Friche, Vladimir

Born Oct. 15 (27), 1870, in Moscow; died there Sept. 4, 1929. Soviet literary and art critic. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Friche became active in the social democratic movement in the late 1890’s. He joined the Communist Party in 1917. In 1922 he became director of the Institute of Language and Literature. He also headed the literature departments of the Institute of the Red Professors and the Communist Academy. Frische was the editor of the journals Literatura i marksizm (Literature and Marxism, 1928–29) and Pechat’ i revoliutsiia (The Press and Revolution, 1929), as well as of the Encyclopedia of Literature (vols. 1–2, 1929). In Essays on the History of Western European Literature (1908), Freudianism and Art (1925), The Sociology of Art (1926), and Problems of Art Criticism (1930), Friche, guided mainly by the aesthetic views of G. V. Plekhanov, developed a materialist conception of the history of literature and art, which he interpreted, however, in a spirit of vulgar sociologism.