Evald Ilyenkov & Mikhail Lifshits:
Aesthetics, Symbolic Mediation, & the Ideal

Selected bibliography compiled by

Ralph Dumain

By Mikhail Lifshits

Lifshits, Mikhail [Aleksandrovich]. The Crisis of Ugliness: from Cubism to Pop-art, translated by David Riff. Leiden; Boston: Leiden, 2018.

Lifshits, Mikhail. “Karl Marx and Present-Day Culture,” translated by Bryan Bean, in Karl Marx and Modern Philosophy: Collection of Articles (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), pp. 143-181.

Lifshits, Mikhail. The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, translated by Ralph B. Winn, edited by Angel Flores. New York: Critics Group, 1938.; University Microfilms, 1972 (reprint); London: Pluto Press Ltd., 1973 (with updated footnotes).

About Lifshits

Gutov, Dmitry; Osmolovsky, Anatoly. “Concerning Abstractionism,” in Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing, edited by Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina (London: Zed Books, 2017), pp.127-155.

Harutyunyan, Angela. “Hegel’s Aesthetics and Soviet Marxism: Mikhail Lifshits’s Communist Ideal,” 2019.

Maidansky, Andrey; Oittinen, Vesain. “Mikhail Lifshits: an enigmatic Marxist,” Studies in East European Thought, (2016) 68: 241–246.

Mareeva, Elena. “Lifshits’ Ontognoseology as a Version of Lenin’s Theory of Reflection,” Studies in East European Thought, (2016) 68: 295–305.

Pavlov, Evgeni V. Review: Perepiska [Letters], Mikhail Lifschitz and György Lukács, Historical Materialism 20.4 (2012) 187–198.

Studies in East European Thought, vol. 68, no. 4, December 2016. Special issue on Mikhail Lifshits – An enigmatic Marxist.

About Ilyenkov & Lifshits

Chehonadskih, Maria. “The Comrades of the Past: The Soviet Enlightenment Between Negation and Affirmation.”

Epstein, Mikhail. The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Lifshits, Mikhail. Диалог с Эвальдом Ильенковым. (Проблема идеального) [Dialog s Evaldom Ilyenkovym. (Problema idealʼnogo)]. Moskva: Progress-Tradicija, 2003.

Maidansky, Andrey; Oittinen, Vesa (interviewer). “Evald Ilyenkov and Soviet Philosophy,” Monthly Review, vol. 71, no. 8, January 2020, pp. 15-20.

Maidansky, Andrey; Oittinen, Vesain. Introduction, The Practical Essence of Man: The ‘Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Philosophy, edited by Andrey Maidansky & Vesa Oittinen (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 1-16. (Historical Materialism Book Series; 108) See also Levant (2016).

Mareev, Sergey. “Lifshits and Ilyenkov on the Nature of the Ideal,” Studies in East European Thought, 68, 319–329 (2016).

Мареева Е.В. Был ли Эвальд Ильенков эстетиком? // Вестник Московского государственного университета культуры и искусств. 2018. № 4. С. 80–89. [Mareyeva E. V. “Was Evald Ilyenkov an Aesthetician?”] English abstract:

The article is devoted to the aesthetic views of the Soviet philosopher E.V. Ilyenkov, whose heritage is attributed to the classics of Marxist thought of the XXth century. In his understanding of art, he proceeds from the idea of the social and universal essence of man. At the same time, art specially cultivates the power of imagination, representing the universal nature of creativity in its pure form. From such standpoint, Ilyenkov criticizes modern art, drawing closer to another representative of Soviet «creative Marxism» M.A. Lifshits. The article points out the difference between Ilyenkov and Lifshits in interpreting Marx’s thesis of the transformation of the world according to the «laws of beauty». The author shows that in the works of Ilyenkov, art not only forms things in accordance with the standard of every species, but is also able to go beyond this framework, expressing an ideal determination peculiar only to man.

Oittinen, Vesa, “The Paradoxes of Ilyenkov and the Soviet Philosophy,” in Evald Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000), pp. 9-22. See also Bakhurst (2000), Jones, Knuuttila, Veresov.

“Through the Looking Glass: Evald Ilyenkov’s Images of the Ideal” by Isabel Jacobs, Trevor Wilson, Martin Küpper and Sascha Freyberg, Marxism & Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 2 (November 2024), pp. 93–101.

"Focusing on Ilyenkov and aesthetics, Angela Harutyunyan (Universität der Künste Berlin), further explored the debate between Ilyenkov and Lifshitz in more detail. Her presentation situated Ilyenkov’s concept of the ideal in Soviet aesthetics from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Harutyunyan argued that the split between Lifshitz and Ilyenkov on the problem of the ideal was “symptomatic of a fundamental split between two versions of Soviet Marxism, one that ontologises nature, following Hegel and Engels (Lifshitz) and the other that bypasses the question of nature as such and adapts a more socially constructivist approach (Ilyenkov).”"

About Ilyenkov

Bakhurst, David. “Ilyenkov and Vygotsky on imagination,” Studies in East European Thought, Volume 76, Issue 3, September 2024, pp. 483-504.

Bakhurst, David. “Ilyenkov on Aesthetics: Realism, Imagination, and the End of Art,” Mind, Culture and Activity, 8(2): 2001, pp. 187-199.

Bakhurst, David. “The Living and the Dead in Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy,” in Evald Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000), pp. 23-39.

Jacobs, Isabel. ‘Introduction to Evald Ilyenkov, “Notes on Wagner”’ (3 January 2024), Studies in East European Thought, Volume 76, Issue 3, September 2024. See also translation, below.

Jones, Peter. “The Dialectics of the Ideal and Symbolic Mediation,” in Evald Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000), pp. 205-227.

Knuuttila, Tarja. “Semiosis and the Concept of the Ideal,” in Evald Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000), pp. 189-204.

Levant, Alex. “The Ideal and the Dream-World: Evald Ilyenkov and Walter Benjamin on the Significance of Material Objects,” in The Practical Essence of Man: The ‘Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Philosophy, edited by Andrey Maidansky & Vesa Oittinen (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 167-187. (Historical Materialism Book Series; 108)

Levant, Alex. Review: From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov [Sergey Mareev, Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 2008], Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 176–189.

Veresov, Nikolai. “Vygotsky, Ilyenkov and Mamardashvili: Searching for the Monistic Theory of Mind (Methodological Notes),” in Evald Ilyenkovʼs Philosophy Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000), pp. 131-145.