Mikhail Lifshitz

Starting in the 1990s, Lifshitz acquired new popularity among the Nationalist circles in Russia, who appreciate his critique of "Western Modernist art", and his defence of traditional art. His works are being republished again.

Lifshitz died in Moscow on 28 September 1983, eight years after his election as a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts, the most prestigious academic artistic organization within the Soviet Union.

In 1963 Lifshitz wrote the controversial article "Why Am I Not a Modernist?" where he defended Socialist Realism, which annoyed many modernists at the time. In 1968 it was included in his anthology "The Crisis of Ugliness" where he criticized Cubism and Pop-art.

Lifshitz's main object of criticism in the 1960s was the modernist movement in the arts. From a political vantage point, Lifshitz, despite his criticism of the Soviet system, remained a strong proponent of Marxist-Leninist socialism.

In the early 1960s, Lifshitz gave considerable support to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then a beginning writer.

His life improved after the official de-Stalinization started in 1956, and the sanctions against him were gradually lifted. Many of his works were published again.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Lifshitz was in trouble again. A pamphlet he published in 1954, criticizing the writer Marietta Shaginyan, now displeased the old Stalinists, and provoked the ire of the established figures of Soviet intellectual life. He was severely criticized in the press and denied employment.

In 1938 Lifshitz's work "The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx" was translated into English. His work also featured prominently in the influential work "Literature and Marxism: A Controversy by Soviet Critics" (1938). Lifshitz was considered a leading literary critic during the Stalin period.

The vast majority of his work remains untranslated. One book on aesthetics, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, was published in English translation in 1938, and republished in 1980.

In 1938, he published a similar anthology of Lenin's view on aesthetics called Lenin on Culture and Art.

Starting in 1933, he edited an influential Moscow magazine "The Literary Critic" (Literaturny Kritik), that was also followed by Marxist art theoreticians around the world through various translations published by Soviet government.

Lifschitz's collection of Marx and Engels's views on aesthetics – Marx and Engels on Art was published in 1933 (also an extended edition of 1938) as the first anthology of its kind. It was also published in German in 1948.

He pursued an analysis of aesthetics from a fundamentally Marxist perspective. His ideas became controversial at Vkhutemas, so he had to leave in 1930. He was offered a job instead at the Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute, where he developed a working relationship with the great Marxist philosopher György Lukács. Lukacs, himself, admitted that he was influenced by Lifshitz' views on Marxist aesthetics.

In 1926-1940, Lifschitz also published a very large number of works dedicated to such diverse authorities as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Francesco Guicciardini, Balzac, Hegel, and Pushkin.

He ended his studies there in 1925 because he disagreed with his modernist oriented instructors. Instead, he was offered a teaching position there; his job was to teach Marxist philosophy to artists.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshitz (Russian: Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Ли́фшиц; 23 July 1905 in Melitopol (Taurida Governorate, now Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine) – 20 September 1983 in Moscow) was a Soviet Marxian literary critic and philosopher of art who had a long and controversial career in the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he strongly influenced Marxist views on aesthetics while being a close associate of György Lukács. He also published important compilations of early Marxist literature on the role of art. In 1975, he was elected as a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts.

Born on 23 July 1905 in Melitopol, a Crimean city then part of Imperial Russia, Lifshitz began higher education as an art student at the Vkhutemas ("Higher Art and Technical Studios") in Moscow in the early 1920s, which was then the hotbed of Modernism.