The present stage in the development of the Marxist-Leninist theory of esthetics cannot but be recognized as productive in the sense that there has been a noticeable expansion of the sphere of studies in esthetics, which has come to embrace ever newer problems that heretofore were virtually or entirely ignored by scholarship in our country. Unfortunately, the problem identified in the title of the present article has not been among those treated. The subject of art and personality differences has had (...) no single monograph or even a chapter in those inclusive works of recent years in which attempts have been made at a systematic presentation of the entire content of the esthetic teachings of Marxism . It is only certain aspects of this subject that have attracted the attention of theoreticians, and then they have been examined only in passing, within the context of other problems. (shrink)

ch.1. Dialekh'ka esteticheskikh i︠a︡vleniĭ.--ch.2. Dialektika iskusstva.--ch.3. Dialektika Khudozhestvennogo razvitii︠a︡.

The concepts of "spirit" [dukh], "spiritual," and "spirituality" have had a strange fate in philosophy. It seems that they are constantly and more widely utilized in the literature—as well as when the solution of the basic question of philosophy is formulated as the "relation of matter and spirit," when the "spiritual life of society" or "spiritual culture" is investigated, and when the issue concerns the "spirituality" of the individual as the manifestation of a high level of development of the socialist (...) personality. At the same time, the categorial status of these concepts not only is not recognized in our philosophy, but in encyclopedic dictionaries and monographs it is asserted that "spirit" is an obsolete concept, a favorite of idealistic philosophy, and that in Marxist science it is replaced by the concept of "consciousness.". (shrink)