This is the volume in which Plekhanov earns the title the Soviet state gave him: the father of Marxist art criticism. The four earlier books in this Selected Philosophical Works collected the founding pamphlets of Russian Marxism, the two masterworks on the individual and on materialism, the writings on Russian social thought. Volume V is the aesthetics, and it is the richest of the five, because it is here that Plekhanov did something genuinely new and here that the stakes for the state reprinting him are highest. The book is a 1981 printing — "First printing 1981," in the translation of K. M. Cook and A. Fineberg, the copyright the Publishers' — of essays Plekhanov wrote between 1888 and the eve of the First World War, prepared, like its companions, by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The primary texts are the real thing. The introductory essay in front of them, by V. Shcherbina, was finalised no earlier than 1974 (it cites the 1974 Volume I by page), and it is a document of the Brezhnev years doing a delicate job: presenting the man the Soviet Union had canonised as the founder of its aesthetics to a world in which those aesthetics had, for nearly half a century, meant the exact opposite of what he taught.
Start with what is founding, because it is considerable and because the credibility of everything that follows depends on saying so plainly. Before Plekhanov, Marxists had opinions about art; Plekhanov built a method. Its core is the claim that art is a social product — that tastes, schools and the very idea of beauty are rooted in the life of classes and change as that life changes — and he pressed it with a range of evidence, from the hunting songs of primitive peoples to the Cubist canvases of his own moment, that no one before him had assembled. His single most brilliant stroke is the treatment of "art for art's sake." The aesthetes of his day held that the doctrine of pure art, art answerable to nothing but itself, was a timeless truth about beauty. Plekhanov showed it was a symptom. "The belief in art for art's sake arises wherever the artist is out of harmony with his social environment," he wrote in Art and Social Life (1912–13), the essay that closes this volume and crowns his work — and he traced the doctrine through Pushkin under Nicholas I, through Gautier and the French Parnassians, showing each time that the retreat into pure form was a class relationship in disguise, the artist's quarrel with a society he could neither approve nor change. The companion demonstration is the sociological reading of eighteenth-century French drama, in which he tracks the popular farce giving way to aristocratic tragedy, tragedy to bourgeois "tearful comedy," and comedy back to the antique heroic costume the Revolution needed — a whole literary history read off the movement of classes. He grounded it in a materialist first principle, that "work is older than art," and he insisted, against the aesthetes, that judgment need not therefore be arbitrary: the objective standard is the correspondence of form to content, of execution to design. "The more closely the execution corresponds to the design ... the more successful it is. There you have an objective criterion." A reader who wants to know why Plekhanov is called the founder of Marxist aesthetics should read these essays and will not need to be told.
The method reaches back to the origins. Plekhanov turned to the art of hunting peoples because there the connection with labour lies open — "Here life appears to us in its simplest form and yields up its secrets to us all the more easily" — and drew from it the sequence that everything else in the theory elaborates: work first, then the aesthetic sense that plays upon its materials, and, once societies divide, "the evolution of the fine arts is determined by the class struggle." What keeps this from collapsing into the crude economic determinism his imitators fell into is that Plekhanov applied it in both directions and without favour. He read the reactionary art of his own moment by the same rule as the revolutionary — noting that the bourgeoisie, as its position grew harder to defend, produced its own committed literature, the plays of de Curel and Bourget urging the class to close ranks against the workers. "Bourgeois art is becoming militant," he observed, without alarm and without applause; a class under threat presses art into service exactly as a class on the rise does. The judgment he passed was never on the fact of engagement but on the truth of the outlook engaged: an art tied to a lie about the world could not, whatever the talent behind it, become true.
And yet the same volume contains, unmarked and unglossed, the warning that the state canonising him would spend the twentieth century ignoring. Plekhanov was not a propagandist of art. He held the classical view, inherited through Belinsky, that art and philosophy have the same content but different means: "The philosopher talks in syllogisms, the poet in images and pictures." The poet's law, Plekhanov quotes Belinsky approvingly, is "to think in images and pictures, but not in syllogisms and dilemmas"; the image "is not a means, but an end." An art that begins from a thesis and sets out to prove it has already stopped being art. Plekhanov watched the mechanism at work and named it. Of Ibsen, whose "revolt" he judged too vague to know its own aim, he wrote that "the vagueness of his preaching is bound to lead to insufficient distinctness in his images. The element of abstraction and schematism will invade his artistic works." That sentence — that preaching, when it outruns vision, breeds schematism — is as exact a diagnosis of what would later be decreed in Moscow under the name of Socialist Realism as anyone wrote before the fact.
There is a still sharper passage, and it is the one to hold in mind through the rest of this introduction. In Art and Social Life Plekhanov turns to the question of who, in society, favours the "utilitarian view of art" — the demand that art serve a purpose beyond itself. He notes that revolutionaries have often held it, but that they hold no monopoly: "political authority always prefers the utilitarian view of art, to the extent, of course, that it pays any attention to art at all ... it is to its interest to harness all ideologies to the service of the cause which it serves itself." And he adds the barb: "since political authority, although sometimes revolutionary, is most often conservative and even reactionary," it would be a mistake to imagine the utilitarian view belongs to the left. It "can just as well cohabit with a conservative, as with a revolutionary attitude of mind." This is Plekhanov, in a book Progress printed in Moscow in 1981, explaining that a state's demand that art serve the state is the oldest reflex of authority, and generally a reactionary one. No footnote attaches to it. As in the earlier volumes of this edition — where an 1883 pamphlet predicting rule by a "socialist caste" and a polemic convicting Plekhanov of the "opportunism" he had accused others of both stand in the text without editorial comment — the book is more candid than the essay that frames it.
It is important to be exact about the objection, because it is easy to mistake. The quarrel is not with art that serves a cause. Plekhanov himself thought the "utilitarian view" natural and right for a rising revolutionary class, and the tradition that answers this volume has never held otherwise; its own founders wrote to change the world and expected art to help. The distinction Plekhanov draws, and the one the state effaced, is between a class whose artists freely find that their images and their convictions run together, and an authority that supplies the convictions and requires the images to match. The first is the condition of all great engaged art; the second is what he means when he says political authority "prefers" the utilitarian view — prefers it because it can enforce it. An art that serves because it is commanded to serve is the case his whole aesthetic rules out, since by his account the artist thinks in images that arise, as he says following Belinsky, unconsciously, and cannot be issued to order like a directive. To command the image is to abolish it.
The candour matters because of what the state did with Plekhanov's name. The one part of his aesthetics that Soviet doctrine seized on and built into a system is his theory of "false ideas": his argument that a reactionary idea at the base of a work damages it, that "when a false idea is made the basis of a literary work, it imparts to it inherent contradictions that inevitably detract from its aesthetic merit." Shcherbina's essay foregrounds exactly this, praising Plekhanov for championing "the ideological nature of art, its duty to bring progressive social ideals to the people." But Plekhanov's doctrine is a diagnosis, not a licence. He is describing why art withers when an artist is tied to a dying class and its illusions; his examples are the reactionary — Hamsun's hatred of the workers, Bourget's defence of capital — and his point is sociological, that "no talent can convert into truth" a class-lie about the world. To read that as a prescription — as a warrant for a committee to certify which ideas are "progressive" and require them of writers on pain of silence — is to convert Plekhanov's account of how art loses its truth into a machine for manufacturing the loss. That conversion is the history of Soviet literature, and it is the reason this volume has a double character its own introduction cannot acknowledge.
For the state that printed Plekhanov-on-images-not-syllogisms was the state of the writers' decrees. In August 1934 the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers wrote Socialist Realism into the statutes of a single compulsory Union; in 1946 and 1948 the Central Committee resolutions associated with Andrei Zhdanov disciplined the poets, the composers and the journals by name. The doctrine did precisely what Plekhanov said political authority always tries to do — it harnessed art to the cause the authority served — and it produced precisely the schematism his Ibsen essay predicted preaching would produce. The companion volumes in this series document the machinery: Avner Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Progress, 1977), which cannot say where the doctrine came from and admits as much; Boris Suchkov's A History of Realism (Progress, 1973), in which the year 1934 does not occur; Kornely Zelinsky's memoir in Soviet Literature: Problems and People (Progress, 1970), which happens to record Stalin naming the method in Gorky's house in October 1932. Those books are the place to follow the decrees and the casualties. The point that belongs here, in the volume of the founder, is the reflexive one: the aesthetic establishment that ran that apparatus claimed Plekhanov as its ancestor — Zis's Foundations cites him among its authorities — and the ancestor it claimed had already told it, in the very pages it was reprinting, that what it was doing was the reflex of reactionary power. There is a further asymmetry worth recording, documented in the companion introduction to Volume I of this edition: while the aesthetics establishment enthroned Plekhanov as its founder, several of the same publisher's philosophy primers — Afanasyev, Krapivin, Frantsov — left his name out of their histories of Russian materialism entirely, crediting the revolutionary democrats he wrote his books about and passing over the man who wrote the books. The state kept him where it needed him and dropped him where it did not, and the aesthetics volume is where it needed him most and could afford him least.
How, then, does the 1981 apparatus handle its awkward father? With the same technique the earlier volumes used, adapted to the subject. Shcherbina's essay is scrupulous and often genuinely illuminating on the philosophy, and it does not lie. But it performs two containments. The first is to read the whole of later Soviet cultural policy backward into Plekhanov as if it were his natural issue. The changeability of taste that Plekhanov demonstrated becomes, in Shcherbina's hands, evidence for "the very close and constantly developing interconnections of the socialist art of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries" — the family of official cultures speaking as one. Plekhanov's 1912 contempt for Cubism ("Nonsense cubed," he wrote, and Shcherbina quotes it with relish) is enlisted as ammunition in a 1981 campaign against Western modernism and abstraction, "the aesthetics of modernism," as though a dead man's reaction to Gleizes and Metzinger settled the cultural politics of the Cold War. What drops out of this framing is that Plekhanov's attack on the Decadents was an attack on an art he judged cut off from a rising class — and that the charge, turned on the state's own official art, would land: the "schematism" he feared is the recognised vice of the doctrine Shcherbina is defending.
The second containment is the volume's version of an operation this edition performs throughout: preserve the aesthetics by quarantining the politics. Because Volume V is criticism, the seam runs not through a biography but through a comparison. Plekhanov wrote finely on Tolstoy, and Shcherbina credits him — but marks the essays down against Lenin's, on the ground that "a comparison of them with Lenin's works on Tolstoy reveals their weak aspects most clearly," the weakness being Plekhanov's "Menshevik" outlook and his "disregard of the role of the peasantry." Wherever Plekhanov's judgment is found wanting — his coolness toward Gorky, his misreading of a Decadent novel as realism — the cause assigned is the same political fall the earlier volumes narrated, and the corrective is always Lenin. The reader is invited to admire the founder and to remember, at each limit, that the founder went wrong in politics and that the politics spoiled the criticism. It is a subtler containment than the flat silences of the reference volumes, and it should be credited for what it does not do: it does not excise. It names Plekhanov's real errors — the excessive weight he gave to biology in the sense of beauty, the law of imitation and contradiction he borrowed from Taine and raised too often into a general law of art, his verdict that Pushkin had dated for the modern reader — and dates them to specific texts. This is argument, not deletion, and set beside what the same publisher did to the historical record elsewhere in this catalogue it is a different order of editorial conduct. The trouble is not that the essay falsifies. It is that it can be scrupulous about every question except the one that matters most for a volume on artistic freedom: what the doctrine descended from this man became in the hands of the state that printed him.
That question the reply tradition answered, and answered from a direction that makes the convergence with Plekhanov exact rather than approximate. It is worth noticing first what Plekhanov and his sharpest Soviet-era critic agreed on. Shcherbina's essay repeatedly defends Plekhanov against the "vulgar sociologists of the Shulyatikov type," who reduced a work of art directly to the economics of its author's class and "ignored the difference between literature and publicistics." Trotsky, debating the proletarian-culture enthusiasts in May 1924, reached for the same target and the same authority Plekhanov used — the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola — to ridicule the critic who would read Dante's poem "as though it were made of the cloth that Florentine merchants provided for their customers," a method he identified by name as "that of the late Shulyatikov, who provided a caricature of Marxism." The founder of Soviet aesthetics and the founder of the Red Army, writing on the same question, rejected the same reduction of art to a class-syllogism. That is not a coincidence; it is the classical Marxist theory of art, which both men held and which the state that claimed both men's authority abandoned.
From that common ground Trotsky drew the conclusion Plekhanov's warning implied but, dying in 1918, never lived to make. In Literature and Revolution (1923) and in the 1924 debate he insisted that art "has its own laws of development, and above all because in artistic creation an enormous role is played by subconscious processes" — the same "unconscious" work of creation that Plekhanov, following Belinsky, made central to poetry in this very volume. Art that works through images and through processes below the reach of the will cannot be produced to order, and the attempt to order it destroys it. By 1938, watching the doctrine harden into the Writers' Union, Trotsky stated the principle at the pitch the moment required: "Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them" ("Art and Politics in Our Epoch," letter to Partisan Review, 18 June 1938; the companion volume on Zis develops this text and the machinery The Revolution Betrayed had already described). Set that beside Plekhanov's sentence about political authority harnessing all ideologies to its own cause, and the two halves of the tradition close on the same judgment from either side of the catastrophe: the one warning, in 1912, that the demand is the reflex of power; the other reporting, in 1938, what the demand had done.
So read the book, and read it for the best of Plekhanov, which is very good — the essay on art for art's sake, the reading of French drama, the analysis of the Decadents, the great final synthesis of Art and Social Life. This is a founder's work, and it founds something real. Then read Shcherbina's essay, but read it as the state's attempt to keep the father while breaking his rule. It claims Plekhanov as the ancestor of an aesthetics he would not have recognised, uses his diagnoses as a state's weapons, and marks down his criticism at exactly the points where Lenin is needed to correct the Menshevik — and it does all this in a book that prints, a few hundred pages later and without a word of comment, its author's flat statement that a government's demand for useful art is the oldest and most reactionary reflex of authority. The founder of Marxist art criticism warned against the thing his heirs would build in his name. The proof is bound between the same covers as the warning, and the introduction is the one part of the volume that cannot afford to notice it.