Abstract

This paper presents a concise exposition of the aesthetic theory of the early Soviet literary critic Aleksandr Voronsky, the editor of Red Virgin Soil who was executed in Josef Stalin’s Great Purge. Despite an anthology of Voronsky’s writings, published for the first time in English in 1998, no English-language scholarly attention has been paid to this work of non-Stalinist Soviet aesthetics. The author focuses on Voronsky’s Marxism-Plekhanovism, his understanding of art and the unconscious, and his method of aesthetic evaluation