Dear Editor
Dear Editor Bell Although I enjoyed reading all of Pearl K. Bell's encomium to Edmund Wilson ("A Critic's Epitaph," NL, September 4), two things in particular served to lift the piece out of the...
...Dosto-evsky...
...NL, September 4) perceptive and accurate...
...The first of these was the way Belt established Wilson's historical place in American letters by means of a personal reminiscence...
...West...
...Thanks to the relaxation of tensions resulting from the Four-Power Berlin Accord, the East has agreed to let the West Berlin government buy the 21-acre area surrounding the site of the city's old Potsdam railroad station, left in rubble since the end of the War, for $10 million...
...Howard Rothman Berlin As a refugee from prewar Berlin who has recently revisited his "home town," I found Thomas Land's report on life there today ("Divided City...
...Of course, first there is the difficult task of clearing the ruins—including the crumbling walls of the old Haus Vaterland dance hall—still booby-trapped by unexploded bombs and artillery shells buried in the debris...
...By way of a footnote, it may interest your readers to know that part of the "no-man's-land" he described will soon be developed into a new commercial district...
...Somerville, Mass...
...The tract, formerly part of the Russian sector, protrudes into the center of West Berlin and was sealed off by the wall in 1961...
...By siding with Turgenev and rejecting what Bell calls "Russian masochism," Wilson tells us as much about himself and his own prejudices as he does about Russian literature...
...Detroit Heinrick Schmidt...
...Despite his effort to set the record straight, the picture he offers us is no less, and possibly more, distorted than that of the critics with whom he was doing battle...
...Wilson, it would appear, was never really able to shed his American skin when discussing Russian literature...
...of course, hated Turgenev as a renegade and capitulator to the sterility of the The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...The second noteworthy feature of Bell's column was her highly suggestive closing comment, where she contrasted Solzhenitsyn's Russian masochism with the "abolitionist fervor" of Wilson...
...Instead of merely asserting the fact of his critical preeminence or lamely reciting the titles of his many books, as several other reviewers have done, Bell told of the influence Axel's Castle had on herself and other young intellectuals of the early '40s, thus giving the reader a genuine sense of the excitement Wilson generated during the years when he was the country's foremost critic...
...Perhaps the best evidence for this comes from Wilson's enthusiasm for Turgenev and lack of interest in Dostoevsky...
...Its acquisition will enable the Western half of the city to straighten out several roads that had been forced to detour around what was years ago one of Europe's busiest intersections...
...Dear Editor Bell Although I enjoyed reading all of Pearl K. Bell's encomium to Edmund Wilson ("A Critic's Epitaph," NL, September 4), two things in particular served to lift the piece out of the ordinary for me...
...I am sorry she did not have the space to pursue this observation, because it seems a valuable means of "getting into" her subject...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 18
