The village comprised about a hundred peasant huts. We settled down in one of them, on the very edge of the village. About us were the woods; below us, the river. Farther north, down the Lena, there were gold-mines. The reflection of the gold seemed to hover6 about the river. Ust-Kut had known lusher times, days of wild debauches, robberies, and murders. When we were there the village was very quiet, but there was still plenty of drunkenness. The couple who owned the hut that we took were inveterate7 tipplers. Life was dark and repressed, utterly8 remote from the rest of the world. At night, the cockroaches9 filled the house with their rustlings as they crawled over table and bed, and even over our faces. From time to time we had to move out of the hut for a day or so and keep the door wide open, at a temperature of 35 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero.
In the summer our lives were made wretched by midges. They even bit to death a cow which had lost its way in the woods. The peasants wore nets of tarred horsehair over their heads. In the spring and autumn the village was buried in mud. To be sure, the country was beautiful, but during those years it left me cold. I hated to waste interest and time on it. I lived between the woods and the river, and I almost never noticed them — I was so busy with my books and personal relations. I was studying Marx, brushing the cockroaches off the page.
The Lena was the great water route of the exiled. Those who had completed their terms returned to the South by way of the river. But communication was continuous between these various nests of the banished10 which kept growing with the rise of the revolutionary tide. The exiles exchanged letters with each other, some of them so long that they were really theoretical treatises11. It was comparatively easy to get a transfer from one place to another from the governor of Irkutsk. Alexandra Lvovna and I moved to a place 250 versts east on the river Ilim, where we had friends. I found a job there, for a while, as clerk to a millionaire merchant. His fur depots12, stores and saloons were scattered13 over a territory as big as Belgium and Holland put together. He was a powerful merchant-lord. He referred to the thousands of Tunguses under him as “my little Tunguses.” He couldn’t even write his name; he had to mark it with a cross. He lived in niggardly14 fashion the whole year round, and then would squander15 tens of thousands of roubles at the annual fair at Nijni-Novgorod. I worked under him for a month and a half. Then one day I entered on a bill a pound of red-lead as “one pood” (forty pounds), and sent this huge bill to a distant store. This completely ruined my reputation with my employer, and I was discharged.
So we went back to Ust-Kut. The cold was terrific; the temperature dropped as low as 55 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero. The coachman had to break the icicles off the horses’ muzzles16 as we drove along. I held a ten-months-old baby-girl on my knees. We had made a fur funnel17 to put over her head, arranged so that she could breathe through it and at every stop we removed her fearfully from her coverings, to see if she was still alive. Nothing untoward18 happened on that trip, how ever. We didn’t stay long at Ust-Kut. After a few months, the governor gave us permission to move a little farther south, to a place called Verkholensk, where we had friends.
The aristocracy among the exiles was made up of the old Populists who had more or less succeeded in establishing them selves during the long years they had been away. The young Marxists formed a distinct section by themselves. It was not until my time that the striking workers, often illiterates20 who by some freak of fate had been separated from the great mass, began to drift to the north. For them, exile proved an in valuable school for politics and general culture. Intellectual disagreements were made the more bitter by squabbles over personal matters, as is natural where a great many people are forcibly confined. Private, and especially romantic, conflicts frequently took on the proportions of drama. There were even suicides on this account. At Verkholensk, we took turns at guarding a student from Kiev. I noticed a pile of shining metal shavings on his table. We found out later that he had made lead bullets for his shotgun. Our guarding him was in vain. With the barrel of the gun against his breast, he pulled the trigger with his foot. We buried him in silence on the hill. At that time, we were still shy about making speeches, as if there were something artificial about them. In all the big exile colonies, there were graves of suicides. Some of the exiles became absorbed into the local populations, especially in the towns; others took to drink. In exile, as in prison, only hard intellectual work could save one. The Marxists, I must admit, were the only ones who did any of it under these conditions.
It was on the great Lena route, at that time, that I met Dzerzhinsky, Uritzky, and other young revolutionaries who were destined21 to play such important r?les in the future. We awaited each arriving party eagerly. On a dark spring night, as we sat around a bonfire on the banks of the Lena, Dzerzhinsky read one of his poems, in Polish. His face and voice were beautiful, but the poem was a slight thing. The life of the man was to prove to be one of the sternest of poems.
Soon after our arrival at Ust-Kut, I began to contribute articles to an Irkutsk newspaper, the Vostochnoye Obozreniye (The Eastern Review). It was a provincial22 organ within the law, started by the old Populist exiles, but occasionally it fell into the hands of Marxists. I began as a village correspondent, and I waited anxiously for my first article to appear. The editor encouraged my contributions, and I soon began to write about literature, as well as about public questions. One day when I was trying to think of a pen-name, I opened the Italian dictionary and “antidoto” was the first word that met my eye. So for several years I signed myself “Antid Oto,” and jestingly explained to my friends that I wanted to inject the Marxist antidote23 into the legitimate24 newspapers. After a while, my pay jumped suddenly from two kopecks a line to four. It was the best proof of success. I wrote about the peasantry; about the Russian classic authors; about Ibsen, Hauptmann and Nietzsche; de Maupassant, Andreyev and Gorky. I sat up night after night scratching up my manuscripts, as I tried to find the exact idea or the right word to express it. I was becoming a writer.
Since 1896, when I had tried to ward19 off revolutionary ideas, and the following year, when I had done the same to Marxist doctrines25 even though I was already carrying on revolutionary work, I had travelled far. At the time of my exile, Marxism had definitely become the basis of my philosophy. During the exile, I tried to consider, from the new point of view I had acquired, the so-called “eternal” problems of life: love, death, friendship, optimism, pessimism26, and so forth27. In different epochs, and in varying social surroundings, man loves and hates and hopes differently. Just as the tree feeds its leaves, flowers, and fruits with the extracts absorbed from the soil by its roots, so does the individual find food for his sentiment and ideas, even the most “sublime” ones, in the economic roots of society. In my literary articles written in this period, I developed virtually one theme only: the relations between the individual and society. Not very long ago, these articles were published in a single volume, and when I saw them collected I realized that although I might have written them differently to-day, I should not have had to change the substance of them.
At that time, official or so-called “legal” Russian Marxism was in the throes of a crisis. I could see then from actual experience how brazenly28 new social requirements create for themselves intellectual garments from the cloth of a theory that was intended for something quite different. Until the nineties, the greater part of the Russian intelligentsia was stagnating29 in Populist theories with their rejection30 of capitalist development and idealization of peasant communal31 ownership of the land.
And capitalism32 in the meantime was holding out to the intelligentsia the promise of all sorts of material blessings33 and political influence. The sharp knife of Marxism was the instrument by which the bourgeois34 intelligentsia cut the Populist umbilical cord, and severed35 itself from a hated past. It was this that accounted for the swift and victorious36 spread of Marxism during the latter years of the last century.
As soon as Marxism had accomplished37 this, however, it began to irk this same intelligentsia. Its dialectics were convenient for demonstrating the progress of capitalist methods of development, but finding that it led to a revolutionary rejection of the whole capitalist system, they adjudged it an impediment and declared it out of date. At the turn of the century, at the time when I was in prison and exile, the Russian intelligentsia was going through a phase of wide-spread criticism of Marxism. They accepted its historical justification38 of capitalism, but discarded its rejection of capitalism by revolutionary means. In this roundabout way the old Populist intelligentsia, with its archaic39 sympathies, was slowly being transformed into a liberal bourgeois intelligentsia.
European criticisms of Marxism now found a ready hearing in Russia, irrespective of their quality. It is enough to say that Eduard Bernstein became one of the most popular guides from socialism to liberalism. The normative philosophy, shouting victory with more and more assurance, was ousting40 the materialist41 dialectics. Bourgeois public opinion, in its formative stages, needed inflexible42 norms, not only to protect it against the tyrannies of the autocratic bureaucracy, but against the wild revolutionism of the masses. Kant, although he overthrew43 Hegel, did not in turn hold his position very long. Russian liberalism came very late, and from the first lived on volcanic44 soil. The categorical imperative45, it found, gave it too abstract and unreliable a security. Much stronger measures were needed to resist the revolutionary masses. The transcendental idealists became orthodox Christians46. Bulgakov, a professor of political economy, began with a revision of Marxism on the agrarian47 question, went on to idealism, and ended by becoming a priest. But this last stage was not reached until some years later.
In the early years of this century, Russia was a vast laboratory of social thinking. My work on the history of freemasonry had fortified48 me in a realization49 of the subordinate place of ideas in the historical process. “Ideas do not drop from the sky,” I repeated after old Labriola. Now it was no longer a question of pure scientific study, but of the choice of a political path. The revision of Marxism that was going on in all directions helped me as it did many another young Marxist — it helped us to make up our minds and sharpen our weapons. We needed Marxism, not only to rid ourselves of Populism, which touched us but slightly, but actually to begin a stout50 war against capitalism in its own territory. The struggles against the Revisionists toughened us politically, as well as in the field of theory. We were becoming proletarian revolutionaries.
During this same period, we met with a great deal of criticism from our left. In one of the northern colonies — I think it was Viluysk — lived an exile called Makhaisky, whose name soon became generally known. Makhaisky began as a critic of Social Democratic opportunism. His first hectographed essay, devoted51 to an exposure of the opportunism of the German Social Democracy, had a great vogue52 among the exiles. His second essay criticised the economic system of Marx and ended with the amazing conclusion that Socialism is a social order based on the exploitation of the workers by a professional intelligentsia. The third essay advocated the rejection of political struggle, in the spirit of anarchist53 syndicalism. For several months, the work of Makhaisky held first place in the interest of the Lena exiles. It gave me a powerful inoculation54 against anarchism, a theory very sweeping55 in its verbal negations, but lifeless and cowardly in its practical conclusions.
The first time I ever met a living anarchist was in the Moscow transfer prison. He was a village school-teacher, Luzin, a man reserved and uncommunicative, even cruel. In prison he always preferred to be with the criminals and would listen intently to their tales of robbery and murder. He avoided discussions of theory. But once when I pressed him to tell me how railways would be managed by autonomous56 communities, he answered: “Why the hell should I want to travel on rail ways under anarchism?” That answer was enough for me. Luzin tried to win the workers over, and we carried on a concealed57 warfare58 which was not devoid59 of hostility60.
We made the journey to Siberia together. During the high floods on the river, Luzin decided to cross the Lena in a boat. He was not quite sober and challenged me to go with him. I agreed. Loose timber and dead animals were floating on the surface of the swollen61 river; there were many whirlpools. We made the crossing safely, though not without exciting moments. Luzin gave me a sort of verbal testimonial: a “good comrade,” or something to that effect, and we became friendlier. Soon after, however, he was transferred to a place farther north. A few months later he stabbed the local police-chief with a knife. The policeman was not a bad sort of fellow and the wound did not prove dangerous. At the trial Luzin declared that he had nothing against the man personally, but that he wanted, through him, to strike at the tyranny of the state. He was sentenced to hard-labor.
While hot discussions were seething62 in the far-flung, snow-covered Siberian exile colonies — discussions of such things as the differentiation63 of the Russian peasantry, the English trades-unions, the relationship between the categorical imperative and the class interests, and between Marxism and Darwinism — a struggle of a special sort was taking place in government spheres. In February, 1901, the Holy Synod excommunicated Leo Tolstoy.
The edict was published in all the papers. Tolstoy was accused of six crimes:
“He rejects the personal, living God, glorified64 in the Holy Trinity.”
“He denies Christ as the God-man risen from the dead.”
“He denies the Immaculate Conception and the virginity, before and after the birth, of the God-mother.”
“He does not recognize life after death and retribution for sins.”
“He rejects the benefaction of the Holy Ghost.”
“He mocks at the sacrament of the Eucharist.”
The gray-bearded metropolitans65, Pobedonostzev, who was inspiring them, and all the other pillars of the state who looked upon us revolutionaries as half-mad fanatics66, not to say criminals — whereas they, in their own eyes, were the representatives of sober thought based on the historical experience of man — it was these people who demanded that the great artist-realist subscribe67 to the faith in the Immaculate Conception, and in the transubstantiation of the Holy Ghost through wafers. We read the list of Tolstoy’s heresies68 over and over again, each time with fresh astonishment69, and said to our selves: No, it is we who rest on the experience of man, it is we who represent the future, while those men at the top are not merely criminals but maniacs70 as well. We were absolutely sure that we would get the better of that lunatic asylum71.
The old structure of the state was cracking all through its foundations. The students were still the ringleaders in the struggle, and in their impatience72 began to employ the methods of terrorism. After the shots fired by Karpovich and Balmashov 1, all the exiles were as much aroused as if they had heard the bugle-call of alarm. Arguments about the use of terrorist methods began. After individual vacillations, the Marxist section of the exiled went on record against terrorism. The chemistry of high explosives cannot take the place of mass action, we said. Individuals may be destroyed in a heroic struggle, but that will not rouse the working class to action. Our task is not the assassination73 of the Czar’s ministers, but the revolutionary overthrow74 of Czarism. This is where the line was drawn75 between the Social Democrats76 and the Socialist-Revolutionists. While my theoretical views were formed in prison, my political self-determination was achieved in exile.
Two years had passed in this way, and much water had flowed under the bridges of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and War saw. A movement begun underground was now walking the streets of the cities. In some districts, the peasantry was beginning to stir. Social Democratic organizations sprang up even in Siberia, along the line of the Trans-Siberian railway. They got in touch with me, and I wrote proclamations and leaflets for them. After a three years’ interval77, I was rejoining the ranks for active struggle.
The exiles were no longer willing to stay in their places of confinement78, and there was an epidemic79 of escapes. We had to arrange a system of rotation80. In almost every village there were individual peasants who as youths had come under the influence of the older generation of revolutionaries. They would carry the “politicals” away secretly in boats, in carts, or on sledges81, and pass them along from one to another. The police in Siberia were as helpless as we were. The vastness of the country was an ally, but an enemy as well. It was very hard to catch a runaway82, but the chances were that he would be drowned in the river or frozen to death in the primeval forests.
The revolutionary movement had spread far and wide, but it still lacked unity83. Every district and every town was carrying on its individual struggle. Czarism had the invaluable84 ad vantage of concerted action. The necessity for creating a centralized party was engaging the minds of many revolutionaries. I devoted an essay to this, and copies of it were circulated throughout the colonies; it was discussed with avidity. It seemed to us that our fellow Social Democrats in Russia and abroad were not giving this question enough thought. But they did think and act. In the summer of 1902, I received, by way of Irkutsk, a number of books in the binding85 of which were concealed the latest publications from abroad, printed on extremely fine paper. We learned from them that there was a Marxian newspaper published abroad, the Iskra, which had as its object the creation of a centralized organization of professional revolutionaries who would be bound together by the iron discipline of action. A book by Lenin also reached us, a book published in Geneva, entitled What Is to Be Done? which dealt exclusively with the same problem. My hand-written essays, newspaper articles, and proclamations for the Siberian union immediately looked small and provincial to me in the face of the new and tremendous task which confronted us. I had to look for another field of activity. I had to escape from exile.
At that time we already had two daughters. The younger was four months old. Life under conditions in Siberia was not easy, and my escape would place a double burden on the shoulders of Alexandra Lvovna. But she met this objection with the two words: “You must.” Duty to the revolution overshadowed everything else for her, personal considerations especially. She was the first to broach86 the idea of my escape when we realized the great new tasks. She brushed away all my doubts.
For several days after I had escaped, she concealed my absence from the police. From abroad, I could hardly keep up a correspondence with her. Then she was exiled for a second time; after this we met only occasionally. Life separated us, but nothing could destroy our friendship and our intellectual kinship.
点击收听单词发音
1 barges | |
驳船( barge的名词复数 ) | |
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2 convoy | |
vt.护送,护卫,护航;n.护送;护送队 | |
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3 decided | |
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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4 ashore | |
adv.在(向)岸上,上岸 | |
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5 loyalty | |
n.忠诚,忠心 | |
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6 hover | |
vi.翱翔,盘旋;徘徊;彷徨,犹豫 | |
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7 inveterate | |
adj.积习已深的,根深蒂固的 | |
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8 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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9 cockroaches | |
n.蟑螂( cockroach的名词复数 ) | |
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10 banished | |
v.放逐,驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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11 treatises | |
n.专题著作,专题论文,专著( treatise的名词复数 ) | |
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12 depots | |
仓库( depot的名词复数 ); 火车站; 车库; 军需库 | |
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13 scattered | |
adj.分散的,稀疏的;散步的;疏疏落落的 | |
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14 niggardly | |
adj.吝啬的,很少的 | |
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15 squander | |
v.浪费,挥霍 | |
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16 muzzles | |
枪口( muzzle的名词复数 ); (防止动物咬人的)口套; (四足动物的)鼻口部; (狗)等凸出的鼻子和口 | |
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17 funnel | |
n.漏斗;烟囱;v.汇集 | |
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18 untoward | |
adj.不利的,不幸的,困难重重的 | |
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19 ward | |
n.守卫,监护,病房,行政区,由监护人或法院保护的人(尤指儿童);vt.守护,躲开 | |
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20 illiterates | |
目不识丁者( illiterate的名词复数 ); 无知 | |
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21 destined | |
adj.命中注定的;(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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22 provincial | |
adj.省的,地方的;n.外省人,乡下人 | |
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23 antidote | |
n.解毒药,解毒剂 | |
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24 legitimate | |
adj.合法的,合理的,合乎逻辑的;v.使合法 | |
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25 doctrines | |
n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 );教义;学说;(政府政策的)正式声明 | |
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26 pessimism | |
n.悲观者,悲观主义者,厌世者 | |
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27 forth | |
adv.向前;向外,往外 | |
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28 brazenly | |
adv.厚颜无耻地;厚脸皮地肆无忌惮地 | |
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29 stagnating | |
v.停滞,不流动,不发展( stagnate的现在分词 ) | |
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30 rejection | |
n.拒绝,被拒,抛弃,被弃 | |
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31 communal | |
adj.公有的,公共的,公社的,公社制的 | |
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32 capitalism | |
n.资本主义 | |
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33 blessings | |
n.(上帝的)祝福( blessing的名词复数 );好事;福分;因祸得福 | |
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34 bourgeois | |
adj./n.追求物质享受的(人);中产阶级分子 | |
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35 severed | |
v.切断,断绝( sever的过去式和过去分词 );断,裂 | |
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36 victorious | |
adj.胜利的,得胜的 | |
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37 accomplished | |
adj.有才艺的;有造诣的;达到了的 | |
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38 justification | |
n.正当的理由;辩解的理由 | |
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39 archaic | |
adj.(语言、词汇等)古代的,已不通用的 | |
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40 ousting | |
驱逐( oust的现在分词 ); 革职; 罢黜; 剥夺 | |
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41 materialist | |
n. 唯物主义者 | |
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42 inflexible | |
adj.不可改变的,不受影响的,不屈服的 | |
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43 overthrew | |
overthrow的过去式 | |
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44 volcanic | |
adj.火山的;象火山的;由火山引起的 | |
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45 imperative | |
n.命令,需要;规则;祈使语气;adj.强制的;紧急的 | |
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46 Christians | |
n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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47 agrarian | |
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48 fortified | |
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49 realization | |
n.实现;认识到,深刻了解 | |
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51 devoted | |
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52 Vogue | |
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53 anarchist | |
n.无政府主义者 | |
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54 inoculation | |
n.接芽;预防接种 | |
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55 sweeping | |
adj.范围广大的,一扫无遗的 | |
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56 autonomous | |
adj.自治的;独立的 | |
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57 concealed | |
a.隐藏的,隐蔽的 | |
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58 warfare | |
n.战争(状态);斗争;冲突 | |
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59 devoid | |
adj.全无的,缺乏的 | |
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60 hostility | |
n.敌对,敌意;抵制[pl.]交战,战争 | |
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61 swollen | |
adj.肿大的,水涨的;v.使变大,肿胀 | |
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62 seething | |
沸腾的,火热的 | |
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63 differentiation | |
n.区别,区分 | |
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64 glorified | |
美其名的,变荣耀的 | |
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65 metropolitans | |
n.大都会的( metropolitan的名词复数 );大城市的;中心地区的;正宗的 | |
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66 fanatics | |
狂热者,入迷者( fanatic的名词复数 ) | |
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67 subscribe | |
vi.(to)订阅,订购;同意;vt.捐助,赞助 | |
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68 heresies | |
n.异端邪说,异教( heresy的名词复数 ) | |
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69 astonishment | |
n.惊奇,惊异 | |
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70 maniacs | |
n.疯子(maniac的复数形式) | |
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71 asylum | |
n.避难所,庇护所,避难 | |
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72 impatience | |
n.不耐烦,急躁 | |
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73 assassination | |
n.暗杀;暗杀事件 | |
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74 overthrow | |
v.推翻,打倒,颠覆;n.推翻,瓦解,颠覆 | |
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75 drawn | |
v.拖,拉,拔出;adj.憔悴的,紧张的 | |
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76 democrats | |
n.民主主义者,民主人士( democrat的名词复数 ) | |
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77 interval | |
n.间隔,间距;幕间休息,中场休息 | |
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78 confinement | |
n.幽禁,拘留,监禁;分娩;限制,局限 | |
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79 epidemic | |
n.流行病;盛行;adj.流行性的,流传极广的 | |
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80 rotation | |
n.旋转;循环,轮流 | |
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81 sledges | |
n.雪橇,雪车( sledge的名词复数 )v.乘雪橇( sledge的第三人称单数 );用雪橇运载 | |
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82 runaway | |
n.逃走的人,逃亡,亡命者;adj.逃亡的,逃走的 | |
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83 unity | |
n.团结,联合,统一;和睦,协调 | |
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84 invaluable | |
adj.无价的,非常宝贵的,极为贵重的 | |
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85 binding | |
有约束力的,有效的,应遵守的 | |
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86 broach | |
v.开瓶,提出(题目) | |
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