Scattered through Goncharov's correspondence, memoirs, several critical essays, and even his novels are many statements about the nature and purposes of art. They reflect the prejudices as well as the special insights of the practicing artist. Little interested in systematic aesthetic philosophy, Goncharov wrote about art sporadically, sometimes to defend his own work, often in the heat of current controversy. His writings on art were not intended to contribute to a comprehensive theory. Nor were they designed as a program. Goncharov did not formulate an aesthetic position and then seek to demonstrate its validity in artistic compositions. On the contrary, many of his opinions derive from a later period, when he was already an established novelist. Though they remain constant enough to permit us to extract a consistent viewpoint, Goncharov's aesthetics seem to have more bearing on some of his works than on others. Nevertheless, they provide an invaluable (and little studied) guide to the mind of the artist.

The triumph of Marxism in backward Russia is commonly regarded as a historical anomaly. Yet, some forty-five years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Marx's Das Kapital in Russian translation had already won quick acclaim. Indeed, the book for a brief time enjoyed greater renown in Russia than in any other country, and it won a warm reception—for highly varied reasons— in many political quarters. Although valuable studies have been written on the first responses to Marxism in Russia, little note has been taken of the rapid and widespread success the book scored, and the reasons for this success have received even less attention. An exploration of these reasons will therefore cover a rarely traveled byway of Russian intellectual history.

This article is a critical analysis of the prevalent interpretation of “war communism” in Anglo-American literature that views the economic policies of that period as temporary expedients to meet wartime and inflationary conditions. Although there are scholars whose accounts are notable exceptions to this interpretation, it is the dominant one and is found in popular works, textbooks, and important scholarly contributions. For example, Nettl states that “war communism” “represented a series of ad hoc measures to combat emergency situations.” Sherman writes that “as a necessary military measure, by the end of 1918 all large-scale factories had been nationalized and put under central control,” and he explains the requisitioning and allocation in kind of supplies from farm and factory as the consequence of inflation having ended the usefulness of money. Anderson states that with the outbreak of the civil war in May 1918 “an emergency policy of War Communism was adopted.” Fainsod says that “the policy of War Communism was the rule of the besieged fortress.” This article will show by a study of Lenin's writings during the “war communism” period that this prevalent interpretation suffers from the neglect of the original aspirations of Marxian socialism and consequently misrepresents the motives behind the economic policies of “war communism.”

Since the Twentieth Party Congress, a controversy has developed in the Soviet Union concerning the activities and views of Anatolii Vasilievich Lunacharsky (1875-1933). Lunacharsky was the USSR's first commissar of education and an important and controversial figure in the arts during the 1920s. Of particular interest in the current debate is the underlying issue of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union today. In praising or attacking Lunacharsky, writers can set forth in an oblique manner their views on topics that cannot always be openly discussed. In this debate those who advocate change in the arts policy and those who support the current policies can confront each other, in an acceptable way, on such issues as censorship, the party's role in the world of art, artistic experimentation, and a variety of other issues of vital concern to artists and writers in the Soviet Union.