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  GEORG LUKACS AND HIS DEVIL'S PACT In the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. There are so many more urgent things to be done. Criticism is an adjunct. For the art of the critic consists in bringing works of literature to the attention of precisely those readers who may least require such help; does a man read critiques of poetry or drama or fiction unless he is already highly literate on his own? On either hand, moreover, stand two tempters. To the right, Literary History, with its solid air and academic credentials. To the left, Book Reviewing—not really an art, but rather a technique committed to the implausible theory that something worth reading is published each morning in the year. Even the best of criticism may succumb to either temptation. Anxious to achieve intellectual respectability, the firm stance of the scholar, the critic may, like Sainte-Beuve, almost become a literary historian. Or he may yield to the claims of the novel an...

  The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn & Petra Couvée - review by Donald Rayfield Donald Rayfield Pasternak Bound The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book By  Peter Finn & Petra Couvée Harvill Secker 350pp £20   In the 1970s and 1980s there was a ‘shop’ in Pimlico where visitors to – and from, if they were daring – the USSR could select free of charge any number of books, largely Russian poetry, fiction and history banned by the Soviets, as long as they promised to distribute them to Soviet citizens. The books were often intercepted by customs, but corruption was then no less widespread than today and confiscated books would soon be selling on the black markets of Leningrad and Moscow. Not just the distribution but the publication and, often, the editing of this material, which shaped the minds of Soviet dissidents (and diplomats), were down to the CIA. The Soviet authori...

  His Exile Was Intolerable Anka Muhlstein Why was Stefan Zweig unable to rebuild his life? May 8, 2014 issue Reviewed: The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik Other Press, 390 pp., $27.95 The Grand Budapest Hotel a film directed by Wes Anderson On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple’s deaths were reported on the front page of  The New York Times . Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, “he belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of t...