Philip Rahv

Philip Rahv (March 10, 1908 in Kupin, Ukraine – December 22, 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American literary critic and essayist.

Life

He was born in Kupin, Ukraine, to a Jewish family. The family escaped Russia and spent two years in Vienna, where Philip attended the gymnasium.[1] He was born under the name Fevel Greenberg. He made his way to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father, lived for a time in Palestine where his mother chose to live, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew, in Portland, Oregon. He wrote at first under the name Philip Rann. Then came the modification to “Rahv,” which appeared in an essay he published on September 1932.[2]

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.[3] Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973.

Literary career

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[4] together with John Cheever and Robie Macauley.[5] 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

MODERN OCCASIONS Edited by Philip Rahv. V.1/1-v.2/2 Fall 1970-Spring 1972. Is this complete?

References

  1. ↑ Dvosin, Andrew J. “Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv. Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU, 1977.
  2. ↑ Kadish, Doris. “A Young Communist in Love: Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, and My Mother.” The Georgia Review 68, 4 (2014): 768-817.
  3. ↑ Klehr, H., Haynes, J. E., Anderson, K. (1998). “The Soviet World of American Communism”.[ New Haven, Yale UP], 332-33
  4. ↑ Snakes, Butterbeans and the Discovery of Electricity, by James Ashbrook Perkins, "Afterword," p. 188.
  5. ↑ "5 Juries Selected to Pick '64 National Book Awards," New York Times, Dec 2, 1963, p. 43.

Bibliography

External links

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