Mikhail Alexandrovich Lifshitz

In 1930, at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Lifshitz met György Lukács. The two became immediate intellectual comrades, and their friendship, which lasted four decades, altered the trajectory of Soviet Marxist aesthetics. Lifshitz drew Lukács toward the aesthetics of Marxism and Lenin's theory of reflection, and Lukács's 1930s works, notably The Young Hegel (1948, dedicated to Lifshitz), bear the deep imprint of Lifshitz's ideas. Yet Lifshitz maintained that Lukács never fully assimilated his conclusions, and he criticised Lukács's later 'subjectivist' turn as a residual neo-Kantianism.

Around Lifshitz gathered a circle of like-minded critics (V. Grib, E. Usievich, I. Sats) known as 'Techenie' (The Current), with the writer Andrei Platonov as a close associate. Their organ was the journal Literaturny Kritik (1933–1940). The group's central task was the refutation of 'vulgar sociology,' which had dominated Soviet literary theory in the 1920s, treating art as a mere reflex of class psychology and dismissing the classical heritage as feudal-bourgeois. Reading Lenin's 'Lev Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,' Lifshitz argued that the maxim 'being determines consciousness' meant not deterministic reduction but the dialectical insight that consciousness can grasp the objective truth of the world. His decisive article 'Leninism and Art Criticism' (1936) reformulated the theory of reflection not as passive copying but as reality reflecting itself in human consciousness. The article triggered a wide debate, and in August 1936 a Pravda editorial effectively adopted Lifshitz's position, restoring 'realism' and 'narodnost' to the official aesthetic vocabulary.

With this victory, Lifshitz compiled two landmark anthologies: Marx and Engels on Art (1937) and Lenin on Art (1938). These volumes introduced Soviet readers to Marx's 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and other early writings for the first time, and became the definitive reference works of Marxist aesthetics. Lifshitz himself valued the anthologies above his own original works. In the autumn of 1939, however, a wave of political denunciations engulfed the Literaturny Kritik group. Rival literary bureaucrats branded them an 'anti-party grouping,' and in 1940 a special Central Committee resolution closed the journal. Lukács was arrested and detained; Lifshitz faced a de facto ban on publication.

The most profound philosophical intervention of Lifshitz's later years was his debate with Evald Ilyenkov on the nature of 'the ideal' (идеальное). Ilyenkov, the most original post-war mind in Soviet philosophy, had taken much from Lifshitz and Lukács, and Lifshitz called him 'the closest of them all to me.' Yet they diverged on fundamentals. For Ilyenkov, the ideal existed only in human social activity and its products (tools, language, works of art) as collective consciousness embodied in objects. His formula that 'in nature itself, including the nature of man as a biological being, there is nothing ideal' provoked Lifshitz's fierce rebuttal.

Lifshitz argued that the ideal is rooted in the objective world itself, on the far side of human consciousness. 'The ideal is in everything: in material being and in consciousness, in society and in nature, or it is nowhere.' His 'ontognoseology' (онтогносеология) sought to break down the artificial division between ontology and epistemology, recasting the world's capacity to reflect itself in human consciousness (a radicalisation of Lenin's theory of reflection) as an objective property of the world itself. On this view, idealism's real mistake was not in asserting the reality of the ideal, but in denying that matter possesses ideal potentialities. Lifshitz wrote: 'Today only materialism can still defend the ideal life of the spirit, the existence of universal truth.'

The debate remains one of the deepest fault-lines in Soviet philosophy. Ilyenkov's partisans see Lifshitz's ontognoseology as a relapse into the schematism of traditional Diamat; Lifshitz's defenders argue he was pursuing a genuinely dialectical materialism that overcomes the subject-object dichotomy. Published posthumously in 1984 as Dialogue with Evald Ilyenkov, the work stands as one of the finest testimonies to the internal tensions of Soviet Marxism, and continues to generate active debate in post-Soviet philosophical circles decades later.