Art as the Cognition of Life: Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky

By Aleksandr Voronsky

Add to wishlist

Short Description

Be the first to review this product

Availability: In stock.

$24.95

Add Items to Cart Qty:

Voronsky was an outstanding figure of post-revolutionary Soviet intellectual life, editor of the most important literary journal of the 1920s in the USSR and a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. He was executed by Stalin in 1937. A defender of the "fellow traveler" writers and an opponent of the Proletarian Culture movement, Voronsky was one of the authentic representatives of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism in the twentieth century.

It has long been a weakness in the West that Marxist literary criticism is usually discussed with little direct knowledge of Voronsky's work. The publication of this volume of essays intends to correct that weakness by making available to an English-speaking audience many translated texts for the first time. Following his "rehabilitation" in 1957, several of his writings were published in the USSR in heavily censored form. All cuts have been restored for this edition. Translated by Frederick S. Choate.

See also

Author	Aleksandr Voronsky
Publisher	Mehring Books
Publication Date	1998
Pages	544
Publication Type	Paperback
ISBN	978-0-929087-76-4

Chapter	Page
1911 Polemical Remarks about Gorky	1
Polemical Remarks about Gorky	5

1918 Communism, Church and State	11

1919 The Red Province	15

1920 G. V. Plekhanov	19
In Memory of G.V. Plekhanov	27

1921 H. G. Wells about Soviet Russia	33
The Decline of Ideology	45

1922 Literary Silhouettes: Boris Pilniak	51

1923 Sharp Phrases and the Classics	77
Art as the Cognition of Life, and the Contemporary World	95
On Proletarian Art and the Artistic Policy of Our Party	*147*

1925 Freudianism and Art	*173*
On Art	*203*
Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze	*227*

1926 In Memory of Esenin	*233*
Larissa Mikhailovna Reisner	*247*
Scoundrels and Toadies	*251*

1927 From the Past	*259*
Notes on Artistic Creativity	*267*
Ten Years of October and Soviet Literature	*299*
One Thunderous Applause	*311*

1928 On Artistic Truth	*323*
The Art of Seeing the World	*361*

1930 On Pereval	*393*

1936 Meetings and Conversations with Gorky	*401*

1925 Appendix 1: Resolution of the First All-Union Conference of Proletarian Writers	*435*
Appendix 2: On Party Policy in the Realm of Imaginative Literature	*443*

1927 Appendix 3: Five Years of Red Virgin Soil	*451*
Appendix 4: Letter from Voronsky to Ordzhonikidze, 3 March 1927	*453*
Appendix 5: To the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Metalworkers	*455*
Appendix 6: Leon Trotsky: Culture and Socialism	*461*

Glossary	*485*
Biographical Notes	*489*
Name Index	*503*
Subject Index	*513*
Index of Literary Works and Characters	*523*

Aleksandr Voronsky (1884-1937) was the editor of the most important literary journal in the Soviet Union during the 1920s – Red Virgin Soil – and a major figure in Soviet intellectual life during that period. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1904 and played an active role in revolutionary politics in Tsarist Russia. Arrested on two occasions for his activity, he spent time in both solitary confinement and in exile. Around the time of the October 1917 Revolution, he played a central role in leading the Bolsheviks to power in Odessa. Voronsky was a Left Oppositionist and a supporter of Leon Trotsky in the struggle against Stalin and the rising Soviet bureaucracy. He was a defender of "fellow-traveler"writers and an opponent of the Proletarian Culture movement. In the late 1920s, Voronsky was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested, and sent into exile. He was re-arrested and executed in 1937 during Stalin’s terror. The Stalinist bureaucracy removed his books from Soviet libraries and virtually erased him from Soviet history. Voronsky was rehabilitated in 1957, after which heavily censored collections of his writings were published in the Soviet Union.

Skip to Store Area:

You're currently on:

ALSO FROM MEHRING

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky