The volume in which Plekhanov earns the title the Soviet state gave him: the father of Marxist art criticism. It is the richest of the five, because it is here that he did something genuinely new.
Before him, Marxists had opinions about art; he 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 pre-literate peoples to the Cubist canvases of his own moment, that nobody had assembled before.
His most brilliant stroke is the treatment of art for art's sake. The aesthetes of his day held the doctrine of pure art to be a timeless truth about beauty. Plekhanov showed it was a symptom, arguing that the belief arises wherever the artist is out of harmony with his social environment, and tracing it through Pushkin under Nicholas I and 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 his sociological reading of eighteenth-century French drama, tracking popular farce giving way to aristocratic tragedy, and tragedy to bourgeois sentimental comedy.
Essays written between 1888 and the eve of the First World War, closing with Art and Social Life.
Volume Five of five. Translated by K. M. Cook and A. Fineberg.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
