‘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.
Publishing is perhaps the first refuge of a lapsed acade¬mic. If you want to stick aro¬und books without either being able to write them or effectively teach them, the next best thing is probably to try and sniff them out and rewrite them for other people. T.S. Eliot’s notion that literary criticism sometimes satisfies suppressed creative desires in critics is even truer if applied to publi-shers as creators of books: once the manuscript is with a publisher it becomes his baby, the child’s real mother being rendered very patient in the hands of a midwife quite often insensitive to the groaning parent.
This is a disappointing anthology. It is not a histori¬cally comprehensive collection where all the important and not-so-important poets of past and present are included, making the work serve as a re¬ference book as well as a liter¬ary treasury. Here the editor attempts to trace the develop¬ment of Indo-Anglian poetry from its beginnings to the pre¬sent day by selecting a number of representative poets with their characteristic work.