What Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night about greatness in men one could also say about that mysterious something in books that makes them bestsellers: Some are born with it, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. An …
This important book provides detailed information about a form of community that few people still experience at first hand— the rural village. Those of us who live in cities are thus given an opportunity to check our conceptions of rural …
THE HIDDEN and unhidden persuaders of Madison Avenue have regularly presented the American Male with his very own products, untainted by a speck of effeminacy. He-men eat Wheaties, smoke cigarettes, bathe with soaps and douse themselves with deodorants, all of …
It has often been rumoured that Bertolt Brecht, the great German Communist poet, had been severely critical of the East German regime despite his show of Stalinist orthodoxy. The German magazine Neue Deutsche Hefte (No. 52) now publishes an article …
Slightly more than thirty years ago, in October 1928, the first Five-Year Plan was launched. For three decades the resources of a vast country, the energies of a large and talented population, and the capacity of a most elaborate and …
Despite all the claims and complaints to the contrary, it now looks as if the 1950’s will go down as one of the most barren decades in American criticism. For nearly ten years the intellectual energy and artistic commitment of …
The new political thinking of Milovan Djilas is marked by a rather surprising contradiction.
In publishing this article more than one year after it was written, the editors are most uncharitable to the author. But they may be doing a service to those who shared his illusions during the time of the million flowers. …
Of my two opponents, Mr. Tumin has put himself outside the scope of discussion and discourse through the tone he adopted in his rebuttal. Mr. Spiti s argument, on the contrary, would deserve a point-by-point analysis if it constituted a …
May I add a word to the discussion begun in the last DISSENT on the political climate in America? Essentially, the 1958 vote continued a trend that began after the Korean War in the summer of 1953. The Polish and …
A soft, round face with a dull and banal expression; a mouth out of which come resounding but hollow words. Haven’t I already come across him on some subway platform or in his home town of Arras? No, I must …
Let me begin by placing on the record my opinion that Mills has written a sound, brilliant and most timely political tract. In using the latter term I do not mean to put it into a minor category but to …
TROTSKY’S DIARY IN Exile: 1935. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1958 The general habit of considering Stalinism and present-day Communism as identical with, or at least as a continuation of revolutionary Marxism, has also led to an increasing misunderstanding of …
THE BROKEN MIRROR, A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY POLAND, Ed. by Pawel Mayewski; Introduction by Lionel Trilling. Random House. New York, 1958. This competent translation of some of the writings of the younger Polish intellectuals in the forefront of …
MY FIRST CONTACT with Dostoevsky’s novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say. It came only when I was twenty-two. And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances. The conditions of my undertaking …
