Art as the cognition of life (Mehring Books £19.99) is a large selection of critical writings by A.K. Voronsky. It is impeccably translated and superbly presented. Voronsky was a Bolshevik critic and editor whose life and work was expunged by the Stalinist regime. Predictably, then, he is in the Engels camp of Marxist criticism ("The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art") and not the Leninist camp ("Literature must become Party literature!").

Voronsky is not a radical critic, but openly develops his key notions from the work of the 19th century writer V.G. Belinsky, and the title-piece of this book is in some ways the least relevant of the collected essays. More intriguing are those which dwell on the circumstances and the figures of the time; some well known to the West (Maxim Gorky or H.G. Wells), other much less so (the poet Sergei Esenin or Voronsky's friend Mikhail Frunze).

This is a significant historical document, a window onto a smudged world and into a giddy time that wants for levelheaded commentary. Voronsky is an authoritative voice rather than a great critic; but you have to remind yourself of the constant barrage or personal attack he was under and marvel at the near complete absence of self-justification and cheap vitriol in his writings. Reviewing the "disgraced" political activist and thinker G.V. Plekanov he bemoans: "The revolution is ruthless. Like Saturn it devours its children, without slowing its furious pace for even a second". 17 years later this "furious pace" saw Voronsky shot and buried in an unmarked grave near Moscow.

Sheffield's Mehring Books deserve huge credit for publishing Art as the Cognition of Life, but who can pretend there is a ready market for it? There are many kinds of censorship but the "free economy" is, in telling ways, the most efficient of them.

Biographism is always a dangerous thing. When it deals with an epoch such as the Russian Art of the beginning of 20th Century it can be even more difficult to understand what really happened (something that I really do not believe is possible anyway).Russian Art of the period is a very hard subject, mostly because of the continuing changes that recent facts produced to the reception of these phenomenae.

The book of Robert Williams manage to deal with the subject in a rather pleasant way but it is almost impossible to agree with its main hipothesis: the work of three generations of Russian artists (generation can be a questionable term) could be explained based on the difficulties of these artists to reach the er... fame. Sometimes it does not explain anything at all, but help the reader to join some information dispersed among a great number of reference works that no doubt Williams had the patience to search.

Sometimes this neo-positivist procedure gives place to some forced affirmations that can be of doubtful comprovation.

Nevertheless I think William's book is fundamental. Read it without taking account his obssession to relate each part of artist's works with their lifes, and you will have a good panorama of the period with a human accent that sometimes lacks on other books of art history about the same period.