SOURCE: “Bakunin, Marx and the Aesthetic Heritage of Socialism,” in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, No. 22, 1973, pp. 42-50.

In the following essay, Reszler probes the origins of socialist aesthetic theory.

The study of the socialist vision of art as revealed in the thoughts of Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx—philosophers whose lives and works have long since become the symbols of the schism in the revolutionary socialist movement—is founded on the existence of two distinct socialist aesthetics: the first is based on the anarchist cult of the limitless creativity of man; the second on the dialectic interpretation of artistic creations, or, better still, on the dogmas of historical or dialectic materialism.

The similarity between the anarchist and Marxist aesthetics is to be found at the level of two primary goals: to expose the social foundations of literary and artistic creation, and to define the revolutionary purpose...