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Contents

October 10, 1991 • Volume 38, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Al Alvarez’s most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, is a longtime human rights activist and the Chair of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation in Moscow. (March 2001)

Antonina W. Bouis translates works of fiction and nonfiction from the Russian, among her most recent translations are Edvard Radzinsky’s Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar and Marina Goldovskaya’s Woman with a Movie Camera.

John Gregory Dunne’s new novel, Nothing Lost, will be published in May. (January 2004)

Thomas R. Edwards is Emeritus Professor of English at Rutgers and a former editor of Raritan. His most recent book is Over Here: Criticizing America, 1968–1989. (June 2004)

J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford. His most recent volume of essays, Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800, was published in 2009. (August 2011)

Stuart Hampshire, formerly Warden of Wardham College, Oxford, is the author of Spinoza and Justice Is Conflict.(October 2002)

Alfred Kazin’s most recent book is God and the American Writer. (April 1998)

Murray Kempton (1917-1997) was a columnist for Newsday, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events and The Briar Patch, as well as Part of Our Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Alan Ryan, the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell, is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women. He teaches at Princeton. (December 2011)

Frank J. Sulloway is Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. (November 2006)

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School, before studying at the universities of St. Petersburg and Heidelberg and at the Sorbonne. Mandelstam first published his poems in Apollyon, an avant-garde magazine, in 1910, then banded together with Anna Akhmatova and Nicholas Gumilev to form the Acmeist group, which advocated an aesthetic of exact description and chiseled form, as suggested by the title of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone (1913). During the Russian Revolution, Mandelstam left Leningrad for the Crimea and Georgia, and he settled in Moscow in 1922, where his second collection of poems, Tristia, appeared. Unpopular with the Soviet authorities, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to publish his poetry, though an edition of collected poems did come out in 1928. In 1934, after reading an epigram denouncing Stalin to friends, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile. He wrote furiously during these years, and his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his work in case his notebooks were destroyed or lost. (Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary memoirs of life with her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published in the 1970s, later helped to bring Mandelstam a worldwide audience.)

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic and author, most recently, of Free Flight. (March 2002)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. His most recent books are The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War and the forthcoming Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. (October 2002)

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at NYU, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. He is the author of The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and, most recently, The American Classics. (October 2006)