ABSTRACT
In introducing a selection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on literature and art, Stefan Morawski cautions that ‘we should distinguish the writings which explicitly and coherently elaborate a topic from the fragments which contain a thesis about a topic but which leave it undeveloped in part and thus rather unclear, and from the hasty or opaque comments which, as such, don’t offer a reliable basis for a thesis’.1 Morawski goes on to note that, for the greater part, the themes clustered under the first of these categories concern the functional aspects of specific attributes of artistic structures. By contrast, he numbers the following among the themes associated with the second and third categories: the distinguishing traits of aesthetic objects and aesthetic experience; the recurrent attributes and enduring values of art; the distinction between science and art; and the hierarchy of artistic values.
