Unaddressed Letters and Art and Social Life

The two works in this volume were written more than a decade apart, and they read like the opening and the summing-up of a single long argument.

The Unaddressed Letters - five of them - appeared in Russian legal journals in 1899 and 1900, when Georgi Plekhanov was in his forties and already the acknowledged founder of Russian Marxism, writing from exile in Geneva. Art and Social Life is the mature statement: a lecture he delivered in Liege and Paris in 1912 and reworked for the journal Sovremennik, where it ran in 1912-13. Between them the two texts do something that had not been done before in Russian and had scarcely been done anywhere: they try to explain art - its origins, its changing forms, its recurring quarrels about its own purpose - from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history.

Plekhanov states his method on the first page and states it without apology: "I look upon art, as upon all social phenomena, from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history." The sentence he keeps returning to is shorter still: "Art is a social phenomenon." The Letters set out to prove it against the biologists and the aesthetes alike, ranging enormously over Darwin and the ethnographers, over the dances and ornaments and hunting songs of peoples the anthropology of his day called primitive, and over Karl Bucher's theory that work and rhythm are the parents of art. It is erudite, argumentative and alive.

What lasts is not the verdicts on particular poets - some have dated, as Plekhanov would have expected - but the method and the temper: that art has a real history, that its quarrels about itself are worth explaining rather than merely joining, and that the critic's first duty is to understand. That conviction fed everything durable in later Marxist thinking about culture.

Translated by Adam Fineberg. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.