Mikhail Lifshitz

Born on 23 July 1905 in Melitopol, a city in Southern Ukraine, 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.

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.

Starting in 1933, he edited an influential Moscow magazine "The Literary Critic" (Literaturny Kritik),[2] that was also followed by Marxist art theoreticians around the world through various translations published by Soviet government.

[3] Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union Lifshitz entered the Second World War as a Red Army volunteer.

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.

[citation needed] The same time-frame was also a period of Lifshitz's collaboration with the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov.

From a political vantage point, Lifshitz, despite his criticism of the Soviet system, remained a strong proponent of Marxist-Leninist socialism.

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.

One book on aesthetics, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, was published in English translation in 1938, and republished in 1980.

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.