Kant's aesthetics in Marxist light. In Hart, No. 2-3, 1927, pp. 96-122.

The article was written on the occasion of the publication of Liia Zyvelchynska’s book «Опыт марксистской критики эстетики Канта» («The Experience of Marxist Criticism of Kant's Aesthetics»). In it, the author provides a brief overview of the class relations of Immanuel Kant’s era, and analyzes the main aesthetic ideas of his predecessors – Alexander Baumgarten, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Georg Hamann, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. The article then turns to Kant’s general aesthetic conception, focusing on its relation—both in terms of similarities and differences – to earlier theories.

In the second part, the author proceeds to a Marxist critique of Kantian aesthetics, advancing the following main objections: first, its abstract and metaphysical character; second, the strict separation between the aesthetic and the cognitive; third, the exclusion of concepts from the structure of aesthetic perception; fourth, the interpretation of the immanent purposiveness of the work of art as purposeless; fifth, the subjectivism of aesthetic judgment and the denial of objective principles of taste; and sixth, the opposition to Kant’s position through the thesis of the possibility of aesthetics as a science.

In conclusion, the author offers a positive assessment of L. Zyvelchynska’s attempt to carry out a Marxist critique of Kant’s aesthetics, while also noting the insufficiently developed analysis of class relations in the reviewed work.