Contents

December 8, 1988 • Volume 35, Number 19

LETTERS

Contributors

John F. Murray is the author of Intensive Care: A Doctorå?s Journal. (October 2008)

Julian Moynahan is Professor of English Emeritus at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. (May 2000)

Peter Partner’s books include Arab Voices and The Pope’s Men: The Papal Service in the Renaissance. His new book, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam, has been published in the United Kingdom. (February 1998)

Raymond Carr was Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and has written extensively on modern Spanish history. (April 2003)

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), the nom de plume of Aleksander Chwat, was born in Warsaw, the descendant of an old and distinguished Jewish family which counted among its members the great sixteenth-century cabalist Isaac Luria. He attended Warsaw University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, and logic, and formed strong ties with the literary avant-garde, publishing a first book of poems, Me from One Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove, in 1920 and, some years later, a collection of stories entitled Lucifer Unemployed. Wat edited a variety of influential journals and helped to disseminate the work of Mayakovsky and the futurists in Poland, before forming an allegiance with the Communist Party and confining his writing to journalism. In 1939 he fled east before the advancing German army and was separated from his wife and young son. The family reunited in Lwów, then under Soviet control, where Wat found work on a newspaper, only to be placed under arrest. Imprisoned in the Soviet Union for the better part of two years, during which time he converted from Judaism to Christianity, Wat again rejoined his family, who had been exiled to Kazakhstan, in 1942. They returned after the war to Poland, where Wat began to write poetry again while serving as editor of the state publishing house. In 1963, he left his native country for France. Wat was invited in 1964 to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taped a series of conversations about his life and times with his countryman the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Edited by Milosz, these were published posthumously as My Century.

John Weightman, Professor Emeritus of the University of London, is the author of The Concept of the Avant-Garde. He will soon publish The Cat Sat on the Mat: Language and the Absurd. (October 2002)

C. Vann Woodward is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. His many books include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and The Old World’s New World. (February 1998)