Shifting the Avalanche

Partisan Review began life in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of the Communist Party. That incarnation lasted about a year, just long enough for its energetic young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, to refuse the bit. They folded their fledgling journal for several years. Then, in 1937, Partisan Review was reborn, independent of its original sponsorship and deeply anti-Stalinist. With a cadre of writers that included Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Dwight Macdonald, and Lionel Trilling—to name only a few of the more prominent—this “little magazine” was a beacon in the hostile seas of intellectual New York after World War II, just as that city was replacing London as the literary capital of the world.

Much was written recently of Partisan Review’s heyday in the Forties and Fifties. Yet the quarterly npw in Boston and edited by Phillips (Rahv died in 1974)—goes on, true to its youthful ideals of anti-Soviet socialism and lucid prose. Because it takes the Soviet experience seriously, and is temperamentally anti-yahoo, this dowager among the serious journals of the Left remains one of the few classy dames on that side of town. More than occasionally, its pages carry some graceful hint of the form that once set young hearts pounding. So it is with a special section in the current issue, Partisan Review No. 4, “From behind Barbed Wire: New Polish Writing.”

MS

About the Author

Michael A. Scully

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Partisan Review began life in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of the Communist Party. That incarnation lasted about a year, just long enough for its energetic young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, to refuse the bit. They folded their fledgling journal for several years. Then, in 1937, Partisan Review was reborn, independent of its original sponsorship and deeply anti-Stalinist. With a cadre of writers that included Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Dwight Macdonald, and Lionel Trilling—to name only a few of the more prominent—this “little magazine” was a beacon in the hostile seas of intellectual New York after World War II, just as that city was replacing London as the literary capital of the world.

Much was written recently of Partisan Review’s heyday in the Forties and Fifties. Yet the quarterly npw in Boston and edited by Phillips (Rahv died in 1974)—goes on, true to its youthful ideals of anti-Soviet socialism and lucid prose. Because it takes the Soviet experience seriously, and is temperamentally anti-yahoo, this dowager among the serious journals of the Left remains one of the few classy dames on that side of town. More than occasionally, its pages carry some graceful hint of the form that once set young hearts pounding. So it is with a special section in the current issue, Partisan Review No. 4, “From behind Barbed Wire: New Polish Writing.”