Voronsky, an outstanding figure of post-revolutionary Soviet intellectual life, was the editor of the most important literary journal of the 1920s in the USSR and a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. He was executed by Stalin in 1937. A defender of the "fellow traveler" writers and an opponent of the Proletarian Culture (proletkult) movement, Voronsky was an authentic representative of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism in the twentieth century.

It has long been a weakness in the West that Marxist literary criticism is usually discussed with little direct knowledge of Voronsky's work. The publication of this volume of essays intends to correct that weakness by making available to an English-speaking audience many translated texts for the first time. Following his "rehabilitation" in 1957, several of Voronsky's writings were published in the USSR in heavily censored form. All cuts have been restored in this edition. Translated by Frederick S. Choate.