During the half-century of its existence, the Soviet study of esthetics has achieved considerable success in developing the views of the founders of Marxism-Leninism with respect to the nature and social function of art. There is no need to list the authors and titles of the works in which the history of world thought about esthetics and the cardinal problems of esthetics have been treated from the Marxist standpoint. Suffice it to say that Soviet esthetic thought has been the first to deal with such very important categories as the principle of partisanship in art, the (the very concept of creative method did not exist until the 1920s and was first introduced specifically in the works of Soviet writers on esthetics and students of literature), the principles of socialist realism, the international and the national in art, and so forth.