Mikhail Lifshitz’s Concept of National Character as Aesthetic Category in the Context of Offi cial Soviet Aesthetics and Literary Criticism

The article is dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the birth of the leading Russian specialist in aesthetics and literary theory Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshits (1905–1983). The subject of the analysis is the history of understanding the category of nationality in Soviet literary criticism with a brief excursion into the history of this problem in the pre-Soviet period. In Soviet literary criticism and aesthetics, nationality as an aesthetic category was described in an inseparable connection with the newly invented categories of “klassovost” (the class point of view) and “partijnost” (the party point of view). Lifshits, as a representative of Marxist aesthetics, did not formally reject the category of “klassovost”, but constantly found himself in opposition to the offi cially accepted point of view, which insisted on the priority of the so-called “the proletarian class approach” to works of literature and art. The position of Lifshits and his team, formed around the “Literary Critic” magazine, was criticized as a concession to “bourgeois literary criticism”. With the obvious fading away of the need for a class approach while the so-called new community of the “Soviet people” was formed, erasing the class antagonism of the past, in theory of literature, up until recent times, there was an obvious fear of losing the category of “class point of view”. Lifshits’s concept of national character in art (“narodnost”) based on the recognition of the world classical literature usefulness for Soviet people regardless of (and sometimes thanks to!), the absence in its content of the motive of class struggle, criticism of the social system, various kinds of social protests, etc., making the world classical heritage accessible to the current socio-aesthetic discourse of Soviet reality.