G. V. Plekhanov - Literaturny Kritik Novye Materiali [Translation from the Russian--G. V. Plekhanov as Literature Critic: New Materials]

Moscow: Zhurnal'No-Gazetnoye OB'edinenie, 1933. Presumed First Edition, First printing [Only 10,000 printed]. Hardcover. Good/Fair. TEXT IS IN RUSSIAN. 175, [1] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Some page discoloration. Stamp and ink notation inside rear cover. DJ is worn, torn soiled and chipped. This includes previously unknown works and letters on literature, reviews of books and plays, articles on various writers, and speeches. Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (29 November 1856 - 30 May 1918) was a Russian revolutionary, philosopher and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify himself as "Marxist". Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where he continued in his political activity attempting to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia. Although he supported the Bolshevik faction at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, Plekhanov soon rejected the idea of democratic centralism, and became one of Lenin and Trotsky's principal antagonists in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet. During World War I Plekhanov rallied to the cause of the Entente powers against Germany and he returned home to Russia following the 1917 February Revolution. Plekhanov was an opponent of the Soviet state which came to power in the autumn of 1917. He died the following year. Despite his vigorous and outspoken opposition to Lenin's political party in 1917, Plekhanov was held in high esteem by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following his death as a founding father of Russian Marxism and a philosophical thinker. Plekhanov began to write and publish the first of his important political works, including the pamphlet Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and the full-length book Our Differences (1885). These works first expressed the Marxist position for a Russian audience and delineated the points of departure of the Marxists from the Populist movement. Lenin called the former, the "first profession de foi [profession of faith]of Russian socialism." Plekhanov famously noted, "... without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement in the true sense of the word." In the latter book, Plekhanov emphasized that capitalism had begun to establish itself in Russia, primarily in the textile industry but also in agriculture, and that a working class was beginning to emerge in peasant Russia. It was this expanding working class that would ultimately and inevitably bring about socialist change in Russia, Plekhanov argued. In January 1895, Plekhanov published his most famous work, The Development of the Monist View of History. The book passed the censors of the Russian government and was legally published in Russia. Plekhanov wrote the book under the pseudonym Beltov and admitted to the use of the "purposely clumsy" name for the book in order to deceive the Russian censors. Plekhanov's book became a very popular defense of the materialistic conception of history. Indeed, V. I. Lenin would later comment that Plekhanov's book "helped educate a whole generation of Russian Marxists." Friedrich Engels commented in a 30 January 1895 letter to Vera Zasulich that Plekhanov's book had been published at a most opportune time. Tsar Nicholas II had just released a statement on 29 January (or 17 January under the old Russian calendar) that announced that it was fruitless for the Zemstvos, locally elected district councils, to agitate for any more democratic reforms in the Russian government. Nicholas II had decided to return Russia to the absolute Tsarist autocracy of his father, Alexander III. The elected Zemstvos, which formed a local government in the European sectors of the Russian Empire, had been initiated by Nicholas' grandfather, Tsar Alexander II in 1864.[29] Under Nicholas II's re-initiation of absolute autocracy, the Zemstvos would become superfluous and basically be abolished. Engels expected this announcement would cause an upsurge in popular protest in Russia and Engels thought the timely publication of Plekhanov's book would augment that popular protest. Later on 8 February 1895, Engels wrote directly to Plekhanov congratulating him on the "great success" of getting the book "published inside the country". A German Edition of the Plekhanov's book was published in Stuttgart in 1896. Despite their sharp differences, Plekhanov was recognized, even in his own lifetime, as having made a great contribution to Marxist philosophy and literature by V.I. Lenin. "The services he rendered in the past," Lenin wrote of Plekhanov, "were immense. During the twenty years between 1883 and 1903 he wrote a large number of splendid essays, especially those against the opportunists, Machists, and Narodniks." Even after the October Revolution Lenin insisted on republishing Plekhanov's philosophical works and including these works as compulsory texts for prospective communists. It seems that Plekhanov, although a revolutionary figure, had not taken the view that art must serve political ends. He himself criticized Chernyshevsky for his view of art, that art must be propagandist; he, rather, declared that only art which serves history, not transient pleasure, is valuable.