Marxist Aesthetics (Lifshitz)

Did Marx have an aesthetics?

Marxism is often known as the theory that the economy decides everything. Is art then merely a reflection of the economy and class interests of its age, and is reading Shakespeare or Tolstoy no more than peering into the minds of former ruling classes? Soviet Marxist art theory of the 1920s mostly answered yes. The common view was that Marx, Engels and Lenin, busy with more serious problems, had left only "fragmentary remarks on art, never fully worked out"; even Franz Mehring, the best authority on Marx's life, thought so. Marxist aesthetics rested mainly on Plekhanov and explained the "superstructure", art included, by reducing it directly to the economic "base".

В двадцатые годы в марксистской литературе господствовала мысль, что у Маркса, Энгельса и Ленина, занятых более серьёзными проблемами, существовали лишь «недоразвитые до конца, частные высказывания по вопросам искусства».

Yet Marx himself had written sentences that did not fit the scheme. In the introduction to the critique of political economy, written in 1857 and unpublished in his lifetime, he said there was no difficulty in understanding that Greek art and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. "The difficulty is that they still give us artistic pleasure and in a certain respect count as a norm and an unattainable model." Interpreters of the 1920s dismissed the passage as a remnant of Hegelianism that Marx had failed to shake off.

Die Schwierigkeit ist, daß sie für uns noch Kunstgenuß gewähren und in gewisser Beziehung als Norm und unerreichbare Muster gelten.

Mikhail Lifshitz, born in Melitopol in 1905, came to Moscow to become a painter at the avant-garde art school VKhUTEMAS, but around 1923–1924 he broke with modernism and turned to the tradition of realist classics. At the same time he became absorbed in Marx's aesthetics and in 1927 wrote his first draft on the subject. He started from a bold assumption: Marx had a coherent view of artistic creation, and it could be recovered by carefully collecting and ordering his scattered remarks.

What did Lifshitz argue?

In his 1927 theses "Dialectics in the History of Art", presented at VKhUTEIN (the successor of VKhUTEMAS), Lifshitz set out ideas he would hold all his life. Their core was a critique of every form of relativism. Leaning on Lenin's note "On the Question of Dialectics" ("for objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative"), he wrote that "relativity is itself relative" and went as far as "relativism is the dialectics of fools". His central thesis was a provocation for its time: "Contrary to the current phrases of our age, absolute beauty exists just as absolute truth does." He attacked Vladimir Friche, then considered the leading theorist of Marxist aesthetics, for his relativism.

абсолютная красота существует так же, как абсолютная истина

This did not mean that beauty is an eternal Idea hanging in the sky. Lifshitz set great store by the passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 where Marx says that, unlike the animal, man knows how to produce according to the measure of every species, "and therefore man also forms things according to the laws of beauty". Beauty is a property of reality itself, discovered as people work on the world. This led to his theory of reflection: for Lifshitz, "it is not man who reflects reality, but reality itself that is reflected in man". The forms that appear in a work of art first exist in life.

der Mensch formiert daher auch nach den Gesetzen der Schönheit.

In his 1936 article "Leninism and Art Criticism" he showed that Marx's famous sentence "social being determines consciousness" can be read in two opposite ways. In the first, being stands, so to speak, "behind the back" of each person and automatically suggests ideas and tastes to him; this is how vulgar sociology filed Tolstoy away as an ideologist of the landed gentry. In the second, being stands in front of the subject and determines consciousness as an external object of sensation and thought. When Lenin called Tolstoy "the mirror of the Russian revolution", what mattered was not Tolstoy's class origin but what his work reflected. Only on the second reading is consciousness both conditioned and in principle unlimited, and so answerable for itself.

Оно также определяет сознание, но определяет его как внешний предмет ощущения и мышления.

What were "the Current" and Literaturny Kritik?

In early 1930, at the Marx-Engels Institute where he worked, Lifshitz met the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who had arrived in Moscow in December 1929. Throughout the 1930s the two influenced each other deeply. Lifshitz later wrote that he had led Lukács to Marxist aesthetics and to Lenin's theory of reflection; Lukács remembered the period as a collaboration of equals. Around them gathered critics such as Vladimir Grib, Elena Usievich and Igor Sats, and the writer Andrei Platonov was close to them. Opponents called the group "the Current" (Techenie).

Their platform was Literaturny Kritik (The Literary Critic), a monthly published from the summer of 1933 by the Organisational Committee of the Soviet Writers' Union. Lukács published a series of essays on realism there, and his The Historical Novel appeared first in Russian in 1937. At the same time he published "Greatness and Decline of Expressionism" (1934) in the German-language exile journal Internationale Literatur, becoming one pole of the so-called Expressionism debate with Bloch, Brecht and others. In defending the realist tradition and in their scepticism toward modernism, Lifshitz and Lukács spoke with one voice.

The work Lifshitz valued most was an anthology. The first edition of Marx and Engels on Art (1933) carried his name but was not compiled to his plan; the 1937 edition was. Through it Soviet readers could for the first time read the young Marx and extracts from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Lenin on Culture and Art followed the next year. In the English-speaking world he remained known almost only through The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1938), an abridged translation of his 1933 booklet.

How does it differ from vulgar sociology and socialist realism?

The 1920s current described in this dictionary's entry on vulgar sociology, which treated works of art as coded class interests and made decoding and exposing them the task of criticism, was the direct adversary of Lifshitz's aesthetics. Vulgar sociology could not explain why great art of past ages still moves us. Lifshitz's answer was that great art went beyond the class limits of its time and reflected the truth of reality.

Around 1936 the debate swung his way. On 8 August that year a Pravda editorial, "Instil in Schoolchildren a Love of Classical Literature", used Lifshitz's formulations word for word, and words like "realism" and "narodnost" (the people's character of art) came back into use. Lifshitz saw this as an ideological turn, yet later wrote that "a change so striking happened too fast, as if by magic". The new ideas were quickly vulgarised, and attempts to go a step further and say something more important ran into danger.

«Перемена, столь разительная, — писал Лифшиц в своем позднем комментарии, — произошла слишком быстро, как бы по щучьему велению».

Lifshitz's aesthetics therefore cannot be equated with socialist realism, made official at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Both appealed to the classical heritage and to realism, but socialist realism was a creative method prescribed by the party, while Lifshitz's concern was the philosophical problem of the objectivity of beauty and truth. In "On Culture and Its Vices", published in Literaturny Kritik in 1934, he criticised both the asceticism of the 1920s and the neoclassicism of the 1930s, mocking in the new Stalin-era architecture "a morbid attraction to styles marked by excess and over-ripeness of form, symbols of outward grandeur, a striving for the gigantic and the overwhelming".

Why was it suppressed, and how was it judged later?

In September 1939 the critic Vladimir Yermilov published "On the Harmful Views of Literaturny Kritik", opening a second great debate, occasioned by Lukács's book On the History of Realism, which Lifshitz had edited. The attackers did not shrink from political accusations. Yermilov wrote to Zhdanov, and in February 1940 the Writers' Union secretaries Alexander Fadeyev and Valery Kirpotin sent the Central Committee a memorandum "On the Anti-Party Group in Soviet Criticism". That year Literaturny Kritik was closed by a special resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

В 1940 г. журнал «Литературный критик» закрывается специальным постановлением ЦК ВКП(б).

Lifshitz volunteered for the front in the war with Germany, but the trials continued afterward. In 1949, during the antisemitic campaign "against cosmopolitanism", he was dismissed from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and the leadership of the Institute of Philosophy branded him a "cosmopolitan and eclectic". His path parted from Lukács's after Lukács returned to Hungary in 1945. When in the 1960s he turned to criticising modernism (see this dictionary's entry The Crisis of Ugliness), for many intellectuals his name became a byword for a conservatism that persecuted the slightest departure from realism.

Judgments still differ. Those who read Lifshitz as a forgotten master stress that he reconstructed Marx's aesthetics almost single-handed, and that it differed as heaven from earth from the textbook aesthetics taught under the same name in the Soviet Union; the artist Dmitry Gutov has been prominent in this revival. Followers of the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, by contrast, criticise his "onto-gnoseology" as a child of the period's dialectical materialism, deriving consciousness straight from matter. In old age Lifshitz called Ilyenkov "the most talented of all our postwar 'philosophers', the one closest to me", yet in his unfinished "Dialogue with Ilyenkov" he argued, against Ilyenkov's view that the ideal exists only in human social activity, that the ideal is present in nature and being as well.

Why read it today?

Lifshitz's question is one that Marxist cultural theory still cannot avoid. Explaining art through class and ideology is necessary, but it cannot by itself say why some works survive their age. Lifshitz found the answer in the objectivity of beauty and truth, and for that reason he is read both as a defender of classical humanism against relativism and as a conservative unable to accept new artistic experiment. Reading his theory apart from official doctrine, and seeing that he fought different enemies in the 1930s and the 1960s, is the starting point for understanding this aesthetics.