More in ‘Lionel Trilling’

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, the historian Michael Kimmage offers a rich and detailed account of one of the great intellectual dramas in 20th-century American history: the left’s romance with Soviet Communism, and its painful disillusionment. It is a story that took place long ago, in the ...

On June 1, 1955, Sam Astrachan graduated from Columbia. On June 2, he moved into a room at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. He was 21, one of the youngest writers ever to be so honored, and he had been invited thanks to his professor, Lionel Trilling, at that time the country’s ...

In 1955, Lionel Trilling published a dazzling introduction to the collected stories of Isaac Babel, a writer who’d become a ghost in his own country, his books removed from libraries, his name scratched out of encyclopedias, as if he’d never existed. Babel had written the first masterpiece of the Russian Revolution, Red Cavalry, a cycle ...