace, affluence and poverty, the novel seemed to many critics and readers the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.

García Márquez made no claim to have invented magic realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magic realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Isabel Allende in Chile and Salman Rushdie in Britain.

“Reality is also the myths of the common people,” García Márquez told an interviewer. “I realized that reality isn’t just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people.”

He incorporated the magical on the first page, writing of “a heavy Gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands” who would drag two metal ingots from door to door to demonstrate their magically magnetic power.

“And everybody was amazed,” he wrote, “to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge.”

In 1973, when Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide, García Márquez vowed never to write as long as Pinochet remained in power.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. “I never thought he’d last so long,” he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. “Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship.”

For more than three decades the State Department denied García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendships with Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton invited him to Martha’s Vineyard.

García Márquez’s ties to Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates. Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, “To me it’s scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world.”

He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans’ “almost pornographic obsession with Castro.” But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents. Suffering from lymphatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 1999, García Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs. One exception was the novel “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” about the love affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old prostitute, published in 2004.

In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing. “Sometimes I cry because I feel like I’m losing him,” he said. But Jaime Abello, director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, said the condition had not been clinically diagnosed.

Pera, the author’s editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that García Márquez had been working on a novel, “We’ll See Each Other in August,” but that no publication date had been scheduled. The author seemed disinclined to have it published, Pera said: ”He told me, ‘This far along I don’t need to publish more.'”

Dozens of television and film adaptations were made of García Márquez’s works, but none achieved the critical or commercial success of his writing, and he declined requests for the movie rights to “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The novel’s readers, he once said, “always imagine the characters as they want, as their aunt or their grandfather, and the moment you bring that to the screen, the reader’s margin for creativity disappears.”

Besides his wife, Mercedes, his survivors include two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Task № 5

Prominent Russians: Ilya Repin

Few Russian artists gain as much fame and recognition as Repin did before they die. He was incredibly hard-working, and left a large and diverse artistic legacy. Repin had no one favorite theme, and in his paintings one can see bargemen, high officials, Biblical characters, and tsars. Some critics and fellow artists accused Repin of “inconsistency” and “externalism”, but he only shrugged: “Maybe they are right, but I love diversity and I can’t run away from myself”.

Ilya Repin was born in the small Ukrainian town of Chuguevo and as a child appeared to have a gift for painting. Local icon painters gave him some art lessons. Helping his teachers, Repin earned enough money to go to St. Petersburg to enter a painting school there, and then eventually the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1863, he successfully passed the entrance exams and considered himself lucky, although his success was more due to his own efforts rather than luck. To make a living while studying, the young artist had to work as a house-painter.

In 1868, Repin took a walk along the bank of the Neva River, and saw a group of exhausted, ragged barge haulers. Young women in bright dresses passed them by, laughing and talking. Impressed by the image, Repin composed a picture. At first he wanted to accentuate the contrast between the rich and the poor, but later abandoned this idea as being too straightforward and decided to paint only the bargemen.

In 1870, Repin went to the Volga River, and there he made the sketches for his future masterpiece “Barge Haulers on the Volga”. Locals willingly posed for him. Right after his return to St. Petersburg, he began to work on the picture that would take him three years to finish. The subjects in the painting were all real people; a former priest named Kanin, a young boy named Larko, an ex-icon painter by the name of Konstantin and eight other bargemen, ordinary people with hard lives, went down in history with the help of Repin.

Opinions about the painting were divided. For example, art critic Vladimir Stasov said: “The bitter faith of human baggage has never been shown to people in such horrible amounts, in such a great and piercing chord”. At the same time he noticed that the picture “was not painted to move the viewers to pity”, but to simply “show the types of people Repin saw”. The artist Fedor Bruni strongly disagreed with Stasov, however, and called the picture “a profanation of art”. However, the majority of critics appreciated Repin’s talent.

In 1871, Repin graduated. He was awarded a large golden medal and the right to study in Europe at the expense of the Academy for his painting “Resurrection of Jair’s Daughter”. He married in 1872 and then, when “Barge Haulers on the Volga” was sent to the World Exhibition in Vienna, Repin and his wife followed it.

Repin visited Paris and was disappointed by the works of French impressionists. “The French are not interested in people at all, only in costumes, colors and light”, he wrote in his letter. While abroad, Repin painted “Sadko” and became an academician of the Academy of Fine Arts for his work on this picture.  In 1874, Repin became a member of “The Itinerants”, the Russian realist art group.

In 1876, the Repins returned to Chuguevo, and then went to Moscow to settle there. Having the ability to work on several paintings at the same time, Repin painted portraits of famous people on demand while working on the historical canvas “Princess Sophia in Novodevichy Convent”.

In 1882, the Repins moved to St. Petersburg. Here Repin participated in “The Itinerants” exhibitions with his historical pictures. The most famous of them is “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son”, painted in 1885. It depicts the Russian tsar embracing his son right after delivering a death blow to his temple. However, the real killing took place under different circumstances and, as they say, fate punished Repin for his “lie”; His right hand eventually began to ache, depriving him of the ability to draw, forcing him to use his left hand. However, Repin faced this problem much later in life.

Repin’s family life was unhappy. In 1887 he divorced his wife.

In 1878, Repin often visited the Moscow suburb of Abramtsevo, where well-known art patron Savva Mamontov had organized an art club. There he heard a story about the Cossacks and the Turkish sultan. According to the story, in the 17th century the sultan sent a letter to the Cossacks, demanding their obedience and their lands. The Cossacks wrote a rude and derisive, but witty answer. Repin was inspired by this story, and decided to tell it on canvas.

Thirteen years passed between the decision and its implementation. The painting was finished in 1891. A picturesque group of Cossacks gathered around the clerk, laughing and proposing lines to add to the letter. Every face on the picture was taken from real life. For example, the bald man who has his back turned to the viewers was modeled after the marshal of Yaroslavskaya province nobility Georgiy Alekseyev. He did not want to pose for Repin, so Repin tricked him into it: he asked Alekseyev to show him his collection of coins. While Alekseyev was rummaging in his desk, Repin made several sketches. When Alekseyev saw the picture, he recognized himself and was offended. 

In 1899, Repin remarried and moved to Finland, to “Penaty” manor.

In 1901, Repin started to work on a picture commissioned by the government: “Ceremonial Session of the State Council 1900”. The large multi-figured painting was finished in 1903, and that’s when Repin’s hand really began to hurt. But he did not stop working.

In 1905, the first Russian revolution took place. Repin did not like Nicholas II’s regime and was waiting for the moment when “this abomination falls apart”. When it actually fell in 1917, Repin changed his views and refused to return to Russia, although the Bolsheviks kept calling him back. His attitude towards Soviet Power is concentrated in the painting “The Bolsheviks”: in it, ugly men with crooked smiles rob a little boy. 

In 1920, Finnish artists accepted Repin as an honorary member of the Finnish Artists Society. Ten years later, Repin died, leaving dozens of paintings and hundreds of drawings to future generations.

Task 6

Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]