The Renaissance deified man. The development that divested God of his powers also endow¬ed the individual with god¬like attributes. An ideal emerged of the individual-as-hero, a man self-sufficient, and unfettered by obligations that formally bound the man of the middle ages to his society and to his representatives. In reality of course, only a sec¬tion of society could aspire to realize the grandiose ideal.
Works on Marxism are legion; those on Marxism and philosophy only somewhat less so. Does Callinicos have anything new to say on the subject or any interesting or illuminating interpretation to offer. That this is not only possible but necessary has to be asserted against all those who see no point in what they consider canonical exegesis. Marxism is not yet a spent force and new conditions of existence allow and necessitate different vantage points from which to applause the past.
‘Ivan Turgenevs whole aspect and temperament was of a larger and manlier kind than I have ever yet encounter¬ed in a scribbler’, Henry James reported to his aunt. These qualities shine forth in A.V. Knowles’s new edition of Turgenev’s letters. Turgenev was attacked by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for his liberal humanist views, condemned for decades to a frustrating liaison with a married woman, and exiled to his estate by the capricious edicts of the Tsar.
Richard Schechner’s new book is a collection of nine essays most of which have been published before in various journals. It is a free ranging collection written over a period of ten years. The first essay, ‘A Letter from Calcutta’ is a series of musings about the city. The second is about The Performance Group’s tour of India in 1976.
I first saw Badal Sircar’s Procession early in the seven¬ties, in a grimy suburban hall in Bombay; and it was so good that it nearly made me ill. I found it difficult to walk back to the bus-stop and fling myself into a moving bus, being hampered as I was by a kind of divine glow. I could think of no other Indian writer who had so acutely depicted the existential des¬pair which was, to us at that time, the only emotion possible.
Quirk in his Foreword—sometimes rendered as Forward in Indian English—to Braj Kachru’s The Indianization of English
to have over eighteen mil¬lion people using English as a necessary part of their daily working lives. This means that India vies with Canada as the country with the greatest number of English speakers after the USA and the UK.