TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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tury. Thanks to this volume we now have the chance to read (or reread)
contributions by many of the already mentioned authors, as well as
those of such writers as Nicola Chiaromonte, Ralf Dahrendorf, Stephen
Spender, Jeffrey Herf, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Shlomo Avineri,
Norman Mailer, etc. Let me add among the journal's collaborators
George Orwell, whose "Letter from London" (1941) is included in the
volume. I admit that I have a
parti pris
on this issue: the volume opens
with Gide's "Second Thoughts on the USSR" and ends with my essay
"Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries"-rarely in my life have I been
more honored by being included in a collective volume.
William Phillips's intellectual biography overlapped totally with the
experiences of
Partisan Review.
Born to a family of East European
(Russian) Jewish immigrants to the U.S., Phillips discovered Marxism
and the artistic avant-garde in the feverish discussions of Greenwich Vil–
lage in the early 1930S. Together with Rahv, he was fast in detecting the
despotic nature of Stalinism and engaged (himself and the journal) in
the major ideological confrontations of the twentieth century: first, in
the 1930S, between Stalinism and Trotskyism; then, between democracy
and totalitarian dictatorships. During the Cold War,
Partisan Review
situated itself unequivocally in the first line of resistance to the Stalinist
and post-Stalinist Left. The role of the journal in debunking totalitarian
lies was acknowledged by many prominent figures, including Christo–
pher Lasch, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus.
In the 1960s, Rahv left the journal. To the very end, Phillips remained
faithful to democratic rationalism and skeptical liberalism (even during
the years when many of his friends or ex-friends decided to extol the New
Left and the utopianism of the counterculture). In the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the journal published critical contributions by Nathan
Glazer, Amitai Etzioni, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Irving Louis Horowitz,
and Walter Laqueur. Especially after 1980, when PR moved to Boston
University, it became a magnet for discussions on the experiences of Euro–
pean communism and anti-totalitarian opposition. Let me mention here
the publication of poetry, essays, book reviews, and fiction by authors
like George Konrad, Norman Manea, Slavenka Drakulic, Ivan Klima,
Stanislaw Baranczak, Leszek Kolakowski, Matei Calinescu, and Vassily
Aksyonov; and this is just a brief list. Excellent articles came out on the
origins and dynamics of anti-Semitism and the new waves of xenophobia
in Western Europe (see contributions by Robert Wistrich, Marta Halpert,
and Paul Hollander). I really know of no other journal that has opened
its pages so generously and uninterruptedly to the voices of those who
fought against any form of tyranny in the twentieth century. This was not
