- published: 14 Sep 2011
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A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, when used as an adjective, the term revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor.
The term —both as a noun and adjective— is usually applied to the field of politics, and is occasionally used in the context of science, invention or art. In politics, a revolutionary is someone who supports abrupt, rapid, and drastic change, while a reformist is someone who supports more gradual and incremental change. A conservative is someone who opposes all such changes. A reactionary is someone who wants things to go back to the way they were before the change has happened.
According to sociologist James Chowning Davies, political revolutionaries may be classified in two ways:
The revolutionary anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechayev argued in Catechism of a Revolutionary:
The Revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy...
Evgeny Igorevitch Kissin (Russian: Евге́ний И́горевич Ки́син Yevgeniy Igorevich Kisin; born 10 October 1971) is a Russian classical pianist. He first came to international fame as a child prodigy. He has been a British citizen since 2002. He is especially known for his interpretations of the works of the Romantic repertoire, particularly Frédéric Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Franz Liszt.
Kissin was born in Moscow to a Russian Jewish family. Recognized as a child prodigy, at age six, he began piano studies at the esteemed Gnessin School of Music for Gifted Children. At the school, he became a student of Anna Kantor, who remained Kissin's only piano teacher.
Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.
At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.
The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom: