Philip Rahv

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Philip Rahv (March 10, 1908 in Kupin, Ukraine – December 22, 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American literary critic and essayist. In 1934 he and William Phillips co-founded Partisan Review, one of the most influential literary periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century. Initially affiliated with the Communist party and adhering to their agenda of proletariat literature, Rahv went on to publish a broad spectrum of modern writers in the pages of his magazine. His goals were uniting Marxism and modernism and bringing together the best of American and European literature. He was one of the first to introduce Kafka to American readers.[1]

Life

He was born to a Jewish family in Kupin, Ukraine, part of the Russian-occupied region of Galicia. The family escaped and spent two years in Vienna, where Philip attended the gymnasium.[2] He was born under the name Fevel Greenberg.[3] He made his way to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father and two brothers, Selig and David. He lived for a time in Palestine where his mother chose to live, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew, in Portland, Oregon from 1928 to 1931. He wrote at first under the name Philip Rann.[4] Then came the modification to "Rahv," which appeared in an essay he published in 1932.[5]

He is noted for his role in founding Partisan Review with William Phillips in 1933. In 1933 he joined the American Communist Party. Partisan Review broke with the Soviet line in 1937 in the wake of the Moscow Trials and maintained an ongoing feud with Stalinist Popular Front advocates such as Granville Hicks of New Masses. He was officially expelled as a Trotzkyite by the American Communist Party on October 1, 1937.[6] Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973.

Literary career

Philip Rahv's writing career began during the Depression. It reflected the prevailing literary currents of Marxism and the rise of proletarian literature.[7] In search of a collective ideology, he and others of his generation rejected the subjectivity, aestheticism, and social disengagement of the great writers of the twenties.[8])

As an independent publication, Partisan Review went on to become the most influential literary journal of the period. According to Partisan Review co-editor William Barrett's "The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals", the Marxist Rahv had a healthy contempt for "Liberals", whom he viewed as appeasers of Joseph Stalin's post-World War II Soviet Union. "He [Rahv] read the Liberal weeklies and the New York Times indefatigably, and the more he read, the more apoplectic he became. "Those goddamned Liberals, " he fumed, "they'll end up giving away the whole of Western Europe to Stalin. He won't even have to make a push for it, they'll make a present of it to him."

Philip Rahv was a beacon of the New York intelligentsia. When the narrator of Robert Lowell's poem, Man and Wife meets his future wife, he "outdrank the Rahvs in the heat/of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet." Rahv's work at Partisan Review, which he co-founded, put him at the center of an intellectual circle that included Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, Sidney Hook, William Barrett, and many other intellectuals of the period. In 1964 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards[9] together with John Cheever and Robie Macauley.[10] Rahv remained a Marxist and was committed to the idea of achieving a synthesis of radical social criticism and literary excellence.

He is also known for his later hostility toward Myth Criticism in the style of Northrop Frye. As he put it, "What the craze for myth represents most of all is the fear of history."

Works

See also

References

  1. ^ Kadish, Doris. "A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, and My Mother." The Georgia Review 68, 4 (2014): 768-817.
  2. ^ Dvosin, Andrew J. Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv. Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU, 1977. Dvosin drew his information by interviewing Rahv's first wife Nathalie Rahv on November 19, 1975 and his brother Selig Greenberg on November 20, 1975.
  3. ^ List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States, January 1922.
  4. ^ Kadish, Doris. "A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, and My Mother." The Georgia Review 68, 4 (2014): 768-817. Kadish's information is based on letters Rahv sent to Ethel Richman from 1928 to 1931. They reside at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
  5. ^ An Open Letter to Young Writers. Rebel Poet, 16, September 1932.
  6. ^ Klehr, H., Haynes, J. E., Anderson, K. (1998). "The Soviet World of American Communism".[ New Haven, Yale UP], 332-33
  7. ^ "The Literary Class War," New Masses 8 (August 1932, 7-10. New Masses was the official cultural organ of the Communist Party.
  8. ^ Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle, 1931.
  9. ^ Snakes, Butterbeans and the Discovery of Electricity, by James Ashbrook Perkins, "Afterword," p. 188.
  10. ^ "5 Juries Selected to Pick '64 National Book Awards," New York Times, Dec 2, 1963, p. 43.

Bibliography

  • Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: the New York Intellectuals & their World. Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3
  • Barrett, William. The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982. ISBN 0-385-15966-8
  • Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
  • Dvosin, Andrew J. Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv. Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU, 1977.
  • Kadish, Doris. A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, and My Mother. The Georgia Review 68, 4 (2014): 768-817.
  • Klehr, H., Haynes, J. E., Anderson, K. The Soviet World of American Communism. Yale UP, 1998. ISBN 0300071507
  • Laskin, David. Partisans. Simon & Schuster, 2000. ISBN 9780684815657
  • McCarthy, Mary. Intellectual Memoirs, New York 1936-1938. Harcourt Brace, 1992. ISBN 0156447878
  • McCarthy, Mary. Philip Rahv, 1908-1973. New York Times Book Review 17, (February 1974): 1-2.

External links

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