TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
223
VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
As editor of
Partisan Review
for almost seven decades, William Phillips
was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century.
The range of his political and cultural interests was truly enormous. In
recent decades, it was thanks to him and to Edith Kurzweil that
Parti–
san Review
played such an important role in bringing to the attention
of American readers the best of East and Central European literature
and dissident writings.
Let me start by saying that I first met William and Edith in Washing–
ton, D.C., in the spring of
I99I,
when they attended an event at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I noticed William's
frail, but extremely impressive presence. At the end of the symposium
(focused on the post-communist cultural tensions), Edith and William
asked me to send them my contribution, which was soon published in
Partisan Review-a
magazine that for me, and for so many other East
European friends, was truly a subject of fascination. In
I992,
I partici–
pated in the extraordinary conference on "Intellectuals and Social
Change in Central and Eastern Europe" that Edith Kurzweil organized
at Rutgers University. The result of that conference, the special issue of
PR (Fall
I992),
remains a landmark in understanding the revolutions of
I989
and the role of ideas in eroding totalitarianism. Among the partic–
ipants, I would mention Adam Michnik, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky,
Czeslaw Milosz, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Adam Zagajewski, and so
many others. William Phillips's participation was not ostentatious; on the
contrary, as always, he preferred to listen carefully and, when needed, to
punctuate and highlight a few crucial issues (see in this respect his often
acerbic, always thoughtful "Comment" in every issue of
PRJ .
A few historical comments are needed in order to capture the impor–
tance of
PR:
the magazine never went over a print run of
I5,OOO
copies,
but its reverberations were amazing. We knew about it in Eastern
Europe and sometimes we could even read it (during the periods of
short-lived "thaw," always followed by new dogmatic freezes). Together
with Philip Rahv, the colleague with whom he later broke for political
and personal reasons, Phillips played an essential role in the founding of
the magazine in the
I930S.
Among the many collaborators throughout
all these years, let me mention Lionel and Diana Trilling, Edmund Wil–
son, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, art historian Meyer
Vladimir Tismaneanu is author of
Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political His–
tory of Romanian Communism.
