Initially affiliated with the Communist Party and adhering to their agenda of proletarian literature, Rahv went on to publish a broad spectrum of modern writers in the pages of his magazine.
Partisan Review broke with the Soviet line in 1937 in the wake of the Moscow Trials and maintained an ongoing feud with Stalinist Popular Front advocates such as Granville Hicks of New Masses.
[8] Because Rahv believed the creative contradictions within a writer are the greatest measure of his achievement, he welcomed the opportunity to reconcile Eliot's conservative views with revolutionary ones that his writing also contained.
From the start of his writing career he articulated his key literary values: the need for a synthesis between European and American artistic traditions and between literary modernism and radicalism; the importance of the Marxist dialectic to effectuate such syntheses; the value of cosmopolitanism to promote a broad understanding of the world and the leading ideas of the writer's times; the rejection of parochial ideas based on region, nation, or ethnicity.
Rahv deplored the dichotomy, looking to the future for the kind of synthesis achieved by such European writers as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann.
His influence continued through the 1940s with his writings on a wide range of European and American authors, most notably Henry James, whose reputation he contributed to reviving.