BOOK REVIEW 73 His subjects, homely and exotic, artistic and para-artistic, should be an object-lesson to all inasmuch as their inspiration is drawn equally from the Indian sun and rain and the winds of change and revolution often blowing in Europe and America. The critic in Dey is certainly more than a mere complemental factor of his poetic personality; it is the same continuum of sensibilities which gives his creative and critical efforts their foundational strength. The poet in him enriches the critic, just as it is his critical mind which instills a manly vitality into his poetry. What aesthetic does Bishnu Dey seek to realise in his critical essays? The answer lies in what we have stated above : Dey's aesthetic is not any abstract and chimerical Absolute pursued, as commonly by the frustrated or neurotic bourgeois idealists, through metaphysical and pseudo-metaphysical casuistry and negation of the hard facts of life. In his 1961 Seminar essay "Let the Crisis Face the Indian Writer", Bishnu Dey coins the happy phrase ^dialectic of the psyche9 to signify the most salient and insistent desideratum for any modern Indian writer in respect of how he responds and reacts to his own self and to the wider world outside. This he traces as a crucial stage of the class struggle going on in our country down the period of British occupation and rendered only more complex after Independence. Analysing this further, with his emphasis on the modern writer's twin responsibilities, personal and social, Dey states with great firmness : "Now the choice is set clearer between the wide-awake pain of isolation and reunion, the throes of self-consciousness, the question of facing the crisis—or just easy acquiescence, or habitual blindness and its reward of loaves and fishes." Surely for Bishnu Dey there cannot be either easy acquiescence of habitual blindness. The modern Indian writer has, as he says, to accept the crisis of the socio-economic life and also the parallel conflict and struggle within him. The crisis of belief, faith and personality automatically comes in, which can be resolved only by a fighting and dynamic idealism upon a new foundation of faith that will go to provide the creative psyche with the essential qualities of flexibility, resilience and sensitivity and make it forge new weapons and media of self-expression. Bishnu Dey must get the deserving critical acclaim for having repeatedly stressed the point in all his essays. Of course, the emphasis may appear to be of the ex cathedra type at times; it may even be treated as a kind of supercilious critical ukase tending to a kind of regimental approach to creative writing. But a discerning reader will surely accept Bishnu Dey's formulations in good grace by not overlooking the fact, already stated, that Dey is not only a critic but also a very successful Bengali poet of the new sensibilities. His essays are as much bold and unrelenting efforts at self-criticism as critical investigations into the mainstream of our arts and letters. The seeming angularity in some of the pronouncements may also disappear if they are adjusted, as Dey is able to do, to the rounded perspective of tradition, both national and international. "An Introduction to Bengali Literature", "Modern Art and the East", 'India and Moderm Art", are the