The emergence of aesthetics as a legitimate philosophical discipline in the U.S.S.R. in recent years has been powerfully aided by the rehabilitation of a number of theorists who provided a lifeline to the richer intellectual culture of an earlier age. Without the opportunity to read once again the writings of Mixail Baxtin, Lev Vygotskij, and others it is doubtful that Soviet aestheticians could have made the advances they have succeeded in making beyond the intellectual wilderness of the Stalin era. And among those voices from the past, none was heard sooner or has continued to be heard longer than that of the still active classicist and philosopher, Aleksej Fedorovič Losev.