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; a sixth exists only as a fragment the author never finished, and the fourth he barely began — 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 Plekhanov delivered in Liège and Paris in 1912 and then reworked for the journal Sovremennik ("The Contemporary"), where it ran in 1912–13. Between them the two texts do something that had not been done before in the Russian language, 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 is not writing criticism. He is founding a discipline. The present edition prints A. Fineberg's English translation, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1957 — the house that six years later would be renamed Progress Publishers.
Plekhanov states his method on the first page of the first letter, 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 even shorter — "Art is a social phenomenon." The Letters set out to prove it against the biologists and the aesthetes alike: art has a history, that history is bound up with the development of the productive forces and the social relations they carry, and even the sense of beauty, which looks most like a fact of nature, is shaped by the conditions of social life. The reasoning ranges enormously — over Darwin and the ethnographers, over the dances and ornaments and hunting songs of peoples the anthropology of his day called "primitive," over Karl Bücher's theory that work and rhythm are the parents of art. It is erudite, argumentative, and alive; whatever else the reader takes from it, the sheer reach of the mind at work is unmistakable.
The heart of the Letters is a running quarrel with the economist Karl Bücher, who had derived work from play — who held that play is the older thing and labour its later, grimmer offspring. Plekhanov turns the order around. Watching the hunting dances of primitive peoples, dances that mime the stalking and the kill and so drill the young in the skills the group lives by, he concludes that "work must have necessarily preceded the dance," and confesses that he "simply cannot understand how Bücher can assert that play is older than work." Labour is the ground; the dance, the song, the ornament grow out of the productive life of the group and only afterwards float free of it. It is a bold and characteristic stroke — the whole materialist wager staked on the one province, the aesthetic, that his opponents held to be furthest from the sphere of material need — and even where the ethnography of 1900 has dated, and much of it has, the shape of the argument still stands.
Art and Social Life narrows the focus to a single question, the one that gives the essay its enduring interest: the recurring war between those who hold that "society is not made for the artist, but the artist for society," and those for whom "art is an aim in itself." Plekhanov refuses to settle the quarrel by taste. He asks instead a historian's question — under what conditions does each view take hold? — and gives an answer of real elegance. "The belief in art for art's sake," he writes, "arises wherever the artist is out of harmony with his social environment"; where, on the contrary, "there is mutual sympathy between a considerable section of society and people who have a more or less active interest in creative art," the utilitarian view, art as a servant of life, comes into its own. The doctrine of pure art, in other words, is not eternal and not a mistake; it is what artists reach for when the world around them has become, in his word, hopeless. That is a genuinely dialectical insight, and it is the reason the essay has outlived almost everything else written on the subject in its generation.
It is worth saying plainly what is strong here, because the strength is the thing the later history obscured. Plekhanov's central move — treating the demand for art-for-art's-sake as itself a social symptom, to be explained rather than praised or condemned — is a permanent acquisition. It dissolves a false eternity. The Parnassian who thinks his contempt for the "bourgeois" is a timeless artistic principle, and the radical critic who thinks utility is art's timeless duty, are shown to be two weather-readings of the same barometer, each produced by a particular relation between artists and their society. Plekhanov does this without crude debunking. He does not say the pure-art poets wrote badly; he says their stance had conditions, and he goes looking for them. When he cites Chernyshevsky's flat verdict — that "the idea of 'art for art's sake' is as strange in our times as 'wealth for wealth's sake,' 'science for science's sake'" — he cites it not as his own conclusion but as a document of the eighteen-sixties, a view with its own social address. That is the historian's discipline, and it is admirable.
The weaknesses are the defects of those same qualities, and honesty requires naming them. The first is a pull toward the mechanical. Plekhanov is so determined to anchor art in the social base that he sometimes lets the anchor do the work the sails should do; the passage from economic condition to artistic form can come too fast, too directly, as though the poem were a readout of the mode of production. He knows better — his best pages are full of mediations — but the reductive temptation is real, and later Marxist writing on art, from Trotsky's Literature and Revolution onward, spent much of its energy putting back the layers of relative autonomy that Plekhanov's tidier formulations flattened. The second weakness is more consequential, because the future seized on it. Plekhanov tends to grade works by their content — by the seriousness and the progressive tendency of the ideas they carry. He is careful, far more careful than his heirs would be, to insist that a correct idea does not make a good poem and that art must be judged as art. But the habit of asking first what a work says, and whether what it says is socially useful, is planted in him; and it was that habit, torn loose from his subtlety and his historical tact, that a later state would weaponise. The scholar who explained why the utilitarian view of art arises would furnish, against his every intention, the vocabulary for imposing it by decree.
Which brings us to the question this series always asks of a canonised text: was the state that enshrined it faithful to it? With Plekhanov the irony is sharper than usual, and it runs on two levels at once.
Consider first the man being canonised. Plekhanov was the teacher of Russian Marxism — Lenin's teacher, among others — but after the split of 1903 he was a Menshevik, and in 1917 he opposed the October Revolution outright, warning the Petrograd workers in an open letter that Russia was not ready for a seizure of power. He died in 1918, unreconciled. The Soviet state that made his aesthetics a foundation stone had, at the level of politics, defined itself against him. Its solution was a quiet division of the man. Plekhanov-the-philosopher and Plekhanov-the-founder-of-Marxist-criticism were embraced; Plekhanov-the-Menshevik, the opponent of the Revolution, was walled off. Lenin himself had licensed exactly this separation: having broken with him without mercy in politics, Lenin still ruled that Plekhanov's philosophical writings were among the best in the whole literature of Marxism and that no one could become a conscious communist without studying them. So the works survived by being severed from the life. This very edition is a monument to the operation — it gives you the aesthetician in full and leaves the Menshevik offstage, mentioned, if at all, only to be regretted.
Then consider the doctrine. Plekhanov's aesthetics is descriptive and explanatory at its core: it seeks to understand why art takes the forms it does, why the quarrels about its function recur, what social ground each artistic tendency grows from. It is a sociology of art, not a set of orders to artists. Yet in the decades after his death his name was fixed to the wall of an enterprise that inverted him completely. "Socialist realism," codified in 1934 and enforced with rising ferocity thereafter, did not explain the relation of art to social life; it prescribed one, by administrative fiat, on pain of silence or worse. Where Plekhanov had shown that the utilitarian view of art arises spontaneously when artists and their public are in sympathy, the Zhdanov years — named for Andrei Zhdanov, who in 1946 arraigned the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko before a Party resolution, and in 1948 did the same to Shostakovich and Prokofiev — simply commanded that sympathy into being and jailed or hounded those who withheld it. The very falling "out of harmony with his social environment" that Plekhanov had studied as a historical fact was now redefined as a crime against the state. He had written the natural history of a phenomenon; his heirs made the phenomenon illegal and put his portrait over the courtroom door.
The apparatus of this edition offers a small, telling glimpse of the machinery. In the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's notes at the back, where Plekhanov discusses the radical critic Pisarev, the editors step in to correct him: Plekhanov's assessment, the note says, "is not quite correct," for Pisarev in truth opposed art for art's sake and held that art should be filled with serious thought and reflect the progressive ideas of its time. It is a modest scholarly caveat, and on its own terms not unfair. But watch what it does. The founder of Marxist criticism is being gently overruled in the direction of the reigning doctrine — the direction of content, tendency, "progressive ideas" — by the institution that guarded the doctrine. The living critic, who weighed and hesitated and distinguished, is being edited into line with the catechism assembled in his name. That the editing is quiet does not make it less revealing; it is the reflex of a culture that could no longer read even its own founder without steadying his hand.
There is one further irony, and it belongs to the date. This translation appeared in 1957, in the first thaw after Stalin's death, when the worst of the Zhdanovshchina was being cautiously disowned and the reading public was being given back some of what the terror had taken. To reissue Plekhanov on art in that year was, whether the publishers fully meant it or not, to reopen a question the state had spent twenty years pretending was closed — the question of how art actually stands to society, as against how the authorities decree it must. The book is more subversive of its own moment than its imprint could admit.
Read now, with the state that misused him gone, Plekhanov's argument recovers its edge, and it cuts in exactly the opposite direction from Zhdanov. His whole achievement is to have shown that the relation of art to social life is something to be understood — patiently, historically, from below — and never something to be legislated. A doctrine that arises from the real sympathy between a society and its artists cannot be manufactured by a resolution of the Central Committee; the attempt to manufacture it produces not the utilitarian art Plekhanov described but its lifeless double, art conscripted, which fools no one and outlives nothing. His pages are, in this sense, the standing refutation of the aesthetic bureaucracy that claimed him. The best of the Marxist tradition understood this from within. Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution — written in 1924, before the freeze — had already insisted that the Party had no business decreeing artistic schools or manufacturing a "proletarian culture" to order, that art must find its own road by its own means; it is the same instinct as Plekhanov's, the refusal to confuse explanation with command, and it was buried under the same avalanche.
What lasts, then, is not a set of verdicts on particular poets — some of Plekhanov's have dated, as he would have expected them to — but the method and the temper: the conviction that art is a social and historical phenomenon with 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 has fed everything durable in later Marxist thinking about culture, and it remains a corrective to dogma of every stripe — the market's dogma that art is merely a commodity, no less than the commissar's that it is merely a message. Plekhanov opened a door that the bureaucracy spent a generation trying to nail shut, and could not. The reader who comes to these letters and this essay for the first time will find, beneath the period furniture, a mind insisting on the one thing his self-appointed heirs could never abide: that living art, like a living doctrine, keeps faith with society not by taking orders from it but by belonging to it.