Though he wrote mostly about literature, and often surpassingly well, Rahv's criticism can't be understood apart from a fancied relation (mostly in his head) to some ideal Marxist text. Sometimes this stood as a relation of mimesis, sometimes parody, most often allegory. His essays moved along a double track. On one track he could faithfully follow the work being examined—an obligation he took with great seriousness—while on the other he might also trace out the half-blurred footprints of Marxism. Just as some of the New Critics seem in retrospect to have been ministers manqué, their rhetoric soaring to a preacher's climax while their matter failed to keep pace, so Rahv wrote with the pleased stateliness of the left-wing theoretician who brushes aside mere particulars in behalf of the largest trends. I seem to be lapsing into a little irony here, but I mean it to be amiable, even admiring, since I think Rahv's criticism was often helped, given bite and flavor, when he shadowed the motions of political argument—just as the New Critics were helped when, even while pledged to the self-sufficiency of the text, they wrote with the ardor of missionaries. Pure critics are rare birds, and they seldom fly very far. (pp. 487-88)
The criticism Rahv wrote in his earlier years was marked by a note of high confidence. In 1949 he put out his first collection, Image and Idea, with pieces on Russian literature and some ambitious, if skewed, studies of nineteenth-century American fiction. He played an important part in the Henry James revival then under way, though he made it a point to distinguish himself from "the James cultists" who failed to see that their idol was finally not in a class with the greatest European novelists. In these early Rahv essays there is a fine interplay between image and idea: his Marxism, no longer mere system, provides cues for placing writers historically; yet his critical judgments are free, supple, and without ideological alloy. He takes pleasure, even, in discovering the moral perspicacity of a reactionary writer like Dostoevsky and in observing how Tolstoy plants his fictions in the soil of history while evoking a sense of humanity not easily reducible to historical categories.
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