In addition to being the father of Russian Marxism, Georgij Valentinovich Plekhanov was the founder of Marxian esthetics. On the basis of the slender and fleeting hints in the works of Marx and Engels, he did more than any of his Marxist contemporaries to build a systematic Marxian esthetic.
So great was the influence of his esthetic legacy upon Soviet theoreticians that by 1928 Valer'jan Poljanskij could claim that "all contemporary art and literary science are built upon the work which was left to us by Plekhanov."