长久以来,马克思主义美学似乎没有得到与马克思主义哲学、政治经济学、历史学等相提并论的重要性地位,1974年《马克思主义美学文档》第1卷《卡尔·马克思与弗里德里希·恩格斯的文学艺术观》(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art)出版,这在很大程度上弥补了对马克思主义美学研究的不足。这本著作作为马克思主义美学文档的第一卷,讨论的是马克思主义美学的起源,即马克思、恩格斯两人的美学观念,建立在对二者的政治、经济、哲学经典著作、片段化的戏剧、绘画等艺术评论与私人通信等真实可靠的文本基础上,深入讨论了诸如艺术与经济、生产、阶级的关系、倾向性写作、艺术现象的语境与内驱力、个体的人的创造力、精神与物质发展的不平衡性、人的异化、马克思与恩格斯的美学是否体系化等问题。著作的另一个深刻之处在于,在充分的原始文本支持下,作者指出了马克思与恩格斯在审美趣味上的差异,如马克思审美的欧洲整体性趣味与恩格斯的德国本土倾向以及马克思主义美学与苏维埃或社会主义美学观念的区别。这些亦是马克思主义美学研究的应有之义。 For a long time, Marxist aesthetics did not seem to have the important position of comparing with Marxist philosophy, political economy, history, etc. The “Marxist Aesthetic Document”, Volume 1, "Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The publication of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art, to a large extent, made up for the deficiencies in the study of Marxist aesthetics. This book, as the first volume of Marxist aesthetics, discusses the origin of Marxist aesthetics, that is, the aesthetic ideas of Marx and Engels, which are based on the classic political, economic and philosophical works of both, fragmentary drama , Painting and other art reviews and personal communications on the basis of real and reliable text, in-depth discussion of such as art and economy, production, class relations, tendentious writing, artistic phenomena context and internal drive, the individual’s creativity , The imbalance of spiritual and material development, the alienation of human beings, and the systematization of the esthetics of Marx and Engels. The other profound feature of the book is that with full support of the original text, the author points out the differences in aesthetic taste between Marx and Engels, such as the aesthetic taste of the whole of Europe and the German native tendency of Engels, the Marxist aesthetics and the Soviet Or the difference between socialist aesthetic concepts. These are also the proper meanings of the study of Marxist aesthetics.