Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works (Volume IV)

A different Plekhanov, and in some ways the most attractive one. Where the companion volumes carry the philosopher and the polemicist, this is the volume of Russian intellectual history - the first Russian Marxist turning back to reclaim his own country's revolutionary past.

It collects the long monograph on the critic and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, worked and reworked across two decades; four studies of the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky; three on Alexander Herzen, founder of the free Russian press abroad; and a closing sheaf of reviews on the Westerners and the Slavophils.

The argument running through it is that Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky were the forerunners of Marxism in Russia and that Marxism was their lawful heir - that the views and aspirations of his own generation were the organic product of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, not an import laid over it.

As criticism it is Plekhanov at his most generous and least sectarian, reading writers he admires and taking their difficulties seriously. For English readers this remains the fullest available gathering of his work on the Russian nineteenth century, and several of these studies are not easily found elsewhere.

The texts span 1890 to 1913. This is a fresh English publication, appearing two decades after the first volume, though its editorial apparatus belongs to the earlier Soviet academic edition from which the whole series was quarried.

Volume Four of five.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.