Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (;  – 16 July 1949) was a Russian poet, playwright, and senior theorist of the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic.

Early life
Born in Moscow, Ivanov lost his father, a minor civil servant, when he was only five years old and was subsequently raised within the Russian Orthodox Church by his deeply religious mother. He graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a gold medal and entered Moscow University where he studied history and philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff. In 1886, he moved to Berlin University to study Classics, Roman law, and economics under Theodor Mommsen. During his stay in Imperial Germany, he absorbed the philosophy of German Romanticism, most notably as represented by Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe. Ivanov's main passionate interest, however, was in researching the connection between the Greek religious cult of Dionysus and his worship during the Bacchanalia with the creation of the theatre of ancient Greece.

In 1886 Ivanov married Darya Mikhailovna Dmitrievskaya, the sister of his close childhood friend Aleksei Dmitrievsky. From 1892 he studied archaeology in Rome, completing his doctoral dissertation there. In 1893 he met Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, a well-to-do amateur singer, poet, and translator, who had recently separated from her husband. Through their shared descent from 17th-century Afro-Russian military officer and aristocrat Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Lidia was also a distant relation of Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin.

Influenced by his recent discovery and enthusiasm for the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ivanov and Zinovieva-Annibal surrendered to their mutual attraction, "during a tempestuous night at the Colosseum, which he described in verse as a ritualistic breaking of taboos and regeneration of ancient religious fervor."

In 1895, Ivanov's wife and daughter separated from him almost immediately and, on 15 April 1896, Lidia gave birth to Ivanov's second daughter, who was named Lidia, after her mother.

Both wronged spouses were easily granted Orthodox ecclesiastical divorces, under the terms of which Viacheslav Ivanov and Lidia Zinovieva-Annibal were ruled the guilty parties and were accordingly forbidden a Russian Orthodox wedding. Making use of a common dodge at the time, Ivanov and Lidia dressed in Ancient Greek religious costumes deliberately reminiscent of the cult of Dionysus and were married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony at Livorno in 1899.

Despite the rejection of Christian morality represented by both the adulterous beginning of his relationship with Lidia and their decision, similarly to many other members of Tsarist Russia's literary bohemia, to have an open marriage, Ivanov would paradoxically recall, "Through each other we discovered ourselves - and more than ourselves: I would say that we found God."

They first settled in Athens, then moving to Geneva, and making pilgrimages to Egypt and Palestine. During that period, Ivanov frequently visited Italy, where he studied Renaissance art. The rugged nature of Lombardy and the Alps became the subject of his first sonnets, which were heavily influenced by the medieval poetry of Catholic mystics.

At the turn of the 20th century, Ivanov elaborated his views on the spiritual mission of Rome and the Ancient Greek cult of Dionysus. He summed up his Dionysian ideas in the treatise The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (1904), which traces the roots of literature in general and, following Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, the art of tragedy in particular to ancient Dionysian mysteries. This was because, similarly to his hero Vladimir Soloviev, Ivanov, "understood Nietzsche as a Christian thinker in spite of himself. This explains why he applies New Testament concepts to Nietzsche's fundamentally anti-Christian worldview."

With the assistance of both his ex-wife and the poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, Ivanov's first collection, Lodestars, was published in 1903. It contained many of his pieces written a decade earlier and was praised by the leading critics as a new chapter in  Russian Symbolism. The poems were compared to Milton's and Trediakovsky's on account of their detached, calculated archaism. According to literary scholar Robert Bird, Ivanov drew heavily upon, "epigraphs from a host of languages ... and in a variety of alphabets", while also experimenting, "in grafting Classical Greek metres and syntax onto Russian verse", and revelling, "in obscure archaisms and recondite allusions to antiquity."

The Tower
After capturing the attention of Russian Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov while delivering a series of lectures on the cult of Dionysus at a short-lived Russian University in Paris in 1903, in 1905 Vyacheslav and Lidia Ivanov made their triumphant return to St Petersburg, where they were much lionized as foreign curiositities. They set up a literary salon known as "" (Ivanov Wednesdays, better known as "On the Tower", from its location).

According to James H. Billington, "'Viacheslav the Magnificent' was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh floor apartment 'The Tower,' overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Peterburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full swing until after supper had been served at 2 A.M."

According to his close friend Nikolai Berdyaev, "Ivanov succeeded in combining an intense poetical imagination with an amazing knowledge of Classical philology and Greek religion. He was a philosopher and a theologian; a theosophist and a political publicist. There was no object upon which he could not throw some new and unexpected light."

Nicholas Zernov later wrote about both Ivanov and the meetings in the Tower, "He attracted the intellectuals and the artists who discussed religion, philosophy, literature, and politics; they listened to music and the recitation of poetry. Berdyaev usually presided over these gatherings, but the lead was taken by Ivanov, a man who brought people of the most diverse views and convictions into one fold; Christians and sceptics, monarchists and republicans, Symbolists and Classicists, occultists and mystical anarchists. They were all welcomed as long as they were original, daring and ready to spend hours in stimulating discussions."

Even during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and as the First Duma began meeting across the road, the Tower understandably became the most fashionable literary salon of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, and was frequented by poets (Alexander Blok), philosophers (Nikolai Berdyayev), artists (Konstantin Somov), and dramatists (Vsevolod Meyerhold). The latter staged Calderon's Adoration of the Cross in Ivanov's house. The Ivanov's accordingly exerted an enormous influence upon the Russian Symbolist movement, whose main tenets were formulated in the turreted house.

At the Tower, Ivanov spearheaded a seachange which brought Russian Symbolism radically away from the intentions of Valery Bryusov to emulate French Symbolism and the concept of art for art's sake, towards literary Philhellenism, Neoclassicism, Germanophilia, and, in particular, towards the German philosophy and dramatic theory expressed by Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Ivanov favored the promotion of an ecstatic (in both the religious and philosophical senses) theatre of mass participation. Ivanov regarded drama as having the potential to be the most powerful of the arts and as capable of taking over the liturgical function of the Russian Orthodox Church and restoring religious belief to a society that had lost its faith in Christianity.

Future Russian Orthodox nun and martyr Maria Skobtsova was then an acclaimed Symbolist poet and frequent guest at the Ivanov flat. Decades later, while living in Paris as an anti-communist White emigre who had returned to her ancestral religious roots, Skobtsova felt deeply ashamed as she recalled the hedonistic atmosphere among the intellectuals at the Tower. She often expressed the belief that her past self and all her colleagues at the Tower could have learned much from any rural peasant woman praying in her Orthodox parish church. Skobtsova elaborated, "We lived in the middle of a vast country as if on an uninhabited island. Russia was illiterate, whereas our milieu was concentrated all the culture of the world: the Greeks were quoted by heart, we welcomed the French symbolists, we thought of Scandinavian literature as our own, we were familiar with the philosophy, theology, poetry and history of the whole wide world, in this sense we were citizens of the universe, the keepers of mankind's cultural museum. This was Rome in the time of its decline... We played out the last act of the tragedy concerned with the rift between the intelligentsia and the people. Beyond us stretched out the Russian Empire's snowy desert, a country in fetters: it was as ignorant of our delights as of our anguish, while its own delights and anguish had no effect on us.

More recently, Robert Bird has been less critical, "Nomenclature notwithstanding, Russian Symbolism owed far less to French Symbolism (with which, according to Ivanov, it shared 'neither a historical no ideological basis's) than it did to German Romanticism and to the great poets and prose writers of nineteenth-century Russia. It was not so much an artistic movement as a comprehensive worldview, an attempt to give aesthetics a spiritual foundation. The Russian Symbolists sought to preserve the insights and achievements of past civilisations and to build upon them. They viewed human creativity as a continuum, celebrating 'Symbolist' tendencies in the art and culture of civilisations distant both temporally and spatially... According to Symbolist conviction, divisions between various fields of knowledge and artistic disciplines were artificial: poetry was intimately linked not only to painting, music, and drama, but also to philosophy, psychology, religion, and myth. The intellectual cross fertilization that took place at Ivanov's 'Tower', in short, was a social manifestation of Symbolist tenets."

It was at this time that Ivanov wrote the first of his two plays, Tantalus (1905). Like his second, Prometheus (1919), it imitated the dramatic structure and mythological subject-matter of Aeschylean tragedy and was written in obscure and archaic language. It was his unrealised, utopian ideas about theatre, however, that proved far more influential.

The ideas of Aleksei Remizov (who was the literary manager of Vsevolod Meyerhold's New Drama Association at this time), Fyodor Sologub, and the Mystical Anarchism of Georgy Chulkov were all part of this second phase of Russian Symbolism.

Ivanov proposed the creation of a new type of mass theatre, which he called a "collective action," that would be modelled on ancient religious rituals, Athenian tragedy, and the medieval mystery play. Writing in an essay on the mask ("Poèt i Čern") that was published in the magazine Vesy (Libra or The Scales) in 1904, Ivanov argued for a revival of the ancient relationship between the poet and the masses. Inspired by The Birth of Tragedy and Wagner's theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, Ivanov sought to provide a philosophical foundation for his proposals by linking Nietzsche's analysis with Leo Tolstoy's Christian religious movement, and ancient Dionysian dramas with later Christian mystery plays. The idea that both the Apollonian and Dionysian could be synthesized within a concept of universal brotherhood would have been completely alien to Nietzsche, who had always stressed the fundamental differences between the two traditions. Ivanov, however, interpreted Dionysus as an avatar for Jesus Christ. By means of the mask, he argued, the tragic hero appears not as an individual character but rather as the embodiment of a fundamental Dionysian reality, "the one all-human I." By means of hero's example, therefore, staged myth would give the people access to its sense of the "total unity of suffering."

Rejecting theatrical illusion, Ivanov's modern liturgical theatre would offer not the representation of action (mimesis), but action itself (praxis). This would be achieved by overcoming the separation between stage and auditorium, adopting an open space similar to the classical Greek orchêstra, and abolishing the division between the actors and the audience, so that all became co-creating participants in a sacred rite. Ivanov imagined staging such a performance in a hall in which furniture is distributed "by whim and inspiration." Actors would mingle with the audience, handing out masks and costumes, before, singing and dancing as a chorus, collective improvisation would merge all participants into a communal unity.

Thus, he hoped, the theatre would facilitate a genuinely spiritual revolution in culture and society. Writing in Po zvezdam in 1908, Ivanov argued:
The theatres of the chorus tragedies, the comedies and the mysteries must become the breeding-ground for the creative, or prophetic, self-determination of the people; only then will be resolved the problem of fusing actors and spectators in a single orgiastic body. [...] And only, we may add, when the choral voice of such communities becomes a genuine referendum of the true will of the people will political freedom become a reality.

While some, such as the director Meyerhold, enthusiastically embraced Ivanov's ideas (at least insofar as they proposed overcoming the division between actor and audience in a collective improvisation), others were more skeptical. The poet Andrei Bely argued that the realities of a modern, class-divided society could not be abolished by means of masks and costumes, however earnestly adopted:
Let's suppose we go into the temple-theatre, robe ourselves in white clothes, crown ourselves with bunches of roses, perform a mystery play (its theme is always the same—God-like man wrestles with fate) and then at the appropriate moment we join hands and begin to dance. Imagine yourself, reader, if only for just one minute, in this role. We are the ones who will be spinning round the sacrificial altar—all of us: the fashionable lady, the up-and-coming stockbroker, the worker and the member of the State Council. It is too much to expect that our steps and our gestures will coincide. While the class struggle still exists, these appeals for an aesthetic democratization are strange.

Splintered Symbolism
His wife's death in 1907 was a great blow to Ivanov. Thereafter the dazzling Byzantine texture of his poetry wore thin, as he insensibly slipped into theosophy and spiritualism, while being preyed upon emotionally and financially by a fraudulent medium who claimed the ability to summon Lydia from the afterlife.

The medium departed for other targets, however, after Ivanov had a dream of his late wife ordering him to marry Vera Shvarsalon, her daughter by her first marriage. Indeed, he married 23-year-old Vera in the summer of 1913; their son Dmitry had been born in 1912. Vera's death in 1920, at the age of 30, broke his heart.

According to an autobiographical sketch written by Anna Akhmatova, Ivanov first met her in 1910. At the time, Akhmatova was still married to Nikolai Gumilev, who first brought her to the turreted house. There, Akhmatova read some of her verse aloud to Ivanov, who ironically quipped, "What truly heavy romanticism."

Moreover, Akhmatova indignantly recalled that Ivanov would often weep as she recited her verse at the Tower, but would later, "vehemently criticize," the same poems at literary salons. Akhmatova would never forgive him for this.

A short time later, Gumilev left his wife for a big game hunting holiday in Ethiopia. In the aftermath, Ivanov, who very likely wanted to have an affair with her, tried very hard to persuade Akhmatova to leave her immature husband, saying, "You'll make him a man if you do." Instead, following his return, Gumilev listened to his wife's poetry for the first time with respect. Furthermore, they departed with Osip Mandelstam to found the Acmeist movement, which rejected Ivanov and Symbolism. Akhmatova's ultimate evaluation of her former admirer was as follows, "Vyacheslav was neither grand nor magnificent (he thought this up himself) but a 'catcher of men.'"

Meanwhile, according to Lazar Fleishman, "The year 1910 marked a crisis in the history of Russian Symbolism. It became clear that the movement was breaking up into two hostile camps. One, headed by Viacheslav Ivanov, constituted the theurgist line (going back to Vladimir Solovyov). The opposite camp, with Valery Bryusov as its major spokesman, rejected all of Symbolism's claims to transcend the limits of art, to fuse art and life, and to subordinate art to religious or mystical goals. Alexander Scriabin's close relations with the Symbolist poets strengthened the theurgist wing of this literary school."

On 18 February 1912, the writer Konstantin Siunnerberg brought Fr. Leonid Feodorov, a priest of the strictly illegal Russian Greek Catholic Church who was on his third secret visit to Russia, to a meeting of the Society of Lovers of the Artistic Word and introduced him to Ivanov. During the subsequent meeting, Ivanov then read aloud an early draft of his essay "Thoughts about Symbolism" and Andrei Bely read aloud his essay "Symbolism". Feodorov later recalled, "The first was quite interesting, the second was a typical example of the chaos reigning in the minds of our intelligentsia... Vyacheslav Ivanov turned out to be a supporter of the Catholic Church and took great interest in the Byzantine Rite. However, his sympathies towards Rome and those of many like him are based on motives of an aesthetic and mystical character, of quite vague and extremely whimsical fantasies."

During an Italian voyage with his wife (1912–13), Ivanov met often with Aurelio Palmieri, an Italian scholar of Eastern Christianity, whose writings were later condemned by the Church as Modernistic. During the same trip Ivanov also routinely defended Catholicism in debates with Vladimir Ern.

Following the Ivanovs' return to Russia in 1913, they made the acquaintances of art critic Mikhail Gershenzon, philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, and composer Alexander Scriabin. He elaborated many of his Symbolist theories in a series of articles, which were finally revised and reissued as Simbolismo in 1936. At that time, he relinquished poetry in favour of translating the works of Sappho, Alcaeus, Aeschylus, and Petrarch into the Russian language.

Ivanov continued, however, to have influence over younger poets and writers. While reading his newly composed paper aloud called, "Symbolism and Immortality" on 10 February 1913, a young Boris Pasternak both echoed and summarized the ideas of both Bely and Ivanov, by saying, "Symbolism achieves realism in religion."

In his diary Cursed Days, Ivan Bunin later recalled, "Once in the spring of 1915, I was walking in the Moscow Zoological Garden and saw a guard... beating a swan with his boot and smashing ducks' heads with the heel of his shoe. When I got home I found V. Ivanov waiting for me. I had to listen to a turgid speech about Russia's 'Christ-like image' and about how, once Russia proved victorious over Germany, this Christ-like Russia would accomplish another great task, i.e., it would spiritually enlighten India -- no less a country than India, which, as regards enlightenment, is three thousand years older than we are!"

After 1917
In 1920, Ivanov moved to Baku, where he held the University Chair of Classical Philology. He concentrated on his scholarly work and completed a treatise  Dionysus and Early Dionysianism (published 1923), which earned him a Ph.D. degree in philology. The new Marxist-Leninist government didn't allow Ivanov and his family to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but through the influence of his former protege Anatoly Lunacharsky, exit visas were finally granted in 1924.

Emigration

From Azerbaijan he proceeded to Italy, where he settled first at Pavia, where he was employed as Professor of Russian literature between 1926 and 1934. He was then elected professor of Russian literature at the University of Florence, but the Government of Fascist Italy, refused to allow Ivanov to take up the position. In 1934, Ivanov and his family arrived in Rome, an event he later commemorated in the sonnet Regina Viarum in 1924.

Ivanov later explained his reasons for becoming a refugee by stating, "I was born free, and the silence there (i.e. in Soviet Russia) leaves an aftertaste of slavery."

For this reason, according to Robert Bird, "Eloquently conversant in all the major European languages, with erudition of rare breadth and depth, Ivanov allied himself with representatives of the religious and cultural revival that occured in many countries between the wars."

While teaching the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language, the vernacular Russian language, and Russian literature at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, Ivanov and his children were formally received as Eastern Rite Catholics into the Russian Greek Catholic Church.

On 17 March 1926, Ivanov pronounced a prayer for reunification composed by his hero Vladimir Soloviev followed by a standard abjuration under oath of all theological principles upon which Russian Orthodoxy differs from Catholicism. In a 1930 open letter in French explaining his conversion to Charles Du Bos, Ivanov recalled, "When I pronounced the Creed, followed by a formula of adherence, I felt Orthodox in the full sense of the word for the first time in my life, in full possession of the sacred treasure that had belonged to me since my baptism, the joy of which had, however, been encumbered for many years by a sense of growing anguish and by the consciousness that I had been severed by the other half of this living treasure of sanctity and grace, that, like a consumptive, I had been breathing with only one lung."

In his 1937 interview for the Russicum's newspaper, Ivanov argued that, prior to their Great Schism, Latin and Byzantine Christianity were "two principles that mutually complement each other." After blaming, similarly to Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, the lack of an indigenous tradition of active monasticism for the failure of the Russian Orthodox Church to mount a far more effective challenge to the regressive secularization of pre-1917 Russian culture, Ivanov concluded, "The Church must permeate all branches of life: social issues, art, culture, and just everything. The Roman Church corresponds to such criteria and by joining this Church I become truly Orthodox." Literary scholar Robert Bird confirms that Ivanov, whose greatest influences were Vladimir Soloviev and Fyodor Dostoevsky, viewed his conversion to the Russian Greek Catholic Church, "as an extension rather than a rejection of Russian Orthodoxy. This decision was in a sense preordained by the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev."

Despite his lack of a steady income and worries about the health of his son Dmitri, "by the early 1930s, Ivanov had become a minor star in the European intellectual firmament."

In 1931, Ivanov's intellectual status was further buttressed by a successful defense of Christianity during a debate against Benedetto Croce, who had travelled with a large entourage from Milan especially for the occasion.

Beginning on 11 February 1936, Ivanov began teaching on Tuesdays as professor of Church Slavonic and eventually of many other subjects at the Russicum, a Byzantine Rite Catholic major seminary and Russian-language immersion school in Rome, which Pope Pius XI had established in 1929 to train priests of the Russian Greek Catholic Church for missionary work in the Soviet Union and the Russian diaspora. Ivanov's students at the Russicum included future Greek Catholic Martyr Bishop Theodore Romzha, as well as Gulag survivors and memoirists Frs. Walter Ciszek and Pietro Leoni.

Ivanov's lectures at the Russicum on Russian literature were considered so challenging that only native Russian speakers and those seminarians most advanced in learning the language attended. Between 1939 and 1940, Ivanov gave a celebrated series of lectures upon the novels of Dostoevsky and, during Russian Christmas in 1940, he gave a reading of several of his own works of Christian poetry about the Nativity of Jesus Christ.

According to former Russicum seminarian Gustav Wetter, Ivanov once summarized the main tenets of Russian Symbolism during a lecture with two quotations. The first was from the German national poet Goethe, "Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything ephemeral is only a reflection"). The second principle, according to Ivanov, was the ascent of the human mind, "a realibus ad realiora" ("From what is real to what is more real.") Gustav Wetter later recalled of Ivanov's lecture, "These two principles engraved themselves in my soul. Symbolism began to play a huge role in my own thought."

Furthermore, according to Fr. Constantin Simon, Ivanov's, "services as a translator, whose golden pen deftly transformed elegant Latin into an equally refined Church Slavonic, were eagerly sought by the Jesuits of the Russian Apostolate as well as by the Vatican. In addition to Biblical texts, Ivanov prepared Church Slavonic translations of, among other prayers, the litanies to the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart, the Salve Regina, the texts of the Jesuit vows, and the invocations to the Little Flower."

According to Robert Bird, "In the emigration, Ivanov proved himself the consummate European, writing essays for leading journals in sophisticated German, Italian, and French. Though his reputation never reached the heights that it had in Russia, these essays attracted a highly literate, if small coterie of admirers, including Martin Buber, Ernst Robert Curtius, Charles Du Bos, Gabriel Marcel, and Giovanni Papini."

According to Fr. Constantin Simon, "He was active as a poet and scholar until his very last day. Besides his poetry, Ivanov also wrote tragedies for the theatre on mythological subjects Tantalus and Prometheus, a few prose works, translations of mostly Greek and Italian poetry and literary criticism. His Roman years brought forth his Roman Sonnets (1924) and his Roman Diary (1944)."

According to Fr. Constantin Simon, "His posthumous mystical allegory, Povest' o Svetomire tsareviche: Skazanie starce-inoke (The Tale of Tsarevich Svetomir, as Told by a Holy Monk) is held by some to contain the key to the whole of his artistic life and quest. The Neoplatonic and Nietzschean tones of his earlier work with their essentially pagan philosophy involving successive epiphanies of the Godhead is muted in his later works, in the light of his rediscovered Christian faith."

According to Robert Bird, both Ivanov's 1926 conversion to Catholicism and his decision to isolate himself, "from the main currents of émigré and Soviet life", later helped contribute to, "an image of near-sanctity". Furthermore, "The late reawakening of Ivanov's poetic muse in 1944 serves as an eloquent reminder that, in the final analysis, he remained, first and foremost, a lyric poet held captive by eternity and struggling to define a place in history."

In his 1944 Roman Diary, Ivanov composed poetry that drew upon the traditional feasts days as set within the differing liturgical calendars of the Russian and Roman Rites, as well as the Christian theology and spiritual symbols of both traditions, while also pondering the violence and chaos of life in Rome during the Second World War. Copies of the poems Roman Diary contained secretly made their way back to the Soviet Union through the medium of Samizdat, where Eugenia Gertsyk embraced them as the fulfillment of her long standing hopes that Ivanov, like his hero Goethe, "would achieve... clarity and wisdom in old age."

Ivanov died in Rome, following a long illness, on 16 July 1949 Although he died a believing Catholic, he had arranged to be buried with two of his poetic heroes, John Keats and Percy Shelley, at the Cimitero Acattolico. Ivanov lies buried not far from the graves of fellow Russian exiles Karl Briullov and Alexander Ivanov.

Legacy
Following his death, the reading of Ivanov's writings continued to be encouraged by C.M. Bowra and Sir Isaiah Berlin, whom he both had met in 1946. Through the influence of both Englishmen, an English translation of Ivanov's book of Dostoevsky scholarship was published as Freedom and the Tragic Life in 1952. Ivanov's final volume of Russian poetry, Svet vechernii ("The Evening Light") was published posthumously in 1962.

In Russian Thinkers, Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote that after Ivan Turgenev, "This search for one's place in the moral and social universe continued as a central tradition in Russian literature virtually until the revolt in the 1890s of the neo-classical Aesthetes and the Symbolists under Ivanov and Balmont, Annensky and Blok. But these movements, splendid as their fruit was, did not last long as an effective force. And the Soviet revolution returned, albeit in a crude and distorted utilitarian form, to the canons of Belinsky and the social criteria of art."

This is why, according to Robert Bird, following Vyacheslav Ivanov's defection with his family to the West, "In the Soviet Union... his works were not republished for decades, and it became inadvisable - if not wholly impossible - to study them. His name became a footnote to other, more 'acceptable' currents in pre-revolutionary literature. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Ivanov became the beneficiary of renewed attention. His books were republished and he has repeatedly been the subject of essays, monographs, and conferences."

In particular, since the fall of Communism, one of the most widely circulated of Ivanov's published writings has been his Russian language commentary on the Christian Bible, which was written in Rome, following his conversion from Russian Orthodoxy to the Russian Greek Catholic Church.

References

Sources
 Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. .
 Billington, James H. 1966. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretice History of Russian Culture. New York: Random House. .
 Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
 Golub, Spencer. 1998. "Ivanov, Vyacheslav (Ivanovich)." In Banham (1998, 552).
 Hackel, Sergei. 1982. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891-1945. Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir's Seminary P. .
 Kleberg, Lars. 1980. Theatre as Action: Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics. Trans. Charles Rougle. New Directions in Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1993. .
 Polivanov, Konstantin. 1994. Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle. Trans. Patricia Beriozkina. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P. .
 Puskás, Lásló, et al. 2002. Theodore Romzha: His Life, Times, and Martyrdom. Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications. .
 Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. 2004. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche To Stalinism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP. .
 Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1981. Meyerhold the Director. Trans. George Petrov. Ed. Sydney Schultze. Revised translation of Rezhisser Meierkhol'd. Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1969. .
 ---. 1988. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. Trans. Roxane Permar. Ed. Lesley Milne. London: Thames and Hudson. . Reprinted as Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932. New York: Abrams.

External links

 V.Ivanov Research Center in Rome

  An ample selection of English translations of verse and prose poems by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, 1921
  English translations of 2 short poems
 Russian Virtual Library's Collection of Ivanov's Poetry and Prose (in Russian)
The Poems by Vyacheslav Ivanov (English)

1866 births
1949 deaths
20th-century Russian poets
20th-century translators
Burials in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome
Catholic philosophers
Catholic poets
Converts to Eastern Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy
Eastern Catholic poets
Eastern Catholic writers
Emigrants from the Russian Empire to Italy
Former Russian Orthodox Christians
People from Moskovsky Uyezd
Russian Eastern Catholics
Russian Greek-Catholics
Russian Catholic poets
Russian dramatists and playwrights
Russian male dramatists and playwrights
Russian male poets
Russian philosophers
Russian classical scholars
Sonneteers
Symbolist dramatists and playwrights
Symbolist poets
Theatre theorists
Translators of Dante Alighieri
White Russian emigrants to Italy
Writers from Moscow

Vyacheslav Ivanov (poet)


Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about three female African-American mathematicians: Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who worked at NASA during the Space Race. Other stars include Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, and Glen Powell.

Principal photography began in March 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia and wrapped up in May 2016. Other filming locations included several other locations in Georgia, including East Point, Canton, Monroe, Columbus, and Madison.

Hidden Figures had a limited release on December 25, 2016, by 20th Century Fox, before going wide in North America on January 6, 2017. The film received critical acclaim, with praise for the performances (particularly Henson, Spencer and Monáe), the writing, direction, cinematography, emotional tone, and historical accuracy, although some argued it featured a white savior narrative. The film was a commercial success, grossing $236 million worldwide against its $25 million production budget. Deadline Hollywood noted it as one of the most profitable releases of 2016, and estimated that it made a net profit of $95.5 million.

The film was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2016 and received various awards and nominations, including three nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

Plot
Katherine Johnson works at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961, alongside her colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, as lowly "computers", performing math calculations without being told what they are for. All of them are African-American women; the unit is segregated by race and sex. White supervisor Vivian Mitchell assigns Katherine to assist Al Harrison's Space Task Group, given her skills in analytic geometry. She becomes the first Black woman on the team; head engineer Paul Stafford is especially dismissive.

Mary is assigned to the space capsule heat shield team, where she immediately identifies a design flaw. Encouraged by her team leader Karl Zielinski, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, Mary applies for a NASA engineer position. She is told by Mitchell that, regardless of her mathematics and physical science degree, the position requires additional courses. Mary files a petition for permission to attend all-white Hampton High School, despite her husband's opposition. Pleading her case in court, she wins over the local judge by appealing to his sense of history, allowing her to attend night classes.

Katherine meets African-American National Guard Lt. Col. Jim Johnson, who voices skepticism about women's mathematical abilities. He later apologizes and begins spending time with Katherine and her three daughters. The Mercury 7 astronauts visit Langley, and astronaut John Glenn goes out of his way to greet the West Area women. Katherine impresses Harrison by solving a complex mathematical equation from redacted documents, as the Soviet Union's successful launch of Yuri Gagarin increases pressure to send American astronauts into space.

Harrison confronts Katherine about her "breaks," unaware that she is forced to walk half a mile (800 meters) to use the nearest bathroom assigned to "Colored" people. She angrily explains the discrimination she faces at work, which leads Harrison to knock down the "Colored Bathroom" sign and abolish bathroom segregation. He allows Katherine to be included in high-level meetings to calculate the space capsule's re-entry point. Stafford makes Katherine remove her name from reports, insisting that "computers" cannot author them, and her work is credited solely to Stafford.

Informed by Mitchell that there are no plans to assign a "permanent supervisor for the colored group," Dorothy learns NASA has installed an IBM 7090 electronic computer that threatens to replace human computers. When a librarian scolds her for visiting the whites-only section, Dorothy takes a book about Fortran and teaches herself and her West Area co-workers programming. She visits the computer room, successfully starts the machine, and is promoted to supervise the Programming Department; she agrees to do so if thirty of her co-workers are transferred as well. Mitchell finally addresses her as "Mrs. Vaughan".

Making final arrangements for John Glenn's launch, the department no longer needs human computers; Katherine is reassigned to the West Area and marries Jim. On the day of the launch, discrepancies are found in the IBM 7090 calculations, and Katherine is asked to check the capsule's landing coordinates. She delivers the results to the control room, and Harrison allows her inside. After a successful launch and orbit, a warning indicates the capsule's heat shield may be loose. Mission Control decides to land Glenn after three orbits instead of seven, and Katherine supports Harrison's suggestion to leave the retro-rocket attached to help keep the heat shield in place. Friendship 7 lands successfully.

Though the mathematicians are ultimately replaced by electronic computers, a textual epilogue reveals Mary obtained her engineering degree and became NASA's first female African American engineer; Dorothy continued as NASA's first African American supervisor; and Katherine, accepted by Stafford as a report coauthor, went on to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle missions. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, NASA dedicated the Langley Research Center's Katherine Johnson Computational Building in her honor.

Cast

Production
In 2015, producer Donna Gigliotti acquired Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book Hidden Figures, about a group of Black female mathematicians that helped NASA win the Space Race. Allison Schroeder wrote the script, which was developed by Gigliotti through Levantine Films. Schroeder grew up by Cape Canaveral and her grandparents worked at NASA, where she also interned as a teenager, and as a result saw the project as a perfect fit for herself. Levantine Films produced the film with Peter Chernin's Chernin Entertainment. Fox 2000 Pictures acquired the film rights, and Theodore Melfi signed on to direct. After coming aboard, Melfi revised Schroeder's script, and in particular focused on balancing the home lives of the three protagonists with their careers at NASA. After the film's development was announced, actresses considered to play the lead roles included Oprah Winfrey, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson.

Chernin and Jenno Topping produced, along with Gigliotti and Melfi. Fox cast Henson to play the lead role of mathematician Katherine Goble Johnson. Spencer was selected to play Dorothy Vaughan, one of the three lead mathematicians at NASA. Kevin Costner was cast in the film to play the fictional head of the space program. Singer Janelle Monáe signed on to play the third lead mathematician, Mary Jackson. Kirsten Dunst, Glen Powell, and Mahershala Ali were cast in the film: Powell to play astronaut John Glenn, and Ali as Johnson's love interest.

Principal photography began in March 2016 on the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Scenes were also shot on location in Historic Downtown Canton, Georgia. Filming also took place at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics at Dobbins Air Reserve Base. Jim Parsons was cast in the film to play the head engineer of the Space Task Group at NASA, Paul Stafford. Pharrell Williams (a native of Virginia Beach, near Langley Research Center) came on board as a producer on the film. He also wrote original songs and handled the music department and soundtrack of the film, with Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. Morehouse College mathematics professor Rudy L. Horne was brought in to be the on-set mathematician.

Music

Historical accuracy
The film, set at NASA Langley Research Center in 1961, depicts segregated facilities such as the West Area Computing unit, where an all-Black group of female mathematicians were originally required to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. However, in reality, Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor of West Computing much earlier, in 1949, becoming the first Black supervisor at the  National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and one of its few female supervisors. In 1958, when NACA became NASA, segregated facilities, including the West Computing office, were abolished. Vaughan and many of the former West computers transferred to the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group.

It was Mary Jackson, not Katherine Johnson, who had difficulty finding a colored bathroom — in a 1953 incident she experienced while on temporary assignment in the East Area, a region of Langley unfamiliar to her and where few Blacks worked. Katherine Johnson, for her part, was initially unaware that the bathrooms at Langley were segregated (in both its East and West areas during the NACA era), and used the "whites-only" bathrooms (many were not explicitly labeled as such) for years before anyone complained. She ignored the complaint, and the issue was dropped.

In an interview with WHRO-TV, Johnson denied the feelings of segregation. "I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."

Mary Jackson did not have to get a court order to attend night classes at the whites-only high school. She asked the city of Hampton for an exception, and it was granted. The school turned out to be run down and dilapidated, a hidden cost of running two parallel school systems. She completed her engineering courses and earned a promotion to engineer in 1958.

Katherine Johnson worked mostly in Langley's West Area, not the East Area — working mainly in Building 1244 starting in mid-1953, and remaining in 1244 even after joining the Space Task Group, through at least the early 1960s and John Glenn's historic flight.

The scene where a coffeepot labeled "colored" appears in Katherine Johnson's workplace did not happen in real life, and the book on which the film is based mentions no such incident.

Katherine Johnson carpooled with Eunice Smith, a nine-year West Area computer veteran at the time Johnson joined NACA. Smith was her neighbor and friend from her sorority and church choir. The three Goble children were teenagers at the time of Katherine's marriage to Jim Johnson.

Katherine Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division in 1953, a move that soon became permanent. When the Space Task Group was created in 1958, engineers from the Flight Research Division formed the core of the group, and Johnson was included. She coauthored a research report published by NASA in 1960, the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. Johnson gained access to editorial meetings as of 1958 simply through persistence, not because one particular meeting was critical.

The Space Task Group was led by Robert Gilruth, not the fictional character Al Harrison, who was created to simplify a more complex management structure. The scene where Harrison smashes the Colored Ladies Room sign never happened, as in real life Johnson refused to walk the extra distance to use the colored bathroom and, in her words, "just went to the white one." Harrison also lets her into Mission Control to witness the launch. Neither scene happened in real life, and screenwriter Theodore Melfi said he saw no problem with adding the scenes, saying, "There needs to be white people who do the right thing, there needs to be Black people who do the right thing, and someone does the right thing. And so who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?"

Dexter Thomas of Vice News criticized Melfi's additions as creating the white savior trope: "In this case, it means that a white person doesn't have to think about the possibility that, were they around back in the 1960s South, they might have been one of the bad ones." The Atlantics Megan Garber said that the film's "narrative trajectory" involved "thematic elements of the white savior". Melfi said he found "hurtful" the "accusations of a 'white savior' storyline", saying:

The Huffington Posts Zeba Blay said of Melfi's frustration:

The fictional characters Vivian Mitchell and Paul Stafford are composites of several team members and reflect common social views and attitudes of the time. Karl Zielinski is based on Mary Jackson's mentor, Kazimierz "Kaz" Czarnecki.

John Glenn, who was about a decade older than depicted at the time of launch, did ask specifically for Johnson to verify the IBM calculations, although she had several days before the launch date to complete the process.

Author Margot Lee Shetterly has agreed that there are differences between her book and the movie, but found that to be understandable.
For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters, and for most people [who have seen the movie] have already taken that as the literal fact. ... You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams. There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... It would be great for people to understand that there were so many more people. Even though Katherine Johnson, in this role, was a hero, there were so many others that were required to do other kinds of tests and checks to make [Glenn's] mission come to fruition. But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible.

John Glenn's flight was not terminated early as stated in the movie's closing subtitles. The MA-6 mission was planned for three orbits and landed at the expected time. The press kit published before launch states that "The Mercury Operations Director may elect a one, two or three orbit mission." The post-mission report also shows that retrofire was scheduled to occur on the third orbit.  Scott Carpenter's subsequent flight in May was also scheduled and flew for three orbits, and Wally Schirra's planned six-orbit flight in October required extensive modifications to the Mercury capsule's life-support system to allow him to fly a nine-hour mission. The phrase "go for at least seven orbits" that is in the mission transcript refers to the fact that the Atlas booster had placed Glenn's capsule into an orbit that would be stable for at least seven orbits, not that he had permission to stay up that long.

The Mercury Control Center was located at Cape Canaveral in Florida, not at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. The orbit plots displayed in the front of the room incorrectly show a six-orbit mission, which did not happen until Wally Schirra's MA-8 mission in October 1962. The movie also incorrectly shows NASA flight controllers monitoring live telemetry from the Soviet Vostok launch, which the Soviet Union would not have been sharing with NASA in 1961.

Katherine Johnson's Technical Note D-233, co-written with T.H. Skopinski, can be found on the NASA Technical Reports Server.

The movie depicts the IBM 7090 as the first computer at Langley, but there were actually earlier computers there, and Dorothy Vaughan had previously been programming for the IBM 704 in FORTRAN.

The movie refers to an IBM 7090, but the console shown is for an IBM 7094, which came later.

Release

The film began a limited release on December 25, 2016, before a wide release on January 6, 2017.

Charity screenings
After Hidden Figures was released on December 25, 2016, certain charities, institutions and independent businesses who regard the film as relevant to the cause of improving youth awareness in education and careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, organized free screenings of the film in order to spread the message of the film's subject matter. A collaborative effort between Western New York STEM Hub, AT&T and the Girl Scouts of the USA allowed more than 200 Buffalo Public School students, Girl Scouts and teachers to see the film. WBFO's Senior Reporter Eileen Buckley stated the event was designed to help encourage a new generation of women to consider STEM careers. Research indicates that by 2020, there will be 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs. Aspiring astronaut Naia Butler-Craig wrote of the film: "I can't imagine what that would have been like: 16-year-old, impressionable, curious and space-obsessed Naia finding out that Black women had something to do with getting Americans on the moon."

Also, the film's principal actors (Henson, Spencer, Monáe and Parsons), director (Melfi), producer/musical creator (Williams), and other non-profit outside groups have offered free screenings to Hidden Figures at several cinema locations around the world. Some of the screenings were open to all-comers, while others were arranged to benefit girls, women and the underprivileged. The campaign began as individual activism by Spencer, and made a total of more than 1,500 seats for Hidden Figures available, free of charge, to poor individuals and families. The result was seven more screenings for people who otherwise might not have been able to afford to see the film - in Atlanta (sponsored by Monáe), in Washington, D.C. (sponsored by Henson), in Chicago (also Henson), in Houston (by Parsons), in Hazelwood, Missouri (by Melfi and actress/co-producer Kimberly Quinn), and in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia (both sponsored by Williams).

In February 2017, AMC Theatres and 21st Century Fox announced that free screenings of Hidden Figures would take place in celebration of Black History Month in up to 14 select U.S. cities (including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Miami). The statement described the February charity screenings as building broader awareness of the film's true story of Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race. 21st Century Fox and AMC Theatres also invited schools, community groups and non-profit organizations to apply for additional special screenings to be held in their towns. "As we celebrate Black History Month and look ahead to Women's History Month in March, this story of empowerment and perseverance is more relevant than ever," said Liba Rubenstein, 21st Century Fox's Senior Vice President of Social Impact, "We at 21CF were inspired by the grassroots movement to bring this film to audiences that wouldn't otherwise be able to see it - audiences that might include future innovators and barrier-breakers - and we wanted to support and extend that movement".

Philanthropic non-profit outside groups and other local efforts by individuals have offered free screenings of Hidden Figures by using crowdfunding platforms on the Internet, that allow people to raise money for free film screening events. Dozens of other GoFundMe free screening campaigns have appeared since the film's general release, all by people wanting to raise money to pay for students to see the film.

In 2019, The Walt Disney Company partnered with the U.S. Department of State on the third annual "Hidden No More" exchange program, which was inspired by the film and brings to the United States 50 women from around the world who have excelled in STEM careers such as spacecraft engineering, data solutions and data privacy, and STEM-related education. The exchange program began in 2017 after local US embassies screened the film to their local communities. The support for the screenings was so positive that 48 countries decided to each nominate one women in STEM to represent their country on a three-week IVLP exchange program in the United States.

Merchandising
Following the 2017 Lego Ideas Contest, Denmark-based toy maker The Lego Group announced plans to manufacture a fan-designed Women of NASA figurine set of five female scientists, engineers and astronauts, as based on real women who have worked for NASA. The minifigures planned for inclusion in the set were Katherine Johnson, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton; astronaut, physicist and educator Sally Ride; astronomer Nancy Grace Roman; and astronaut and physician Mae Jemison (who is also African American). The finished set did not include Johnson. The Women of NASA set was released November 1, 2017.

The Miracles' 1961 chart hit, "Mighty Good Lovin'", written by lead singer Smokey Robinson, is played in the film during the house party dance scene, and was also heard in the closing credits.

Home media
Hidden Figures was released on Digital HD on March 28, 2017, and Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD, and DVD on April 11, 2017. The film debuted at No. 3 on the home video sales chart.

Reception

Box office
Hidden Figures grossed $169.6 million in the United States and Canada, and $66.3 million in other territories, for a worldwide gross of $236 million, against a production budget of $25 million. Domestically, Hidden Figures was the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee at the 89th Academy Awards. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $95.55 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues for the film, making it one of the top twenty most profitable release of 2016.

During its limited release in 25 theaters from December 25, 2016, to January 5, 2017, the film grossed $3 million. In North America, Hidden Figures had its expansion alongside the opening of Underworld: Blood Wars and the wide expansions of Lion and A Monster Calls. It was expected to gross around $20 million from 2,471 theaters in its opening weekend, with the studio projecting a more conservative $15–17 million debut. It made $1.2 million from Thursday night previews and $7.6 million on its first day. Initially, projections had the film grossing $21.8 million in its opening weekend, finishing second behind Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ($22 million). However the next day, final figures revealed the film tallied a weekend total of $22.8 million, beating Rogue Ones $21.9 million. In its second weekend, the film grossed $20.5 million (for a four-day MLK Weekend total of $27.5 million), again topping the box office.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 314 reviews, with an average rating of 7.64/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "In heartwarming, crowd-pleasing fashion, Hidden Figures celebrates overlooked—and crucial—contributions from a pivotal moment in American history." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 74 out of 100, based on 47 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, one of fewer than 90 films in the history of the service to receive such a score.

Simon Thompson of IGN gave the film a rating of nine out of ten, writing, "Hidden Figures fills in an all too forgotten, or simply too widely unknown, blank in US history in a classy, engaging, entertaining and hugely fulfilling way. Superb performances across the board and a fascinating story alone make Hidden Figures a solid, an accomplished and deftly executed movie that entertains, engages and earns your time, money and attention." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote, "the film's made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons."

Clayton Davis of Awards Circuit gave the film three and a half stars, saying "Precisely marketed as terrific adult entertainment for the Christmas season, Hidden Figures is a faithful and truly beautiful portrait of our country's consistent gloss over the racial tensions that have divided and continue to plague the fabric of our existence. Lavishly engaging from start to finish, Hidden Figures may be able to catch the most inopportune movie-goer off guard and cause them to fall for its undeniable and classic storytelling. The film is not to be missed."

Other reviews criticized the film for its fictional embellishments and conventional, feel-good style. Tim Grierson, writing for Screen International, states that "Hidden Figures is almost patronisingly earnest in its depiction of sexism and racism. An air of do-gooder self-satisfaction hovers over the proceedings", while Jesse Hassenger at The A.V. Club comments that "lack of surprise is in this movie's bones." Eric Kohn of IndieWire argues that the film "trivializes history; as a hagiographic tribute to its brilliant protagonists, it doesn't dig into the essence of their struggles" and similarly, Paul Byrnes concludes that "When a film purports to be selling history, we're entitled to ask where the history went, even if it offers a good time instead."

Accolades

Among its many achievements, Octavia Spencer was particularly lauded for her portrayal of Dorothy Vaughan and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress  Motion Picture and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role. The film's ensemble cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The film itself garnered a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture and several nominations its screenplay (including for the Oscar and BAFTA), soundtrack and score.

Overall, the film received three nominations for the 89th Academy Awards in 2017, winning none:
 Best Picture  Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Pharrell Williams and Theodore Melfi (lost to Moonlight)
 Best Supporting Actress  Octavia Spencer (lost to Viola Davis for Fences)
 Best Adapted Screenplay  Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi (based on the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race) (lost to Moonlight)

See also
 African-American women in computer science
 Henrietta Swan Leavitt
 Kathaleen Land
 List of black films of the 2010s
 List of films about mathematicians
 Mathematical fiction
 Women in science

References

Further reading

External links

 Hidden Figures at History vs. Hollywood

2016 films
2016 biographical drama films
2010s historical drama films
African-American biographical dramas
American films based on actual events
American historical drama films
Biographical films about mathematicians
Biographical films about scientists
Drama films based on actual events
Films scored by Hans Zimmer
Films scored by Pharrell Williams
Films scored by Benjamin Wallfisch
Films about astronauts
Films about computing
Films about mathematics
Films about NASA
Films about racism
Films about sexism
Films about women in the United States
20th Century Fox films
Films based on non-fiction books
Films directed by Theodore Melfi
Films set in 1926
Films set in the 1960s
Films set in 1961
Films set in 1962
Films set in Florida
Films set in Virginia
Films set in West Virginia
Films shot in Atlanta
Project Mercury
Women in mathematics
Women in science and technology
John Glenn
2016 drama films
Films based on biographies
Chernin Entertainment films
History of women in West Virginia
2010s feminist films
2010s female buddy films
2010s English-language films
2010s American films

Hidden Figures


Wapedia was a mobile version of Wikipedia. It was started in August 2004 by Florian Amrhein and shut down on 4 November 2013. It was operated by Taptu.

Wapedia was originally a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) site for use on mobile phones of the very early 2000s. The URL for Wapedia was http://wapedia.mobi/  (which was one of the early examples of a .mobi website). Over time, HTML interfaces were added, with the site generating pages optimised for a variety of mobile devices such as smart phones, Personal digital assistants (PDAs), and tablets. In 2009 dedicated applications for iPhone, Android and WebOS were launched.

Wapedia served articles using a combination of a proxy-like behavior and a local article database. It did not offer the ability to edit pages. Wapedia injected adverts into the Wikipedia articles, either in the HTML or in the applications.

See also
 Help:Mobile access

References

External links

Android (operating system) software
Discontinued iOS software
Websites which mirror Wikipedia
2004 software
Computer-related introductions in 2004

Wapedia


Marie-Nicole Vestier (1767–1846) was a French painter.

Biography
A native of Paris, Vestier was the daughter of painter Antoine Vestier. Known as a portraitist, in 1789 she married miniature painter François Dumont. In 1785 a portrait of her by her father, in which she is depicted painting his portrait, appeared at the Paris Salon; this painting is currently held in a private collection in Buenos Aires. She was barred from presenting her own work at the Salon for several years, but in 1794 showed her self-portrait The Artist at Her Occupations. For many years it was assumed that Vestier was the artist who received much acclaim from critics for work which had been shown in 1785 at the place Dauphine; more recent research has shown this to be Angélique-Louise Verrier instead. Another portrait of Vestier by her father is held by the National Gallery of Scotland.

A painting of Marie-Nicole was acquired by the Musée de la Révolution française in 2017. This painting is his self-portrait presented at the Salon de Paris in 1793.

References

1767 births
1846 deaths
French women painters
18th-century French painters
18th-century French women artists
19th-century French painters
19th-century French women artists
French portrait painters
Painters from Paris

Marie-Nicole Vestier


Julian Jordan (November 10, 1850 – October 13, 1929) was an American composer, vocal instructor and singer. He worked with Willis Woodward & Co., a publisher in New York City's Tin Pan Alley. In 1887, he wrote his most successful composition, "The Song That Reached My Heart."

The Song That Reached My Heart
"Mr. Jordan tells the following story of how he came to write "The Song that Reached My Heart."
"Mr. Sayres, manager of the minstrel company, chanced to hear at one of the New York theaters a song entitled "The Song for Me," which introduced "Home! Sweet Home!" as a finish. The following day Mr. Sayres and I met. He spoke of the song he had heard and said that he would like to have me get it for use in this minstrel company. Naturally I objected to taking the composition of another man, being a song writer myself, and so I told Mr. Sayres that if he was desirous of having a song which would introduce the melody of "Home, Sweet Home" I believed that I could compose one which would be as effective as the one he wished me to obtain. The idea was favorable to him, and Mr. Sayres at once suggested as a title for the song that I was to compose, "The Song That Reached My Heart." "Take that for a title and go home and see what you can make of it" are the words Mr. Sayres used. I went home and the possessors of 100,000 copies of the song today know what I made of it." Willis Woodward, the song's publisher, regarded the piece "to be one of the most lasting and profitable "hits" in his long career."

Julian's twin brother, Jules Jordan, was also a composer and singer.

References

External links

 Library of Congress. The Song that Reached my Heart sung by Evan Williams

1850 births
1929 deaths
People from Willimantic, Connecticut
American male composers
American composers
American vocal coaches

Julian Jordan (composer)


An electronic navigational chart (ENC) is an official database created by a national hydrographic office for use with an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS). ECDIS and ENCs are the primary means of electronic navigation on cargo ships.

Inland Electronic Chart Display and Information System are similar systems used for navigation of inland water.

ENC
An Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) is a digital representation of a real-world geographical area for the purpose of Marine navigation.
Real-world objects and areas of navigational significance, or to a lesser degree - informational significance, are portrayed through Raster facsimiles of traditional paper charts; or more commonly through vector images, which are able to scale their relative position and size to meet a Mariner's Selected Viewing Scale (MSVS) displayed through an ECDIS.

All Navigational charts must meet the requirements set out in the Safety of Lives At Sea (SOLAS) Convention.
To meet these requirements, ENC's created and published by a Hydrographic Authority must conform to the internationally recognised standards stated in the publications set out by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO). Presently the S-57 Standard is the only ENC standard which meets SOLAS chart carriage requirements. The IHO and it's parent body the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) have begun a transition to a new suite of standards that is targeted to exist as a unified, interactive suite of products and standards within the S-100 Universal Hydrographic Data Model.  Within this model an updated standard for the production and publishing of ENCs is under development; The S-101 product specification.
At present Hydrographic Authorities must only produce and publish data to the S-57 product specification, from here that published data can be certified as an ENC. Only ENCs can be used within ECDIS to meet the International Maritime Organization (IMO) performance standard for ECDIS.

ENCs are available for wholesale distribution to chart agents and resellers from Regional Electronic Navigational Chart Centres (RENCs). The RENCs are not-for-profit organizations made up of ENC-producer countries.  RENCs independently check each ENC submitted by the contributing countries to ensure that they conform to the relevant IHO standards.  The RENCs also act collectively as one-stop wholesalers of most of the world's ENCs.

IHO Publication S-63 developed by the IHO Data Protection Scheme Working Group is used to encrypt and digitally sign ENC data. Chart data is captured based on standards stated in IHO Publication S-57, and is displayed according to a display standard set out in IHO Publication S-52 to ensure consistency of data rendering between different systems.

IMO adopted compulsory carriage of ECDIS and ENCs on new high speed craft from 1 July 2010 and progressively for other craft from 2012 to 2018.

ECDIS

An Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) is a geographic information system used for nautical navigation that complies with International Maritime Organization (IMO) and IHO regulations as a method of electronic navigation. It is considered as an alternative to paper nautical charts for navigation by ships. IMO refers to similar systems not meeting the regulations as Electronic Chart Systems (ECSs).

An ECDIS system displays the information from Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC) and integrates position information from position, heading and speed through water reference systems and optionally other navigational sensors. Other sensors which could interface with an ECDIS are radar, Navtex, Automatic Identification Systems (AIS), and depth sounders.

In recent years concerns from the industry have been raised as to the system's security especially with regards to cyber attacks and GPS spoofing attacks.

ECDIS provides continuous position and navigational safety information. The system generates audible and/or visual alarms when the vessel is in proximity to navigational hazards. Military versions of ECDIS are known as WECDIS (warship ECDIS) or ECDIS-N (ECDIS-naval).

Regulations
ECDIS (as defined by IHO Publications S-57 and S-52) is an approved marine navigational chart and information system, which is accepted as complying with the conventional paper charts required by Regulation V/19 of the 1974 IMO SOLAS Convention. as amended. The performance requirements for ECDIS are defined by IMO and the consequent test standards have been developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in International Standard IEC 61174.

S-100
In the future, the ENC will be part of a product specification family which is based on the "IHO Universal Hydrographic Data Model", known as S-100. The product specification number S-101 has been assigned to the ENC. ENCs are now being produced under the S-100 standard and it is envisaged that S-100 ENCs will replace S-57 data sets by the 2030s. The new ENC standards include greater data layers allowing for enhanced navigation formats, such as S-129 on Under Keel Clearance Management (UCKM). Other sub-formats include S-102 on Bathymetric Surfaces, S-111 on Surface Currents and S-124 on Navigational Warnings.

See also
 e-Navigation concept
 Raster Navigational Charts (NOAA)
 Navionics
 C-MAP

References

Further reading
 ECDIS Passage Planning and Watchkeeping. Witherby Publishing Group, Livingston, 2022. ()
 ECDIS Procedures Guide. Witherby Publishing Group, Livingston, 2021. ()
 WEINTRIT Adam: The Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS). An Operational Handbook. A Balkema Book. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, Boca Raton – London - New York - Leiden, 2009. (), http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9780415482462

External links
IMO Electronic Chart Overview
Transas Electronic Navigational Charts, World Folio
International Centre for ENCs, one of two RENCs in the world
PRIMAR, one of two RENCs in the world
United Kingdom Hydrographic Office
Electronic Chart Centre (ECC)
Product Survey ECDIS - ECS+ software
Office of Coast Survey, has free download of ENCs for US.
Inland Electronic Navigation Charts (US)
Open Electronic Navigation Charts Directory
NOAA ENC Chart Viewer
Meaning of "ECDIS"

Electronic navigation
Navigational aids
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Sahier al-Qalamawi (; July 20, 1911 – May 4, 1997) was a significant literary figure and politician from Egypt who shaped Arabic writing and culture through her writing, feminist activism, and advocacy. She was one of the first women to attend Cairo University and in 1941 became the first Egyptian woman to earn her Master of Arts Degree and PhD for her work in Arabic literature. After graduating, she was employed by the university as their first woman lecturer. Al-Qalamawi was also one of the first women to hold a number of chief positions including chairperson of the Arabic Department at Cairo University, president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, and president of the League of Arab Women University Graduates. Her writings include two volumes of short stories, ten critical studies, and many translations from world literature.Aḥādīth jaddatī (My Grandmother's Tales) was published in 1935.

Biography

Early life
Sahier al-Qalamawi was born on July 20, 1911, in Cairo, Egypt and lived there throughout her life. She was born to a family that took pride in educating its female members and therefore she was able to take advantage of her father's extensive library of works at an early age. Exposure to authors like Taha Hussein, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, and Ibn Iyas helped advance her literary talent and shape her voice as a writer.

As a child during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, al-Qalamawi grew up with influences from the Egyptian women at the time including legendary feminist Huda Sha'arawi and nationalist figure Safia Zaghoul. These women and other feminists at the time focused on moving feminist debate into the streets to create a more far reaching movement. This goal influenced some of al-Qalamawi's feminist ideals.

Education
In 1928, al-Qalamawi graduated the American College for girls and intended to study medicine like her father at Cairo University. However, upon receiving a rejection, she was encouraged by her father to instead specialize in Arabic Literature. She became the first young girl to attend Cairo University and the only female among fourteen males to study Arabic Literature. During her time at Cairo University, al-Qalamawi received guidance from Dr. Taha Hussein who was the chairperson of the Arabic Department and editor in chief of the Cairo University Magazine. He made al-Qalamawi the assistant editor of the Cairo University Magazine in 1932 and thus al-Qalamawi became the first woman with a license in journalism in Egypt. During her years as a student, she was also a broadcaster for the Egyptian Radio Broadcasting service. After earning her Masters of Arts degree, she received a scholarship to do research in Paris for her PhD. In 1941, after completing her thesis, she became the first woman to receive a PhD from Cairo University.

Career
She was a woman of many "firsts" and began her career as the first woman lecturer at Cairo University in 1936. She soon worked her way up to professor and later chairperson of the Arabic Department between the years 1958-1967 and was the first woman to do so.

She served as the president of the Egyptian Feminist Union and in 1959, she became the head of the League of Arab Women University Graduates where she set the basis of cooperation between the Egyptian Union and the World Union of Universities. Later, she was the head of the Egyptian General Authority for Cinema, Theater, and Music in 1967 and the head of the Children's Culture Community in 1968.

Al-Qalamawi contributed to the fight for women's rights not only through literary works, but also through her participation in Arab Women's Conferences where she advocated for equal rights. In 1960, she was the president of the International Conference on Woman; by 1961 she was the head of the first conference on Folkloric Arts. She established a committee to superintend the university Palestinian girls to address her concern of the Palestinian issue in 1962.

Her political career began when she entered the political arena as a member of parliament in 1958 until 1964 and again in 1979 until 1984. She was also the director of the government affiliated Egyptian Organization for Publishing and Distributing where she worked to broaden the audience of readers, encourage young writers, and promote the book industry. In 1967, she established the Middle East's first international book fair: the Cairo International Book Fair. During her last few years, she served as the Head of the General Book Organization from 1967 to 1971 and president of the Board of Censorship from 1982 to 1985.

Starting as early as 1935, she published a wide array of literary works including short stories, critical studies, cultural magazines, and translations. She died in Cairo on May 4, 1997.

Writing and themes
Among her more than eighty publications, al-Qalamawi's earliest and most famous work is her first volume of short stories published in 1935. This work, which was published in Cairo, was also the first volume of short stories to be published by a woman in Egypt. In Ahadith Jaddati (My Grandmother's Tales), al-Qalamawi analyzes the female social role as a preserver and renewer of community history through oral narrative in this work. The volume is framed by the story of a grandmother reminiscing about the past to her granddaughter. She develops this story line into a social criticism and vision of wartime form the perspective of the civilians who stayed home. The grandmother extracts morals from her recollection of events and draws comparisons between the past and present, often favoring the past. Al-Qalamawi suggests through this work that old wives' tales and grandmothers' bedtime stories can contain a deep feminist message. Like many other works of fiction in the 1930s, her collection of stories provides realistic depictions of Egyptian middle class society and, through middle class eyes, a view of peasant society.

The thesis that earned al-Qalamawi her PhD, a research paper on Alf Lailah wa Lailah (One Thousand and One Nights), lays the foundations of her feminist mission. She aims to create the new woman: an intelligent, cultured, and wise woman who is fully in charge of her life and family. This woman not only uses her wits and virtues to reach equality with men, but also strives to re-educate men in order to gain equality. This message was further developed in her books on literary criticism, "Limitation in Literature" (1955) and "The World Between Two Bookcovers" (1958).

Her translations of works such as Chinese stories by Pearl Buck (1950) and Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" (1964) further illustrate women's struggles and the need to re-educate men. Al-Qalamawi also founded and released several cultural magazines that dealt with contemporary subjects such as cinema, music and the arts. Other significant works include "The Devils Play and Dance" (1965), "The Dissident's Literature (1941), and "The World in a Book" (1958).

Her work has been received warmly by critics; many regard her as a "remarkable literary figure of the contemporary cultural movement in Egypt."

Tribute
On July 20, 2014, Google dedicated a Doodle to the writer for the 103rd anniversary of her birth. The Doodle reached all the countries of the Arab World.

Awards
Al-Qalamawi received awards and recognition for her literary work, leadership, and advocacy. These awards include:
Award of the Arabic Language Academy, for her Ph.D. thesis on "Arabian Nights", 1945.
State Merit Award in Youths' Literature, she was the first woman to obtain it 1955.
State Encouragement Prize, 1955.
State Merit Award in Literature, shared with Dr. Shawki Deif, 1963.
Nasser's Award, dedicated by the former Soviet Union, 1976.
State Merit Award in Literature, 1977.
Medal of Appreciation, 1977.
Medal of the Republic, first class, 1978.
Medal of Achievement, 1978.
State Appreciation Prize for Literature
Honorary Doctorate from the American University in Cairo, (AUC), 1987.
In addition, she was honored by the Cairo International Book Fair in 1993 for serving as the president of the General Egyptian Book Organization. In 1955, she was honored by the Cairo Governorate for Egyptian Women's Day.

Notes

References

1911 births
1997 deaths
Egyptian feminists
Members of the House of Representatives (Egypt)
Egyptian novelists
Egyptian women writers
Writers from Cairo
Cairo University alumni
Egyptian women short story writers
Egyptian short story writers
Egyptian women novelists
20th-century novelists
20th-century women writers
20th-century short story writers
Academic staff of Cairo University

Suhayr al-Qalamawi


Lycée Polyvalent Mixte Maine de Biran is a Lycée or High School in the town of Bergerac in the Aquitaine Region of France. As a Polyvalent Lycée, the school offers students the possibility of Studying for either a général or téchnologique Baccalauréat. The school campus is located on Rue Valette in the west of the town, and is spread over more than 11 acres and includes 2 teaching buildings, 2 Dormitory buildings, a building housing two canteens, a gymnasium and an administration building . It is the biggest only Polyvalent Lycée in the south west Dordogne, excluding the nearby private school,  Institution Sainte Marthe - Saint Front on Avenue Pasteur in the north of the town. There are several other smaller Lycées in Bergerac and the surrounding towns. The estimated student body is 1700.

References

Information translated from https://web.archive.org/web/20100722155806/http://lyceemainedebiran.fr/spip.php

External links
  School's official website (French)

Lycées in France
Buildings and structures in Dordogne
Education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Lycée Polyvalent Mixte Maine de Biran


The Swingin' Stars were an early popular band from Dominica, formed in 1959 in the Virgin Lane/Turkey Lane area.  They were originally known as the Swinging Teens and changed their name in 1961.  Their first major show was at the 1960 calypso competition at Carnival, and they continued to gain fans across the Caribbean in the early 1960s; their first show outside Dominica came in 1964.  They recorded in Barbados in 1967, releasing "Sparrow Party" backed by "Tom Cat Mambo".

The Swinging Stars are the second longest living calypso music band in the Caribbean. They have continued performing and recording to the present, and have released at least eleven albums.

References

Cakafete
Contemporary Music in Dominica

Dominica musical groups
Musical groups established in 1959
1959 establishments in Dominica

The Swinging Stars


The railway from Paris to Lille is an important French 251-kilometre long railway line, that connects Paris to the northern French city Lille. Branch lines offer connections to Belgium and Great Britain. As one of the first railway lines in France, it was opened on 20 June 1846. The opening of the LGV Nord high speed line from Paris to Lille in 1993 has decreased its importance for passenger traffic.

Route
The Paris–Lille railway begins at the Gare du Nord in Paris, running north for 6 km until Saint-Denis. From here, it climbs in northeastern direction at a constant 5 mm/km incline. Near Marly-la-Ville, it turns north and then northwest, and descends towards the river Oise. At Creil, the Oise is crossed. The line to Saint-Quentin and Brussels branches off at Creil.

The line leaves the Oise valley and continues north to the river Somme at Longueau near Amiens. Here the Longueau–Boulogne railway to the Gare d'Amiens and Boulogne-sur-Mer branches off to the west, and a line to Laon to the east. The line to Lille continues in northeastern direction, following the valley of the Somme until Corbie, and then the river Ancre until Miraumont, where the line turns north until it reaches Arras.

From Arras it follows the river Scarpe in eastern direction until Douai, where it turns northwest. After Ostricourt it turns north again, entering the agglomeration of Lille. After a total length of 251 km, it reaches its terminus Gare de Lille-Flandres.

Main stations

The main stations on the Paris–Lille railway are:
 Gare du Nord (Paris)
 Gare de Creil
 Gare de Longueau
 Gare d'Arras
 Gare de Douai
 Gare de Lille-Flandres

History

The idea of linking France to Belgium and Great Britain was studied by the French Government as early as 1833. By November 1842, the northern French cities Lille and Valenciennes were already connected to the Belgian railway network. In July 1844 a law was passed that determined the route of the new railway from Paris to Lille. Exploitation of the line from Paris to Lille and several branch lines was granted to the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord. Owners of the CF du Nord were Hottinger, Laffitte, Blount and Baron de Rothschild as president. The railway line as well as the Parisian station was inaugurated in June 1846.

The line originally passed through the Oise valley, along Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône and Persan. This way a steep climb and descent between Saint-Denis and Creil could be avoided. The arrival of stronger engines prompted the CF du Nord to construct a 19 km shorter line between Saint-Denis and Creil over the plateau, passing along Chantilly. This new section was opened on 10 May 1859.

Since the opening of the LGV Nord high speed line between Paris and Lille in 1993, most long-distance passenger traffic has shifted away from the classical Paris–Lille line. It remains an important railway for freight traffic and regional passenger traffic.

Services

The Paris–Lille railway is used by the following passenger services:
TGV, Thalys and Eurostar on the section between Paris and Villiers-le-Bel - Gonesse, and on short stretches near Arras and Lille
TGV additionally on the section between Arras and Lille
Intercités from Paris to Boulogne on the section between Paris and Longueau, and Intercités from Paris to Cambrai and Maubeuge on the section between Paris and Creil
TER Hauts-de-France regional services on the whole line
Transilien regional services on the section between Paris and Saint-Denis
RER D Paris rapid transit on the section between Paris and Creil

References

External links
Transilien network map
TER Hauts-de-France railway map

Railway lines in Île-de-France
Railway lines in Hauts-de-France
Railway lines opened in 1846
1846 establishments in France

Paris–Lille railway


Report from the Aleutians is a 1943 documentary propaganda film produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps about the Aleutian Islands Campaign during World War II. It was directed and narrated by John Huston.

Plot
In contrast to the other technicolor films made in the Pacific war, Report from the Aleutians has relatively little combat footage, and instead concentrates on the daily lives of the servicemen on Adak Island, as they live and work there while flying missions over nearby Kiska. The film opens with a map showing the strategic importance of the island, and the thrust of the 1942 Japanese offensive into Midway and Dutch Harbor. Photographs of the pilots who beat the Japanese back at Dutch Harbor are passed before the camera. "There is no monument to these men. If you want to see their monument, look around you."

The American forces dug in at Adak Island, and there commenced daily bombing missions over the Japanese who had taken Kiska. The film focuses on their routine activities such as harbor patrols, messes, news boards and mail call. "Ask any pilot. He'd tell you he'd gladly fly an extra trip over Kiska to get just one letter." One pilot's crash landing is shown, and his funeral is filmed.

The last twenty minutes or so of the film is taken from footage taken over a mission over Japanese positions. The monotony of the one-hour trip there is emphasized, noting that some have taken up "mental solitaire" on the way over. But at Kiska there is no lack of excitement, as several loads of bombs are dropped over the Japanese, and fire is exchanged by the tailgunner. At the end of the film the servicemen at Adak are shown rejoicing that all of their comrades have returned.

Huston included shots showing the monotony of Army life, e.g. latrine digging and cigarette smoking, and Army authorities objected to the inclusion of these scenes. However, Huston fought for the inclusion of these scenes and eventually prevailed, although after a delay of a couple of months.

External links

 Report from the Aleutians at the National Archives and Records Administration
 John Huston (Twayne's Filmmakers Series),

1943 films
American World War II propaganda films
Films directed by John Huston
Films scored by Dimitri Tiomkin
American aviation films
Films set in Alaska
Aleutian Islands campaign
Aleutian Islands
1940s war films
American documentary films
1943 documentary films
Articles containing video clips
1940s English-language films

Report from the Aleutians


The Girl Scouts of the USA is a not-for-profit organization that is a branch of the Scouting movement, similar to the Boy Scouts of America, except it is for girls. It was founded in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low and first was called the Girl Guides of America, after the Girl Guides in the United Kingdom. Girl Scouts do many activities, which they often earn patches or "merit badges" for. They are best known for selling Girl Scout cookies every year to raise money.

Levels
There are different levels for Girl Scouts, based on age. Different levels do different activities. Today those levels are:
 Daisies
 Kindergarten and first grade girls, 5 to 7 years old.
 These girls earn "Petal" patches and learn about being part of the Girl Scouts. These girls are the first level of Girl Scouts.
 Brownies
 Second and third grade girls, 7 to 9 years old.
 These girls earn "Try-it" patches and try out new activities.
 Juniors
 Fourth and fifth grade girls, 9 to 11 years old.
 These girls earn badges in activities by becoming good at them, not just trying them. They may also work towards earning other awards.
 Cadettes
 Sixth, seventh and eighth grade girls, 11 to 14 years old.
 These girls work on Interest Projects, which involve more complex activities to earn a badge. They also may work towards other awards. These girls are supported to act as leaders.
 Seniors
 Ninth and tenth grade girls, 14 to 16 years old.
 These girls do many of the same things as cadettes. They usually also work on projects related to being leaders and lead activities for younger Girl Scouts.
 Ambassadors
 Eleventh and twelfth grade girls, 16 to 18 years old.
 These girls do many of the same things as seniors, because Ambassador is a new level that used to be part of the senior level. These girls are the highest level of Girl Scouts.

Adult members
There are also adult members of Girl Scouts who volunteer and help the organization. Adult members might be college students who became too old to be Girl Scouts, or they might be older adults. Both men and women are allowed to be adult members and volunteer.

References

Scouting
Organizations in New York City

Girl Scouts of the USA


Agent Mitchell Carson is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

The character was portrayed in live-action by actor Martin Donovan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe 2015 film Ant-Man.

Publication history
Created by writers Robert Kirkman and Andy Kuhn, he first appeared in Marvel Team-Up Vol. 3 #21. He was the primary antagonist in the 2006 Irredeemable Ant-Man series.

Fictional character biography
Mitch Carson was a high-ranked S.H.I.E.L.D. security agent. He killed his father when he was fifteen years old and many others after that. He had, however, never been caught for any of those crimes and managed to find employment with S.H.I.E.L.D.

Carson was part of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team that took the Iron Maniac into custody. The alternate Stark was held alongside the Life Model Decoy (LMD) of Diamondback. His body somehow adapted to the sedatives used, and he attacked the agents watching him, then activated the LMD coercing it to help.

Carson was supposed to become the wearer of the newest Ant-Man suit made for S.H.I.E.L.D. by Hank Pym. The suit was thought to be stolen, but it actually disappeared by accident when Agent Chris McCarthy tried it on. Chris was later killed during a Hydra attack on the Helicarrier, and it was then that Eric O'Grady took the suit for himself.

Carson was determined to find the suit and bring in whoever stole it. During his mission to capture the new Ant-Man, he was heavily burned in the face during a fight with him. After that, it did not take long for Carson to find out that the new Ant-Man was actually O'Grady.

Eventually, Carson used an older Ant-Man suit and managed to confront and capture O'Grady. Instead of bringing him to justice, however, Carson planned to torture him. Carson confessed his crimes but before he could kill O'Grady, Iron Man arrived and intervened. Seeing Carson in the Ant-Man suit while torturing O'Grady, Stark fought and defeated him. O'Grady lied to Stark and told him that Carson killed McCarthy and tried to steal the suit. O'Grady claimed to be on the run from Carson and trying to prevent him from getting the suit. Carson was arrested for attempted murder and stealing the Ant-Man suit.

Powers and abilities
Carson has S.H.I.E.L.D. training, specifically in firearms/explosives, espionage, intelligence gathering, and hand-to-hand combat.

He gained access to an old Ant-Man suit which he used to shrink and take out Eric O'Grady using the more advanced Ant-Man suit.

In other media

Mitchell Carson appears in Ant-Man (2015), portrayed by Martin Donovan. This version is a Hydra agent who previously worked undercover as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Head of Defense during the 1990s and partook in the latter organization's failed attempt at replicating Hank Pym's Pym Particles. In the present, Carson and a group of Hydra agents meet with Darren Cross, Pym's former protégé who had successfully created his own Pym Particles and developed the Yellowjacket battle suit. After Pym, Scott Lang, and Hope van Dyne intervene, Carson absconds with Cross's replicated technology. In an alternate ending, Carson is apprehended before he can escape.

References

External links
 Mitchell Carson at Marvel Wiki

Marvel Comics male supervillains
Fictional characters who can change size
Fictional characters with disfigurements
Fictional patricides
Fictional secret agents and spies
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents

Mitchell Carson