Kokand See Qo'qon
Koko Nor Chinese Qinghai Hu or Ch'ing-hai Vchiq-'hA Hu Lake, Qinghai province, China. The largest drainless mountain lake of Central Asia, it is 65 mi (105 km) long and 40 mi (64 km) wide; its surface area fluctuates seasonally between 1,600 and 2,300 sq mi (4,200 and 6,000 sq km). It is located in the Nan Mountains (Nan Shan) at an elevation of 10,515 ft (3,205 m). Formed by melting glaciers during the Late Pleis¬ tocene Epoch, the lake today receives the waters of some two dozen riv¬ ers and streams.
Kokoschka Vko-'kosh-koN, Oskar (b. March 1, 1886, Pochlam, Austria—d. Feb. 22,1980, Villeneuve, Switz.) Austrian painter and writer. He studied and taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts but was dissatisfied because the school omitted study of the human figure, his pri¬ mary artistic interest. His early paintings were rendered in delicate, agi¬ tated lines and relatively naturalistic colours. After c. 1912 he became a leading exponent of Expressionism; his portraits came to be painted with increasingly broader strokes of more varied colour and heavier outlines. While recovering from a wound received in World War I, he wrote, pro¬ duced, and staged three plays; his Orpheus and Eurydice (1918) became an opera by Ernst Krenek (1926). The landscapes he produced during 10 years of teaching and travel mark the second peak of his career. Shortly before World War II he fled to London, where his paintings became increasingly political and antifascist. He continued his political art after moving to Switzerland in 1953.
Kol Nidre Vk61-'ni-dra\ Prayer sung in Jewish synagogues at the start of services on the eve of Yom Kippur. The prayer begins with an expres¬ sion of repentance for all unfulfilled vows, oaths, and promises to God during the previous year. It was in use as early as the 8 th century, per¬ haps as a means of annulling oaths forced on Jews by their Christian persecutors. The melody used by Ashkenazi Jews became famous when the composer Max Bruch used it in his Kol Nidrei (1880).
kola nut or cola nut Caffeine- containing nut of two evergreen trees
Kohlrabi (Brassica oleracea)
W.H. HODGE
Kola nut (Cola nitida)
W.H. HODGE
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Kola Peninsula ► Komodo I 1047
(Cola acuminata and C. nitida ) of the cocoa family (Sterculiaceae), native to tropical Africa and cultivated extensively in the New World tropics. The trees grow to 60 ft (18.3 m) in height and have oblong leathery leaves, yellow flowers, and star-shaped fruit. The nut has been used in medicines and in soft drinks, though American “colas” today instead use synthetic flavorings that mimic its taste. Kola nuts are also used where grown as a medium of exchange or are chewed to diminish sensations of hunger and fatigue, to aid digestion, and to combat intoxication, hangover, and diar¬ rhea.
Kola Peninsula Promontory, northern Russia. It separates the White and Barents seas; it occupies 40,000 sq mi (100,000 sq km) and extends across the Arctic Circle. It consists of rock more than 570 million years old. The winter climate is severe; the largest town is the ice-free port of Murmansk on the northern coast. It has the world’s largest deposits of apatite, used for fertilizer production.
Kolbe Vkol-boX, Saint Maksymilian Maria orig. Rajmund Kolbe (b. Jan. 8, 1894, Zdunska Wola, near Lodz, Russian Empire—d. Aug. 14, 1941, Auschwitz; canonized Oct. 10, 1982; feast day August 14) Polish Franciscan priest martyred by the Nazis. Ordained in 1918, he founded the City of Mary Immaculate religious centre (1927) and became its superior, as well as director of Poland’s chief Roman Catholic pub¬ lishing complex. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and again in 1941 on charges of aiding Jews and the Polish underground. He was imprisoned at Warsaw, then shipped to Auschwitz, where he volunteered his life in place of that of a condemned inmate.
Kolchak \k6l-'chak\, Aleksandr (Vasilyevich) (b. Nov. 16, 1874, St. Petersburg, Russia—d. Feb. 7, 1920, Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Russia) Russian naval officer and political leader. He was forced to resign as com¬ mander of the fleet in the Black Sea after the Russian Revolution of 1917 began. After a coup d’etat in Omsk in 1918, he gained power among the counterrevolutionary White Russians, and in 1919 he was recognized by them as supreme ruler of Russia. After initial successes against the Red Army, his armies were routed in 1919; the next year he was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks.
Kolkat a formerly Calcutta City (pop., 2001: city, 4,580,546; metro, area, 13,205,697), northeastern India. Capital of West Bengal state, former capital (1772-1912) of British India, and India’s second largest metro¬ politan area, it is located on the Hugli (Hooghly) River, about 90 mi (145 km) from the river’s mouth. The British established a trading centre at the site in 1690, which grew and became the seat of the Bengal presidency in 1707. It was captured by the nawab of Bengal, who in 1756 impris¬ oned the British there (in a prison that was later known as the Black Hole); the city was retaken by the British under Robert Clive. It was an extremely busy 19th-century commercial centre, but it began to decline with the removal of the colonial capital to Delhi in 1912. The decline continued when Bengal was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1947 and when Bangladesh was created in 1971. The flood of refugees from those political upheavals boosted the city’s population but also significantly added to its widespread poverty. Despite its problems, Kolkata remains the dominant urban area of eastern India and a major educational and cul¬ tural centre.
Kollontay \,ka-l3n-'tl\, Aleksandra (Mikhaylovna) orig. Ale- ksandra Mikhaylovna Domontovich (b. March 31, 1872, St. Petersburg, Russia—d. March 9, 1952, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Rus¬ sian administrator and diplomat. As the first commissar for public wel¬ fare in the Bolshevik government (1917), she advocated simplifying marriage and divorce procedures and improving the status of women. She became the first woman to serve as an accredited minister to a foreign country when she was named minister to Norway (1923-25, 1927-30); she later served as minister to Mexico (1926-27) and Sweden (1930-45). In 1944 she conducted the negotiations that ended Soviet-Finnish hostili¬ ties in World War II.
Kollwitz \'kol-,vits,\ English Vkol-.witsV Kathe orig. Kathe Schmidt (b. July 8, 1867, Konigsberg, East Prussia—d. April 22, 1945, near Dresden, Ger.) German graphic artist and sculptor. She studied paint¬ ing in Berlin and Munich but devoted herself primarily to etchings, draw¬ ings, lithographs, and woodcuts. She gained firsthand knowledge of the miserable conditions of the urban poor when her physician husband opened a clinic in Berlin. She became the last great practitioner of Ger¬ man Expressionism and an outstanding artist of social protest. Two early series of prints, Weavers’ Revolt (1895-98) and Peasants’ War (1902-
08), portray the plight of the oppressed with the powerfully sim¬ plified, boldly accentuated forms that became her trademark. After her son died in World War I, she created a cycle of prints dedicated to the theme of a mother’s love. She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Acad¬ emy of Arts, where she was head of the Master Studio for Graphic Arts (1928-33). The Nazis banned her works from exhibition. The bombing of her home and studio in World War II destroyed much of her work.
Koln See Cologne
Kolreuter Vkcel- I r6i-t9r\ / Josef Gottlieb (b. April 27, 1733, Sulz,
Wiirttemberg—d. Nov. 12, 1806,
Karlsruhe, Baden) German botanist.
A pioneer in the study of plant hybrids, he was the first to develop a scientific application of the discovery (made in 1694 by Rudolph Camer- arius) of sex in plants. Cultivating plants in order to study their fertiliza¬ tion and development, he performed experiments, particularly with the tobacco plant, that included artificial fertilization and the production of fertile hybrids between plants of different species. His results foreshad¬ owed the work of Gregor Mendel. Kolreuter recognized the importance of insects and wind as agents of pollen transfer. He applied Carolus Lin¬ naeus’s sexual system of classification to lower plant forms. His work was not recognized until long after his death.