Yevgeny Basin's Semantic Philosophy of Art is the most Western-facing book Progress Publishers issued in its aesthetics list, and the most disconcerting to read against the grain, because it does almost nothing that a reader trained on the rest of the catalogue expects. It is a book-length critique of twentieth-century Anglo-American and European theories of art as language, symbol and sign — the neo-positivist aesthetics of I. A. Richards, the "analytic aesthetics" descended from the later Wittgenstein, the neo-Hegelian expression theory of Croce and Collingwood, Whitehead's philosophy of symbolism, Cassirer's symbolic forms, Susanne Langer's presentational symbol, Peirce's semiotics and Charles Morris's behaviourist theory of signs. And it reads them. Not through Soviet intermediaries and not from digests, but in their own editions, in four languages, with the apparatus of a working historian of philosophy. The polemical frame is entirely orthodox; the scholarship underneath it is real. Learning to hold those two facts together is the whole task of reading the book honestly.
A word first on what the book is and when it was written, because the spine misleads in the usual direction. Progress dated the English translation 1979, but the copyright page and colophon did not survive scanning — the front matter breaks off after the Soviet imprint code and the back is a bare "The End" — so the text must be dated from inside. Its bibliography closes early: the latest Russian-language and Western secondary items it cites are from 1971–72 (M. S. Kozlova's Filosofiya i yazyk, Moscow 1972; the Kommunist articles of 1971), and the single latest token anywhere is the English Marx–Engels Collected Works volume 1 of 1975, which is the translation apparatus, not the argument. The manuscript is an early-1970s Russian text — on the internal evidence around 1972–73 — carried into English at the end of the decade, a lag of six or seven years in a field that was moving fast enough for the gap to matter: nothing in the book registers the reception of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968), which appears only as two bare index entries, and structuralism enters as a movement of "the mid-60's" still felt to be current. The author, Yevgeny Basin, presents himself simply as a Soviet philosopher and historian of aesthetics; the text gives no institutional affiliation and I have not tried to supply one. The translation, by Christopher English, is clean and literate throughout.
What the book was for is not hidden. Its closing methodological sentence names the fourth and governing task of the study as "the exposition of the class nature of the semantic philosophy of art, diametrically opposed to materialism, and ultimately expressing the class interests of the bourgeoisie," whose "clearest manifestation" is "the hostility of semantic aesthetic idealism to progressive realistic art and in the theoretical justification of various forms of modernist art." That is the commission. This is a book in the aesthetic theatre of the ideological Cold War, and its ultimate object is not Richards or Peirce but the defence of "progressive realistic art" — which, in a Soviet book of the early 1970s, means socialist realism — against the whole family of twentieth-century modernisms for which the semantic theorists are read as supplying a philosophical licence. Keep that telos in view and everything the book does well and everything it does badly comes from the same place.
This series has learned to run one test before all others on a Soviet book that attacks Western thinkers: does it quote them, from their own works, or does it characterise them from a distance and route every footnote through a Soviet commentator? The test has a sharp form — not whether he cites the enemy but which opponents get read and which get merely relayed. On the aesthetics and philosophy shelf it has now inverted three times. Batalov footnoted Marcuse to Marcuse's own German editions more often than he cited Lenin. Naletov read Popper, Carnap, Quine, Kuhn — and Adorno and Marcuse in the original German. Basin belongs with them, and further along the same line.
His targets are read in their own editions and cited by work. Croce appears in Italian, French, German and English printings — the 1904 Paris Esthétique, the 1922 London Aesthetics as Science of Expression, the German Grundriss der Ästhetik. Cassirer is worked from the German Philosophie der symbolischen Formen and the papers he delivered to the German aesthetics congresses of 1927 and 1930. Peirce is quoted from the Collected Papers by volume and paragraph; Richards from the Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry; Morris from Signs, Language and Behavior, section and chapter; Wittgenstein from the Philosophical Investigations and the Göttingen lectures on aesthetics. The chapter on Collingwood reconstructs the contents of his Essays in the Philosophy of Art down to individual 1925 papers. This is not the apparatus of a man relaying a caricature. Where it thins — Goodman at two mentions, Frege absent — the likeliest cause is the manuscript's early-1970s date rather than avoidance, since both belong to a reception that had barely begun in Russian. On the question the test is built to answer, Basin passes cleanly: he did the reading.
He also reads the Soviet secondary literature, and cites it openly alongside the primaries — Bogomolov, Melvil and Narsky on the integration of bourgeois philosophical schools, Oizerman on the bourgeoisie's turn to "refined idealistic theories," Zis on axiology, Bogdanov on the eclecticism of imperialist-age philosophy. That is the healthy scholarly pattern, not the Batalov relay: the commentary supplements the sources, it does not stand in for them. And the book carries, near the front, the standard Soviet warrant for this kind of reading, quoted from Bogomolov, Melvil and Narsky: to identify the "genuine epistemological, methodological, psychological and social problems" buried in bourgeois philosophy, because "to ignore the ideas of bourgeois authors simply because they are put forward by our ideological opponents or because they contain certain errors would be to hold up the development of Marxist philosophy." It is the same licence Naletov and Boris Suchkov used to justify taking the Western canon seriously, and Basin uses it to earn a genuinely learned book.
For a Soviet "semantic philosophy of art" published in 1979 there is a second test, sharper than the first and specific to the subject. Soviet semiotics existed, and it was distinguished and politically exposed: the Tartu–Moscow school under Yuri Lotman, with Uspensky, Ivanov, Toporov and others, tolerated at the margins of official scholarship and never quite trusted by it. A book that engaged Morris and Langer while stepping around its own country's semioticians would have been telling a revealing silence. Basin does not keep that silence. In the introduction he names the Tartu group directly as "a group of Soviet authors, who constitute an entire movement," singling out "the writings of Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vyacheslav Toporov, Yuri Lekomtsev," and he notes honestly that "the Soviet scholars are divided in their opinion" of the worth of applying exact methods to art — an acknowledgement of a live and unsettled Soviet debate rather than a party line. Later he cites Lotman for the defence: on the inner logic of narrative texts he writes that "correctly argues Yu. M. Lotman," this logic "cannot be defined as self-evident on the basis of the intuition of the scholar, but must be revealed through an analysis of secondary modelling systems," citing the Tartu series Semiotika i iskusstvometriya by page. Jakobson — an émigré, and therefore doubly awkward — appears twice as "the well-known western linguist and semiotician," his positions reported without abuse. This is braver than the genre led one to expect, and it should be said plainly.
But look at how the Soviet semioticians are admitted, because the mechanism is the real finding. Basin builds his book on a borrowed classification (from the Yugoslav aesthetician Miloš Damjanović) that sorts semantic theories of art into three groups: special-scientific theories, transitional "analytic" doctrines, and a "symbolic philosophy of art" concerned with epistemology. He then announces that his critique takes as its object "not the material-scientific semantic theories of art, but the philosophical semantic theories" — the third group only. The distinction that saves the Tartu school is the distinction between method and theory. Soviet semiotics is allowed to be legitimate exact method, bracketed out of the indictment before it begins; Western semiotics is convicted as idealist philosophy. The same tools — sign, code, structure, information — are science in Tartu and idealism in Cambridge and Chicago. The line between them is not drawn by anything in the semiotic apparatus itself, which is shared; it is drawn by the prior political sorting and then rationalised through the theory/method cut. That the cut is convenient does not make it empty — as we will see, the argument beneath it is a real one — but the national geography of the verdict is decided before the philosophy is done.
It would be easy, and wrong, to leave the book there. The Marxist objection Basin is pressing is not a slogan, and where he argues it he argues something that serious non-Soviet critics were arguing at the very same moment. His core charge is that the semantic theories commit a "metaphysical absolutization of one of the aspects of art" — they seize on the fact that art can be treated as a sign system and inflate that one aspect into the whole essence of art, so that "art, when interpreted as language (or some other sign system) becomes the idealistic semanticist's main, if not only, aspect of aesthetic study." The result, he argues, is that art's relation to objective reality and to social life drops out — "without exception," he claims, "all the aestheticians of the semantic school deny that art provides an adequate reflection of objective reality." His own positive statement of the point is careful and, quoting the Soviet scholar Ya. I. Hajikyan, generous to the other side: art "admits the possibility of being viewed in the same aspect in which its sign nature functions," but "its sign nature does not exhaust its essence." That is not a bad sentence to hang a critique of reductive semiotics on.
The best stretch of the book is the methodological argument that a method is never innocent of a theory. Basin insists that when the procedures of linguistics or information theory are carried over to art, "theoretical models are also transferred" — that treating art as a sign system is not a neutral technique but a substantive claim about what art is, smuggled in as if it were only a way of proceeding. The semantic theorists, he notes, like to present their aesthetics as "not a theory, nor a system of interpretation, but a system of methods," and he is right that this is a evasion: the method presupposes the theory. This is, almost exactly, the argument Fredric Jameson was making against structuralism in The Prison-House of Language in 1972, and the argument Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School had long pressed against formalism — that a formalism which brackets the social and historical content of the work has not suspended a metaphysics but concealed one. Where Basin reasons rather than pronounces, he is inside a real and continuing debate, and the introduction to a book we are not endorsing should say so.
The trouble is not the objection but its destination. The same category — that art's significance cannot be reduced to its form or its sign-function, that it must be judged by its truth to reality and its place in "the progressive development of mankind" — is aimed, in this book, at a fixed political target: it is the philosophical undercarriage of a defence of socialist realism and a blanket verdict against modernism. The reader is never in doubt that the "progressive realistic art" whose hostility to formalism the book vindicates is the officially licensed art of the Soviet state, and that "modernism" names everything that art turned into once it stopped taking orders. The aesthetic conclusion is settled before the analysis of Peirce begins.
This is exactly the ground on which the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition broke with the outlook Basin is defending, and it did so on the aesthetic question itself. In "Art and Politics in Our Epoch," a letter to Partisan Review written on 18 June 1938, Trotsky put the name "socialist realism" where it belonged: "The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts," and the art it described was "based on lies and deceit," the product of "functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers." Far from treating the succession of modern schools as bourgeois decay to be philosophically liquidated — Basin's "various forms of modernist art" — Trotsky read cubism, futurism, dadaism and surrealism as the genuine, tormented registrations of "the decline and decay of bourgeois society," art that "will rot away inevitably" only if the revolution fails, not because it is formalist. The doctrine of a licensed, content-approved realism was for him the aesthetic face of the bureaucracy, not the answer to it.
The deeper point is that Basin's central formal objection and the tradition that answers him are not, in fact, opposed. Trotsky made the same objection Basin makes. In Literature and Revolution (1924) — not held in our archive here, and cited by argument — he took the Russian Formalists seriously enough to devote a chapter to them, granted their attention to the material of art its due, and then denied that form could be the whole account of the work, precisely because it severed art from its social ground. That is Basin's move, forty-nine years earlier and against the direct ancestors of his own Western targets. The difference is not in the philosophy of the sign; it is in the manner and the purpose. As Trent Hutter wrote when Literature and Revolution was reissued in the West (International Socialist Review, vol. 19 no. 1, Winter 1958), Trotsky criticised the schools of his day sharply but "even at his sharpest he does not swing the club of the bureaucratic policeman." Basin's philosophy is often better than his reputation would suggest; what it is chained to is the club. The same tradition answered the American half of his book in advance: George Novack's long critique of pragmatism — "Dewey's instrumentalism is the highest form of pragmatism," and pragmatism "is not a working class philosophy" but "the theory of middle class progressivism" ("American Philosophy and the Labor Movement," 1962) — is the materialist reply to Peirce, Morris and Dewey that Basin's own chapters gesture at, made without a state aesthetics behind it.
One small measurement confirms the book's character. The deviation-words this series has learned to count — opportunism, revisionism — are simply absent: zero occurrences of each in 82,650 words. Basin's policing vocabulary is entirely epistemological: idealism runs to more than two hundred uses, with formalism, modernism, subjectivism, agnosticism and relativism behind it. This is a philosopher disciplining philosophy, not an apparatus disciplining a movement, and it places the book among the minority of the catalogue that reaches for no organisational label at all. It is worth adding what the epistemological vocabulary never does: it never turns inward. "Idealism," "formalism" and "metaphysics" are charges that could in principle be levelled at any thinker, including a Soviet one; in this book they are reserved, by the method/theory sorting described above, for the far side of the ideological border. The one place a Soviet practitioner of the very same semiotic methods appears — the Tartu school — he is pre-cleared as science and exempted from the categories the rest of the book exists to apply. Error, in these pages, is admissible on the bourgeois side and the Soviet side alike; the classification only ever runs one way.
None of which is a reason to dismiss the book. It is, within its constraints, a genuine piece of scholarship — the fullest Russian-language engagement of its day with Anglo-American analytic aesthetics and semiotics, built on real reading, and honest enough to name and quote the Soviet semioticians its own censorship regarded with suspicion. A reader who wants to know how the strongest Soviet philosophy of the 1970s understood Peirce, Cassirer and Langer will learn a great deal here, and will not be lied to about what those thinkers said. What the reader should carry in is only this: the formal argument the book makes against reducing art to its sign-nature is a good one, and it was not the property of the state that commissioned the book. The same argument was made, earlier and more freely, by the tradition the book was written to bury — made by people who drew from it the opposite conclusion about what art, once you refuse to reduce it, is finally for.