If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties

Mikhail Lifshitz (1905, Melitopol–1983, Moscow) was a philosopher, cultural theorist, and one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the twentieth century. After enrolling at the avant-garde art school VKhUTEMAS in the early 1920s, he experienced a creative crisis and turned to the classical legacy. Aged 20, he was invited to teach dialectical materialism. In 1933, Lifshitz published his key work On the Question of Marx’s Views of Art, where he demonstrated that Marx had a coherent system of aesthetic opinions. In 1938, this study was published in English in New York as The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx and subsequently appeared internationally in many other languages. In the 1930s, Lifshitz was at the epicenter of intellectual life in the Soviet Union. He lectured prolifically at several Moscow institutions and edited a number of classic works on aesthetic theory. He also briefly occupied the post of Assistant Director for Research at the Tretyakov Gallery and took part in the period’s most heated discussions on art. In 1941, Lifshitz volunteered for service at the front. After demobilization in 1946, he fell victim to the unfolding anti-Semitic campaign “against cosmopolitanism.” After the death of Stalin, he quickly returned to the spotlight when Novy Mir magazine published his article “The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan” (1954), which painted a satirical picture of the Stalin-era intelligentsia. However, his manifesto “Why Am I Not a Modernist?” published in Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper in 1966, stirred up controversy: along with the new generation of readers, even those who had admired his boldness in the 1950s now accused him of obscurantism. For decades, Lifshitz remained a symbol of the Brezhnev-era campaigns against the avant-garde and contemporary art. This image was reinforced by the publication of his book The Crisis of Ugliness, in which he offered a radical critique of cubism and pop art. Burning his bridges, in 1976 he published an article titled “The Right Path” on the exhibition of young artists to mark the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lifshitz’s philosophy, centered on his belief in the tragic fate of art in modernity, was only partially explained in the writings he published during his lifetime, and remained largely unstudied in his archive of over 700 files. Most of his books were published after his death: the majority of them in recent years, which have seen a dramatic shift in the understanding of his legacy.