2
Mikhail Lifshits: A Marxist Conservative
The name Mikhail Lifshits (1905–83) will probably mean little to most English-speaking readers. Perhaps one or two, interested in Marxist aesthetics, might have come across his little book The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1935) originally published in English translation in New York in 1938 and reprinted by Pluto Press in 1973 with an introduction by Terry Eagleton;1 or, less likely, his contributions to Literaturnaya Gazeta, published in New York in 1939 under the title Literature and Marxism and edited by Angel Flores.2 America has served him much better than Britain. But only aficionados will have seen any other work of his in English translation, scattered among Marxist and other journals on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the English Modern Quarterly and the American periodicals Science and Society and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Who is he and why am I writing about him? Lifshits was the first person to put together a Marxist aesthetics by combing through the works of Marx and Engels (later Lenin) for whatever they had to say about literature and art and ordering it into a historical and thematic anthology supported by an extensive commentary.3 But this was no mere compilation, it argued for a coherent philosophy of art. The smaller Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx charts Marx’s aesthetic views from his early dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus through to the Theories of Surplus Value. Lifshits’s aim was not to lift an independent aesthetic system out of Marx (and Engels), for no such thing existed. The main concerns of the two thinkers lay, in any case, elsewhere: they were revolutionaries whose prime need was for a theory of society and history. On the other hand, aesthetics was no mere spin-off of their more practical and urgent studies, it was an integral part of them. Marx had no time to write his projected monograph on Balzac, nor did he contribute the article on aesthetics that he had promised to the New American Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, as Lifshits was at pains to show, the aesthetic dimension – its flowerings and defeats – inheres in every facet of Marx’s work from his study of production to his conception of ideology.
To persuade his readership that a coherent philosophy of art could be found in Marxism, Lifshits had to overcome two obstacles. One was the widespread view that the artistic likes and dislikes of Marx and Engels differed little from those of educated Victorians (for instance, Marx’s devotion to classical Greece), that they were private predilections that had nothing to do with his politics. It is a view to be found in Peter Demetz’s Marx, Engels and the Poets (1967) and Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1978) and is still quite common. More importantly, it was shared by David Riazanov, head of the Marx–Engels Institute where Lifshits worked in the early 1930s. Or, at least, Riazanov held that there was no recognisable aesthetic system in Marx, and turned down Lifshits’s application to work on the subject.
The other obstacle was a whole cluster of attitudes originating in the Second International and categorised in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as ‘vulgar sociology’ – the derivation of art directly from its class and economic basis, an approach which Engels had already warned against in a number of letters after Marx’s death, at a time when theorists like Kautsky were transforming historical materialism into an economic determinism. Engels, by contrast, underlined the complex and interactive relationship between consciousness, ideology and social practice, emphasising the uneven development of ideas in relation to the base.4 The economy, he cautioned in a resonating phrase, was determining only in the last instance. So strong was the objectivism of Social Democratic thinking in this period that even radical thinkers, like Mehring and Plekhanov, resorted to Kantian categories in order to define questions of value and subjectivity. This economic or class determinism lasted into the Soviet period, where it flourished under different banners. And though such attitudes were officially banned, they survived or took on a new form in various ideological currents, not least in Socialist Realism.
Very little was known or published of the writings of Marx and Engels on the arts before the 1930s. Only then were Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts discovered, which provided a foundation for both an ontology and an aesthetics. Nor yet had Engels’s seminal letters on realism appeared.5 But, more importantly, to quote Brecht from a different context, ‘the circumstances weren’t right’. The avant-garde wanted to wage war on bourgeois art with the same ferocity as the Reds fought the Whites. The radical magazine LEF, edited by Mayakovsky, charged the symbolist poet Valery Briussov (who had just joined the Community Party) with counter-revolution in form. Exhibits in museums and art galleries were labelled according to the artist’s class origins.6 Constructivists rejected the easel as a parasitic appendage of bourgeois culture. Futurists called for the expulsion of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky from the steamship of modernity. Trotsky described this avant-garde frenzy as a hangover from its petit-bourgeois revolt in the pre-revolutionary period. Lenin counter-attacked by shutting down Prolet’kult, an organisation that campaigned for a pure proletarian art. Any socialist culture, Lenin remarked, would have as its basis the entire history of humankind, critically assimilated. Despite these rebuffs the avant-garde continued to occupy senior administrative posts in the arts until the late 1920s. Apart from Lenin’s intervention, the Party took a lenient attitude to the various artistic tendencies. But with the inauguration of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan in 1928 the situation changed radically. A new class-based aesthetics, based on realism, replaced the sociological formalism of the avant-garde. By the end of the First Five Year Plan this, too, was ousted (though partially incorporated) by Socialist Realism, personally supervised by Stalin.7
The 1920s were by no means bereft of genuine Marxist endeavours, above all the linguistic studies of Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov and their critiques of the Formalist school. Since then, apart from Vyogtsky’s work and Marr’s class-based theories of the early 1930s, linguistics was neglected by Russian Marxists. Stalin’s belated and commonsensical corrective to Marr, in his Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950), did nothing to advance the subject. Lifshits ignored it, and Lukács, an émigré colleague, only turned his attention to it much later in his Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen,8 limiting himself, however, to Pavlov’s reflex theory of language. This is a pity, since, from the eighteenth century, Russia was extraordinarily rich in linguistic developments. At the time of the ‘linguistic turn’ in western cultural studies, it was logical that Voloshinov, Medvedev and their mentor, Bakhtin, should have appealed much more than the more traditional Lifshits. Indeed, Voloshinov’s description of the sign as the site of class struggle made him an icon of the left.9 For Lifshits such an assertion, if he knew it, would have been another example of ‘vulgar sociology’. Nor did he countenance any attempt to adapt formalist theory to Marxism, as Mayakovsky, a poet whom he belittled, sought to do.
Lifshits’s work marked a turning point in Soviet thinking about art and culture. He was far from alone and even drew sustenance from Stalin’s ‘Thermidor’. Yet his position was unique, and without him the aesthetic thought of the period would have been impoverished. Without him, and his colleagues, there would have been no Marxism that could counter the stereotyped naturalism that went under the name of Socialist Realism. That such a Marxism found its expression in aesthetics was a response to Stalin’s suppression of revolutionary politics. Not that Lifshits or his colleagues were ever political activists. But the manner of Lifshits’s work on aesthetics constituted a strategic withdrawal of the kind that distinguishes late from early Hegel in regard to the French Thermidor. In his ‘reconciliation with reality’ Hegel produced the dialectical insights which, stripped of their conservative husk, became revolutionary. Lifshits notes a similar phase of renunciation in Vico’s work. ‘In certain tragic periods of history, he wrote in 1936 apropos of Vico’s theory of cycles,
the final goal is still too distant and the burden of today’s sacrifices so heavy and painful that the masses succumb to a state of political apathy for years on end. Periods of quietism and indifference inevitably follow the revolutionary storms of the past.10
Lifshits denied identifying with either Vico or Hegel, for, after all, was he not living in a socialist democracy in which the revolution continued to grow? And yet those thinkers, artists and writers to whom he feels closest share a similar resignation, resembling Hegel’s owl of Minerva, which takes flight only at dusk. In a later comment on the position he and Lukács occupied in the Soviet Union, a similar note is struck: ‘Unlike Hegel, we profess a faith in the democracy of the historical process which also demands sacrifice, including human sacrifice.’11
In using aesthetics as a platform for Marxism, Lifshits was also emulating a time-honoured tradition in Russia dating back to the eighteenth century, when literature and literary criticism were the only voices of opposition. To occupy a post in an institute, which Lifshits periodically did, inevitably involved compromise. He was a Communist. Outside the Communist Party it was possible to be more subversive, like Bulgakov with The Master and Margarita, but at a cost. Bulgakov’s novel was unpublishable. Mandelstam’s anti-Stalin poem sent him to a camp.
First in 1930, and then again in 1933, Lifshits was joined by Lukács, who emigrated to Russia shortly after Hitler’s accession to power. In 1928 Lukács had submitted his famous Blum theses (Blum was his Comintern pseudonym) to the exiled Hungarian Communist Party, proposing a common front against fascism between progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat. His programme unfortunately coincided with the so-called Third or ‘class-against-class’ Period of the Comintern (of which the class-based aesthetics of First Five Year Plan was an offshoot). The Comintern refused an alliance with the Social Democrats, dubbing them Social Fascists and so depriving the working class of an ally against fascism, with disastrous results. Lukács’s proposals were in all essentials realised by the Popular Front of 1935, set up with Comintern approval. But already in 1928, forced to recant his theses, he decided to retire from political life and return to theory. Not until the Hungarian uprising of 1956 would he take a direct part in politics again. The Blum theses had aesthetic implications. In his later literary theory Lukács conceived of a broad realism that could include bourgeois and socialist writers from Thomas Mann to Mikhail Sholokhov. During 1931 and 1932 he fought for this position on a commission from the International Association of Proletarian Writers. Soon the Comintern would be moving in the direction of the Popular Front and his critique of left-wing modernism reflected this shift.
Returning to Russia in 1933 as an émigré, and distanced from the Hungarian Communist Party in exile, he resumed work with Lifshits on the construction of a Marxist aesthetics. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts became available through their efforts, as did Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks with their comments on Hegel’s Logic. Engels’s letters on realism were published. And Hegel’s Aesthetics provided, in Engels’s words, an indispensable preliminary to a Marxist philosophy of art. With these tools – Hegel’s aesthetic theory, Marx’s early ontology and anthropology, Engels’s definition of realism and Lenin’s concept of reflection (to be discussed later) – the two thinkers developed a model of aesthetics and realism that could be applied to the entirety of history, starting with cave paintings. Aesthetics, as Lifshits put it, was no mere speciality or discipline, but the philosophy of art history.
There were essentially four components to this aesthetic theory: the relationship between use value and exchange value, the uneven development between art and the economy, the goal of a classless society, and the place of realism in history. A society based on use value, it was argued, was likely to produce a higher form of art than one more economically advanced in which exchange value or the market predominated. The polarisation of use value and exchange value was at its most extreme in capitalist society, where unprecedented freedom entailed unprecedented saleability, a contradiction which only a communist order could dissolve by dismantling the market and putting production under public control. Capitalism, as Marx declared, presents the greatest threat to art. From this perspective the significant art of the past can be seen as an anticipation of communism where ‘useful work’ (to borrow Morris’s term) is the norm. Significant art, according to Lifshits, is always realistic, and flourished in societies where use and exchange value were in relative balance (as in the Athenian democracy and the city states of the Renaissance). By realism Lifshits means an art that plumbs the depths of its time, which transcends temporary class dominations and prefigures the still-hidden motions of social development (in the spirit of Shelley’s definition of poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’). It is to be distinguished from naturalism, which is only of its time and is concerned with the average rather than the typical. Nor is it a style, limited to certain novels of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, it is a rounded conception that goes back to the beginnings of civilisation, and represents the world faithfully by contending both with its opponents and its own illusions.
In May 1933 a group of like-minded writers and critics founded a journal, The Literary Critic, which in time acquired the status of a tendency or school of which Lifshits and Lukács were the leading lights. The Literary Critic was born out of the turmoil precipitated by the Party Resolution of 23 April 1932 which abolished all existing organisations and associations involved in literature and the other arts and paved the way for a single, unified body, principally the Union of Soviet Writers. Similar bodies were set up for the other arts. As in pre-revolutionary Russia, literature formed the cauldron of the debate. RAPP, the Association of Proletarian Writers, had dominated the class-against-class period. With the completion of the First Five Year Plan, Stalin considered that a socialist base had been laid and that it was time to halt the persecution of bourgeois specialists as well as the excesses of collectivisation. In place of the RAPP slogan ‘Ally or Enemy’, the Party called for a new inclusiveness. The so-called Cultural Revolution of 1928–32 was over just as, internationally, the Third Period was coming to a close. The Party also questioned the cultural credentials of RAPP, accusing the Association of leftist vulgarisation and oversimplification in its dealings with loyal fellow travellers (a fellow traveller was a sympathiser who had not joined the Party). Theoretically, it condemned the ‘dialectical materialist method’ which RAPP sought to impose on all writers, proletarian or fellow traveller. Ivan Gronsky, chairman of the Organization Committee of the new Union of Soviet Writers, the body set up to implement the Central Committee resolution, remarked in May 1932 that the only demand that they would make of the writer was to write the truth, to ‘portray our reality that is in itself dialectic’12 and that this was the method of Socialist Realism.
Not all the Party’s criticisms were fair, and the traditionalism of RAPP found its way into the practices of Socialist Realism, as did some of the RAPPists themselves, most notoriously the dogmatic Alexander Fadeyev. Socialist Realism was formally inaugurated in 1934 at an international congress attended by delegates from all over the world and chaired by the venerable Maxim Gorky, the butt of attack both from RAPP and the avant-garde.13 Gorky linked the new realism with its forbear in the nineteenth century. Engels’s letters to Margaret Harkness and Minna Kautsky, already mentioned, were published in 1932 and used by the Party against RAPP. ‘The realism I allude to’, wrote Engels in his letter to Margaret Harkness, ‘may crop out in spite of the author’s opinions.’14 As an example he referred to the legitimist Balzac, who satirised the aristocracy and admired the republican insurrectionists. This position became canonical in Marxist criticism, but was subject to differing interpretations, as we shall see. It fitted the new mood of the Second Five Year Plan and the conciliatory beginnings of Socialist Realism. It also provided a cornerstone for the separate theory of realism propounded by Lifshits and Lukács. RAPP’s ideological terror was lifted and writers could enjoy a breathing space before the new doctrine turned into a rubber stamp for Party decisions.
The Literary Critic appeared with the philosopher Yudin, a Stalin appointee, as editor. Yudin was one of the fiercest opponents of RAPP. While the views of Lifshits, Lukács and their colleagues came under increasing attack from other journals during the 1930s, Stalin’s indirect patronage ensured that none of the authors suffered. Lukács’s contributions included the essays published in Britain after the war under the title Studies in European Realism, the first book by which he became known in the English-speaking world. Under Stalin’s shadow, the journal acquired the paradoxical status of a fronde. Lifshits told me that in the vaulted basement of the Marx–Engels Institute, where he and Lukács spent many happy hours chatting together, they would refer to Stalin as ‘der finstere Georgier’ (the sinister Georgian).
Marxists could no longer take the road of open polemics, or rather less than before, but, like their nineteenth-century forbears, had to use an ‘Aesopean’ language. In the neglected sphere of aesthetics they found their answer. Unlike Lukács, Lifshits was never a politician. Nevertheless, their collaboration constituted a necessary retreat from the political arena back through the aesthetic to the heart of Marxism. Here was a safer means of countering Stalin’s opportunism. This aesthetic turn curiously parallels the position that Adorno was taking up in the west in vastly different circumstances. While such a comparison would have enraged Lifshits, there is a similar strategic shift here that is missing from all accounts of Soviet Marxism. The crucial difference is that concepts like ‘administered Socialism’ or ‘inauthenticity’ were taboo in the Soviet Union. Aesthetics was not an escape route, it was a strategy. There was no ‘outside’ position for a Soviet Marxist.15 Such a position meant silence or suppression. In any case, Lifshits and Lukács were not merely opponents of the regime; they were far from disabused of the prospects of socialism in the USSR. Lukács readily declared that the worst form of socialism was preferable to the best kind of capitalism. Looking back much later to the early 1930s, Lifshits wrote to his friend: ‘Those difficult times were perhaps the happiest of my life.’16 They constructed their Marxist aesthetics in opposition to the official line, but only by cooperating with official policies.
Cooperation turned into opposition through a kind of osmosis or camouflage and sometimes it was difficult to tell the two apart. The same terminology could mean different things, depending upon users or receivers. Lifshits applauded the official reinstatement of terms, which had been banished from the discourse of the 1920s, such as ‘motherland’, ‘the people’, ‘glory’, ‘beauty’, ‘genius’, because of their universal human significance.17 He even had a good word for the neoclassical architecture of Zholtovsky and others, until it become too ornate, because it brought back a human dimension. And it can be argued that the bureaucracy was responding to a public need after the sectarian austerity and ‘infantilism’ (Lenin) of political culture in the preceding decade. The resurrected vocabulary boosted morale and soon adorned propaganda posters from then until the end of the Brezhnev era. A fine stylist himself, Lifshits’s terminology inevitably risked contamination from the official cliches. Words had to be chosen carefully. In the columns of Literaturnaya Gazeta, organ of the Writers’ Union, Lifshits sought to clarify his independent definition of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’ only to be accused of losing sight of ‘class’ in his crusade against vulgar sociology. The regime mobilised both ‘people’ and ‘class’ in its consolidation of the new Soviet Union. It recognized two classes: the leading working class and the collectivised peasantry. In addition, there was the intelligentsia, not a class, but a social stratum, and in time the offspring of the two major classes. Together, the working class and the peasantry constituted the people. The Russian term narodnost means both nation and people. The adjective narodny became the criterion for judging good and bad figures in the past. Ivan the Terrible was revalued as a man of the people (which is how he appears in Eisenstein’s film) because he was the prime founder of the Russian state. So, too, Peter the Great, who, like Ivan, curbed the powers of the feudal nobility. In the present the two terms, ‘people’ and ‘class’, acquired a more rhetorical and instrumental resonance. While the First and Second Five Year Plans may have established the foundations of socialism, the Soviet Union was still a backward country encircled by capitalism and threatened by the rise of fascism. In this situation Stalin warned of reversions and counter-revolution, declaring, in the mid-1930s, that class struggle would sharpen with the growth of socialism, a position that differed from the more relaxed policies of the early 1930s. The ensuing show trials provided Stalin with his evidence. Lifshits commented later on the historical irony which took the comparatively mild dogmas of 1920s leftism to such hideous extremes. In the period of sharpened class struggle one could be denounced as either a class enemy or an enemy of the people or both. During the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ after the Second World War, Lifshits himself, a Jew, was condemned as an enemy of the people. Given the use of the term ‘class’, first in ‘vulgar sociology’, then in the fearful Cultural Revolution accompanying the First Five Year Plan, and finally in Stalin’s terror, it is understandable why Lifshits chooses ‘people’ as his leading socio-aesthetic category rather than ‘class’, although, as we shall shortly see, he does try to bring the two together. But it is not just a tactical choice. The ‘people’ for him is a more transcendent and universal category. He was not alone in his preference for a broader concept than class. ‘Popular’, ‘democratic’, ‘humanist’ are common evaluative and interpretative terms of the Soviet period, only in part authorised by official rhetoric. Bakhtin’s semi-Marxist book on Rabelais is likewise based on the category of the popular.
In Lifshits’s view of history, based on Marx, Hegel and Vico, reason will triumph despite and even because of its defeats (‘la raison finira par avoir raison’ was one of his favourite maxims). Battles lost were also battles won, he declared, simply by having taken place, and they were not lost forever – a sentiment quite close to Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Sotto voce, indirectly, more vocally in the years preceding his death and, most freely of all, in the voluminous notes left in his archive, Lifshits applied these ideas to the Soviet experience. His few followers, notably Viktor Arslanov, find in his work a touchstone for salvaging and renewing the almost annihilated Marxism of the Stalin years. Not, however, by pitting the experiments of the 1920s against the straightjacket of the 1930s, as has long been fashionable, particularly in the west, but by calling attention to the brief moment at the start of the 1930s when a new form of realism (unlike Socialist Realism), even a new classicism (in the work of Nesterov and Mukhina) seemed just possible. And, of course, there was The Literary Critic itself. In Lifshits’s cyclical account, periods of classicism occurred in similarly brief moments – in the gap between a dying social formation and a new one that had not yet consolidated itself, in other words a gap between one form of class domination and another. The Renaissance flourished in such a moment. But a renewed realism or classicism was no more than a possibility in the Soviet period. Arslanov sets himself the profound task of resurrecting what genuine Marxism there was in the Soviet years, while recognising how inextricably it was intertwined with the crimes and terror. Indeed, he goes beyond the perversions of Stalin, and raises the question of revolutionary guilt in making the Revolution in the first place. Any innovation in history or art, he argues, involves transgression, and it is important that the revolutionary takes responsibility for it, even if he feels justified by historical necessity. Lenin could do this and was, therefore, according to Arslanov and Lifshits, the tragic hero of the Russian Revolution. (See the earlier quotation from Lifshits on the necessity of human sacrifice in building socialist democracy.) Lukács himself had argued eloquently for this position in his essay ‘Tactics and Ethics’ of 1919. Obviously this claim did not extend to Stalin, who took no such responsibility for his crimes.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Lifshits was born into a middle-class family in a small town on the steppes of southern Ukraine in 1905, the year of the first failed socialist revolution. This and the successful 1917 revolution, he declared, defined his intellectual formation, and he was glad not to have been born earlier or later. He felt nourished by the 1917 revolution at first hand. As a schoolboy he experienced the alternating rule of Reds and Whites, German occupation, Makhno’s18 anarchy, famine and typhus from which he nearly died. The romantic appeal of the Revolution sustained him through the violence and tragedy, and enabled him as an adult to retain an optimism tempered by irony. At school he read Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism, later to become a Menshevik opponent of the Revolution, but always respected by Lenin. Plekhanov was the first Russian Marxist to write extensively on art and literature in a lucid, attractive manner, uncommon among Russian Marxists of the time, and this left its mark on Lifshits’s attention to style. A talent for drawing took him to Moscow in 1922, where he hoped to study art but was rejected as a naive, provincial realist by Vkhutemas, one of the avant-garde art institutes. After a year, having learned to ape the devices of the avant-garde, he was accepted. But disillusion with the new pedagogy cut short his career as an artist. Instead, he discovered a talent for teaching and, in his early twenties, emerged as what he would always be – a philosopher and a philosopher of art, giving his first paper on William James and pragmatism. He immersed himself in Schelling and Hegel. Notes for a lecture he delivered on ‘Dialectics in the History of Art’ in 1927 (when he was 22) read almost like a chapter out of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But this predilection for classical philosophy and art cost him dear. In 1929 the authorities in Vkhutein (the new name for Vkhutemas) charged him with right-wing deviation, and, lacking any organisational support, he was forced to leave. It was still the heyday of leftism, though not for much longer.
We have already referred to Lifshits’s troubles at the Marx–Engels Institute where he was employed next. Nevertheless, he pursued his work on a Marxist aesthetics, and in 1933 the first version of his anthology of the writings of Marx and Engels on literature and art appeared. The second, fuller edition came out in 1937. In 1931 Lifshits was in danger of losing his job at the Marx–Engels Institute as a result of the anti-Deborin campaign. Anton Deborin was a leading Marxist philosopher whom Stalin accused of ‘Menshevising idealism’, an accusation aimed at not a few figures as part of the reorientation of Soviet intellectual life described above. Deborin was charged with the sins of the Second International, in particular the economic determinism that inspired the Menshevik opposition to the revolution. As far as idealism was concerned, Deborin was accused of treating Marxist theory as pure methodology divorced from practice. Whatever the substance of these accusations, they became a rubber stamp for persecution. Unusually, Deborin survived to have the charge rescinded after Stalin’s death. The campaign, if not the methods, pleased Lifshits because it removed one of the pillars of vulgar sociology, though to label Deborin in this way is stretching the term. Lifshits often links economic determinism with formalism (a variant of idealism) in his characterisation of vulgar sociology (of which more below). Along with Deborin two other explicit ‘vulgar sociologists’ fell: the art historian Vladimir Friche and the literary critic Valerian Pereverzev. For the latter Lifshits retained some regard. Riazanov, supporting Deborin, broke with Lifshits, but failed to remove him from the Institute where he remained until Lunacharsky, commissar for enlightenment, arranged his transfer to the newly established Communist Academy. Lifshits also distinguished himself as a popular lecturer at the famous evening Institute of Philosophy and Literature in Moscow. One of his students, Alexander Tvardovsky, poet and post-war editor of the relatively independent journal Novy Mir (New World), became his close friend, inviting him to contribute to its pages both as writer and internal reader. In the latter capacity Lifshits encouraged the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s momentous story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).
Two sometimes bitter controversies in Literaturnaya Gazeta engaged Lifshits in the second half of the 1930s. The first took place in 1936 when ‘vulgar sociology’ was given its final quietus. Lifshits posed two questions: Is there an inner equation between the greatness of the artwork and its popular character (narodnost)? Or are the finest compositions no more than documents of slave-owning, feudal and capitalist ideologies?
Lifshits’s answer to his questions amplifies what we have already heard: great art is ‘popular’ in the sense of representing the interests of the exploited majority who may never have encountered a work of art. Art that serves only the interests of an exploiting class can never achieve greatness. An artist employed by such a class must in some way find a distance from it to produce anything worthwhile. What Lifshits calls ‘social egoism’ – the representation of a class’s needs, tastes, psyche – can only damage art, and a reactionary ideology can never form the basis of a healthy culture, as the ‘vulgar sociologists’ thought, arguing that any system of belief could support a work of art as long as it rested on a substantial social foundation and demonstrated vigour and skill. What about the Balzac model then? The difference is that he transcends the class values that he espouses outside his work. Lifshits distinguishes such writers and artists from those who merely express a class ideology, however firmly based. The transcendence of class interest or ‘social egoism’ is an important touchstone for Lifshits.
Lifshits turns his attention to whether skill and imagination can redeem a reactionary ideology, as the vulgar sociologists supposed. This view, he argues, links sociology and formalism in a grotesque manner. By way of illustration he quotes two anecdotes. In the first, a museum guide explains an eighteenth-century painting to a group of visitors: ‘You see before you a famous grandee from the age of Catherine. He performed various services for his class. Of course, the artist idealizes him, but look at the skill with which he has painted the magnate’s satin camisole!’ In the second story, a guide in the History Museum remarks: ‘And there are the pincers that the Counts Sheremetev used to tear out the nostrils of their serfs. But look at the filigree craftsmanship!’19 Here is the essence, Lifshits assures us, of all vulgar sociological theory, high and low. Skill is more than a matter of craft, Lifshits argues, it is the way truth (the truth of content, he calls it) is translated into language of art. Truth of content in art means fidelity to reality, just as in the social sphere it means justice and, in the moral domain, goodness. These categories – truth, justice and goodness – he regards as ontological entities, part of the objective world, absolute values that are reflected in relative forms.
The second controversy of 1939–40 left ‘vulgar sociology’ behind and addressed the relationship of ‘people’ to ‘class’, which Lifshits discussed at greater length and more concretely in a separate paper, ‘The Popular in Art and the Class Struggle’.20 Here his characterisation of exploiting classes and their representatives is more complex. He notes, for instance, that, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the British bourgeoisie included advocates of production for production’s sake, such as David Ricardo, philanthropic economists anxious to protect the rights of individuals and small property owners, like Sismondi, and outright reactionaries like Malthus who saw the economy as a means of curbing the proletariat and strengthening the power of the ruling classes, in particular the aristocracy. Following Marx, Lifshits saw in Ricardo an unusual apologist of the bourgeoisie, who fiercely criticised any manifestation of his class that stood in the way of maximum productivity and whose argument in favour of production for its own sake meant production beyond his own class – for humanity. Sweeping aside Sismondi’s concern for the welfare of the individual, Marx had written that
although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed.21
Marx’s words illuminate Lifshits’s philosophy of history and his tragic (but in the end optimistic) history of art.
In another article of this period, ‘What is the argument really about?’,22 Lifshits recalls Marx’s enthusiasm for William Cobbett, a Romantic who ‘was at once the most conservative and the most radical destructive man of Great Britain – the purest incarnation of old England and the most audacious initiator of young England’.23 What is important for Lifshits is the dual position taken by Ricardo and Cobbett, in Ricardo’s case as apologist of the bourgeoisie and advocate of humanity; in Cobbett’s as opponent of the Industrial Revolution and fighter for the working people. Neither man fits a precise class category. What matters to Lifshits is that they both speak for ‘humanity’, whether as a ‘progressive’ or a ‘conservative’ or, in the case of Cobbett, as both. Their views are class connected, but not class bound. Lifshits too easily equates ‘humanity’ with ‘people’. But it seems clear that Cobbett is closer to the latter, as happens whenever a radical conservative challenges a new commercial class, while Ricardo, the unusual apologist for the bourgeoisie, has to be placed closer to ‘humanity’.
Principled conservatism will always be more genuinely progressive and popular, according to Lifshits, than any liberalism. He refers to the great conservatives of history who retain values to which we should return – the heritage of classical times when men saw more clearly, when the human being was the measure of the universe. Indeed, he views revolution as a restoration rather than a transformation, calling it a magna restauratio in a play on Bacon’s magna instauratio by which the latter meant the expansion of scientific knowledge. But it is important to note that his antinomy of conservative and liberal is confined to periods of commercialisation. Only a communist society, Lifshits argues, will resolve this antinomy, for then progress will no longer be associated with an exploitative class (the bourgeoisie), conservatism will have lost its historical justification, and aesthetics can rejoin politics.24 In his Grundrisse Marx pointed out that Greek art, the product of an undeveloped economy, has furnished an unsurpassed model for economically more advanced societies, and sketched some explanations for this uneven relationship between artistic and social development, which contradict the simplistic parallels between base and superstructure usually associated with Marxism.25 Lifshits’s aesthetics is nothing other than an attempt to give body and colour to this sketch.
In his 1939 articles Lifshits took this conservative–progressive antinomy to an extreme which cost him dear. If writers could (in the right circumstances) produce a progressive picture despite their class prejudices, they could also do so because of them. This was as true of Balzac’s monarchism, he argued, as of Tolstoy’s religious anarchism, which enabled him to give voice to the feelings of the predominant class in Russian society – the peasantry – then in a ferment of contradictory change and rebellion, which in turn made it possible for him to oppose his own class. The debate with Lifshits and his colleagues split into a Swiftian battle between ‘despitists’ and ‘becausists’. Much later, Lifshits remarked how few people at the time could deal with this opposition dialectically. Instead, he, Lukács and others were accused of condoning reactionary ideology or downright royalism (in the case of Balzac).
In ‘The Popular in Art and the Class Struggle’ Lifshits adds to his definition of the ‘popular’, distinguishing between two kinds. First, there is popular life, festivals, folk art which are sometimes incorporated into ‘high’ art, not just for the sake of decoration but as part of the central meaning. Examples are Bruegel’s peasants or Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth. But a more universal manifestation of the popular, according to Lifshits, is to be found at certain aristocratic or classical moments of western cultural history (he rarely looks beyond the west.) The principal ones are ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Goethe period in Germany and the Pushkin age in Russia. Paradoxically, he cites Leonardo as a product of such a moment, although the latter avoided popular life, taking part in none of the movements which attracted his contemporaries (e.g. Savonarola), but who, like Goethe in Weimar, found a retreat in the insignificant court of Milan, and was, like Goethe, sceptical of social change. Yet, in following this path, Lifshits argues, Leonardo stripped away all the accidentals of life, all the motley inheritances of the quattrocento and the Middle Ages, and raised the individual to the level of the species (as Goethe does in Faust). This universality, Lifshits maintains, is popular art in the highest sense, describing it as the ‘lofty simplicity of a classical, aristocratic age’. Note the Winckelmannian terminology here, which is not fortuitous. Lifshits devoted a major essay to Winckelmann and applied his phrase ‘noble simplicity’ to a genuinely popular and classical art. By contrast, the aristocratic and classical culture of, say, Louis XIV’s court was neither popular nor universal; and the neoclassicism of Winckelmann’s day even less so. By the term ‘aristocracy’ Lifshits means something more than the class in the narrow sense, for those artists who are employed by the nobility, like Leonardo, project visions and inventions that anticipate later ages. The aristocracy, with its base in trade and industry, made this possible, but it is the same class that put an end to the Renaissance in pursuit of its own selfish interests. Hence, Lifshits explains, the aura of pessimism and resignation that accompanies the greatest art of these periods, for all its serenity, joy, balance and beauty. Although their art may be popular in a universal sense, the artists themselves live their lives largely unconnected with the people and represent the class (or classes) by which the latter are oppressed. Only in a communist society, Lifshits predicts, will the people retrieve the art that was always theirs and prove its true popularity.
The 1939 discussions came to no conclusion and were never resumed. Lifshits’s views were criticised in a Party resolution in 1940 and The Literary Critic was closed and its contributors silenced in the 1940s and 1950s. During the war Lifshits served as a political commissar with a naval flotilla and was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. After the war he worked variously in the Tretyakov gallery, the Institute of Art and the Institute of Philosophy. Then, in 1950, he was victimised (as mentioned above) in the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, becoming homeless and unemployed. After Stalin’s death he contributed to a number of journals – New Times, Questions of Philosophy, The Communist and Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir (New World), referred to above. Submitting a late doctorate, he was made corresponding member (1967) and then full member (1975) of the USSR Academy of Arts.
His post-war role was very different from that of the 1930s, now that ideological restrictions had eased after Stalin’s death and the unstoppable Thaw. Heterodox then, he now appeared orthodox, as previously banned books became available and stored-away modern works of art were put on exhibition. The younger generation, thirsting for the forbidden, had no difficulty in jettisoning their ‘Marxist’ catechism. Lifshits was angered not by the young, but by those erstwhile lip-serving dogmatists who had suddenly turned into complaisant liberals, admiring the good things of modernism that they had spent a lifetime decrying under Stalin. Lifshits, too, had decried modernism, but not because of Stalin. He would not change his views now. He was isolated on all sides – by the young and by the reformed dogmatists. Three of the people I interviewed about Lifshits remarked spontaneously and independently of one another: ‘A tragic figure!’ It was as if he was fighting a one-man rearguard battle against history. He fitted into the role of his ‘great conservatives’. He shocked the public with his 1965 essay ‘Why I Am Not a Modernist’ (the title taken from Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’).
If modernism was now popular in the Soviet Union, at least in urban centres and among the well-educated graduates of Stalin’s universities, it was not popular in Lifshits’s meaning of the word, ignoring the real needs of the people and lacking universality. It was fashionable rather than popular. But it was a serious fashion, a product of disintegrating Stalinism. What was dangerous about it, according to Lifshits, was that is reproduced the nihilism of the Stalin period at the level of caricature and parody. Victor Shklovsky once described the new art to me as the carnivalisation of Marxism. Not all artists were fashionable in this sense. There were those concerned with humanitarian and ecological issues. There were religious artists who were only too fashionable. The 1960s were still a hopeful period and the charge of nihilism is more applicable to subsequent decades. Yet, even here, especially in the avid return to the art of the 1920s, with its dissolution of realism and disregard of the individual, Lifshits saw an endorsement of nihilism.
In The Crisis of Ugliness (1968) he declared (like Trotsky, to whom he had always been hostile) that modernism had never surpassed the stage of petit-bourgeois rebellion. It was an anarchist refusal that had never seriously contested the authority of the big bourgeoisie and never based itself on the working-class movement. Psychologically, it oscillated unstably between subjective chaos and a desperate need for order (Cubism, geometrical abstraction). For the modernist, the world had become a void that he or she tried frantically to fill with a ‘will to power’ or ‘will to form’ derived from Nietzsche and articulated by Riegl and Worringer. Reality had shrunk to the artist’s materials and perceptions. As part of the general irrationalism of the imperialist period, modernism must lead objectively to fascism, irrespective of the honourable, idealistic even anti-fascist views of its practitioners, among them members of the Communist Party, like Picasso and Léger. History, Lifshits never tires of reminding us, pursues its own grim logic regardless of personal intention. Despite the ‘degenerate art’ exhibition, Lifshits maintains that Fascism was never intrinsically anti-modernist. At the beginning it fed on the anti-capitalist impulses of Futurism and Expressionism, until it was ready to establish its own aesthetics – a pseudo-realism that satisfied the tastes of the petty bourgeoisie, while still retaining elements of modernism. Its opportunistic denunciation of modern art can in no way, he insists, be compared to the principled critique levelled by the Communists, starting before the Revolution with Plekhanov and Mehring.
To condemn the whole of modernism as nihilistic, let alone to link it with fascism, is breathtakingly reductive. It is not a surprising attitude coming from Soviet critics, but it stems just as logically from the aesthetic theory of Lifshits and Lukács. (It is striking that similar views have been expressed about the Russian avant-garde by Boris Groys and Igor Golomstok, who argue, not unlike Lifshits, that the avant-garde prefigured the ‘totalitarian art’ of the Soviet period.)26 The aesthetic theory of Lifshits and Lukács is an organic whole, which would fall apart, if any attempt was made to accommodate even the most ‘progressive’ modernism. Indeed, this was Lifshits’s complaint about the turncoat Marxists of the 1960s, who looked for a ‘good’ modernism. For Lifshits and Lukács, there was only one modernism, regardless of left or right inflections, just as there was only one realism, one romanticism, one classicism. By painting Guernica Picasso did not become a ‘good’ modernist. Perhaps Brecht, whom Lifshits disliked, came closest to bringing realism and modernism together without damaging Marxism, but that is another story.
The posthumous essay ‘On the Ideal and the Real’ (1984) marks a new beginning after the debacle over modernism. It was written as a rejoinder to the most promising young Marxist philosopher of the new generation, Evald Ilyenkov, whose Dialectic of the Concrete and Abstract in Marx’s Capital (1960) has been translated into English.27 The argument is perhaps an old one – whether the material world contains ideal properties or whether these are constructs of the mind. Ilyenkov’s position is that the ideal is the product of consciousness and social practice. Lifshits goes further, finding ideal forms in nature itself. Each natural process, he argues, tends towards an ideal essence, like a gas or a liquid in a pure state. So, too, in human society, taking into account the mediations of consciousness and social practice. Capitalism, for example, emerged with such clarity and relief in nineteenth-century Britain that it provided an ideal or classical form for Marx’s analysis as no other capitalist development did. In the absence of this form Marx could not have made his analysis. Where Marx declares that social being determines consciousness, Lifshits compresses his definition so that consciousness is not just determined by ‘being’, it is ‘conscious being’ or ‘being made conscious’. In this sense, Capital is social being rendered conscious through Marx’s efforts. But the prime mover here is not so much his efforts as the ideal social form that pre-exists his analysis and reflects itself into his brain.
Lenin had introduced the concept of reflection in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1906) as a means of rebutting various neo-Kantian theories. Like Lifshits, he argued that reflection was a property of matter not just of consciousness. But what is important for Lifshits is not reflection so much as reflectability. It is reflectability (or ‘mirrorness’) that makes reflection possible. Marx could only write Capital because British capitalism had reached a point when it was reflectable. Not all situations are reflectable, because they have not yet reached an articulate form, in other words social being is not yet self-conscious (or no longer so). Or, as Lifshits puts it, it has not yet found its ‘concept’. By transposing the primacy of reflection to the object, Lifshits erases the subject–object dichotomy that still inheres in Marxism, but is it at the cost of slipping back into Hegelianism, as his critics maintained? In one of his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx stresses the need to approach reality not just as an object, but practically and subjectively, Lifshits turns this on its head. One should regard consciousness, he suggests, not just as subject, but ‘in the objective forms it adopts in the course of history’.28
All this lies at the base of Lifshits’s aesthetics. As with British capitalism, so the classical periods of art achieve a self-identity, a self-clarification or ideality. All too briefly, because they appear only in the fissures of history, between the ‘no longer’ of a dying social formation and the ‘not yet’of a new. Lukács wrote of Lifshits that he dedicated his life to Marxist aesthetics in order to rescue humanity’s ‘cultural legacy’ for socialism.29 He did not leave a large oeuvre, though his archive is full of fragments and notes, which Arslanov is publishing chunk by chunk. He planned a book expounding his ‘ontognoseology’, some of whose ideas I have sketched just above. But death cut him short. He was a teacher and essayist, most of whose work sprang from controversy, including his pioneering anthology of the writings of Marx and Engels on literature and art, which he regarded as his most important and enduring contribution. He resembled an eighteenth-century philosophe of whom Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, once remarked: ‘Don’t think he talks to us fools…he talks to Voltaire. Over our heads. And what are we to him?…Phoo – oo’ – and he blew across the palm of his hand.30