Dear Editor
Dear Editor Bell Pearl K. Bell's review of A Window on Russia (NL, September 4) lauds Edmund Wilson for having dispelled "mistaken assumptions about Russian literature"—such as its being mystical....
...But when their great polymath "went overboard for the 'obscurantism' of mystical religion," Bell informs us, they felt "bewildered and heinously betrayed...
...Princeton, N.J...
...Trenton...
...Walter Williams...
...Dostoevsky's father was brutally murdered by his serfs...
...Dostoevsky called the Russians "the chosen people" with a "Messianic role...
...guru and is turned off by the early nihilist...
...It is also the subject of the most powerful books in the Hebrew scriptures...
...To the best of my knowledge, nobody else has mentioned this fact...
...Dawn and the Darkest Hour ("Swiftian Swami," NL, September 18), Pearl K- Bell betrays a generational bias...
...The generation that came of age during the Vietnam war, on the other hand, grooves the The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...But there have been many notable Russian writers for whom the description seems apt...
...And unless this vision of life is truer than that of persons whose childhoods are happy, it should militate against their writing well...
...Bell's brief description of Turgenev's "monstrous mother" is enough to prove that if Turgenev did not develop a gloomy and morbid attitude only a miracle would explain it...
...In addition, if, as Jencks and others suggest, education is a weak determinant of future income, we are left with an even more disturbing question—though one that The New Leader, to its credit, spotlighted in an earlier special issue (NL, November 15, 1971): What, if anything, should the public schools be teaching our children...
...Yet Shakespeare, Sophocles, Swift, Beckett, Kafka, and many others too numerous to name deal with it in their writing...
...He always seems to come up with something new to say about a subject, even when it has apparently been covered to death...
...As always, he presented a complex subject in a clear, straightforward manner, guiding a layman such as myself through seemingly incomprehensible political and economic thickets...
...Turgenev's childhood was, I think, not atypical of most great writers...
...Lekachman has a rare talent for doing this...
...Thus, at least one of the five points on which Wilson questioned Virginia Woolf's understanding of Russian literature is itself to be questioned...
...Rilke's mother raised him as a girl...
...Few young people today know any of Huxley's preconversion works except Brave New World...
...Unfortunately, the world is one of global wars and nuclear stockpiles, and the sad fact is that the gloomy and morbid are also the True...
...Lekachman himself suggests as much toward the end of his piece, where he spreads out to cover many of the larger questions that Serrano touches on...
...There is a tendency among economists, not always avoided by Lekachman, to quantify social issues and deal with them purely in terms of dollars and cents...
...The other four might also be, particularly the contentions that the Russians are neither gloomy nor morbid...
...New York City David Delate Tn her review of George Woodcock's critical study...
...Indeed, they haven't read many of his later novels either, preferring instead the consciousness-expansion of The Doors of Perception or the mysticism of The Perennial Philosophy...
...Gogol, the Encyclopedia Britannica informs us, "had fallen completely under the influence of a religious fanatic...
...Unhappy childhoods cause many writers to be gloomy and morbid...
...It may be that the latter is regarded more as a compendium of myth than fact, but then Brave New World—once considered science fiction?is coming to resemble the "real world" more closely every day...
...But money alone is a dubious index for measuring quality education, and a real problem for legislators concerned with tight budgets and recalcitrant taxpayers is how properly to evaluate the performance of our schools...
...Speaking for those who "came of age at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War," she attests that they were "dazzled" by the "formidable learning, salacious mockery, and decentralist pacificism" exhibited in Aldous Huxley's early works...
...He] burned the completed second part of Dead Souls, . . . then took to his bed, refused all food and died...
...In short, the youth of the *30s embraced the Swiftian Huxley and rejected the Swami...
...In his latest piece ("Chairman of the Board," NL, September 18), he reveals that Nixon knew about Senator Eagleton's medical history before it was made public...
...I suspect that both Wilson and Bell are, by virtue of being Americans and therefore more than slightly sheltered from many of life's ugliest realities, incapable of appreciating not just Solzhenitsyn's "unrelievedly bleak worlds," but this gloomy and morbid view of life in any author...
...Cleveland, Ohio Anne Wanda Torri Glass Andrew J. Glass' reports from Washington are one of The New Leader's greatest assets...
...In an odd way, though, I felt somewhat unsatisfied after I had finished reading the article and now, with the current publicity surrounding Christopher Jencks and his new book on education, I think I understand the reason why...
...And Tolstoy's mysticism is well known...
...Larry Darrel Lekachman i want to congratulate Robert Lekachman for his article on the implications of the Serrano decision ("Schools, Money and Politics," NL, September 18...
...Lekachman treats his chosen subject as well as could be expected, but the problem of financing public education appears to be only the tip of the iceberg...
Vol. 55 • October 1972 • No. 19
