Abstract
Last year's meetings of the leaders of the party and government with groups of creative artists caused a stir in the field of esthetics, placed in the foreground discussion of questions concerning the theory of the realistic image, and led to an examination of the experience accumulated in the party's struggle for socialist realism. In recent years, as a consequence of the spread of mathematical methods of research into the social sciences and even into creative work, old doubts with respect to the specific significance of the creative image in art have again arisen. For several years now, efforts have been made in esthetics to emphasize, as distinctive features of art, other factors in artistic creativity, more accessible to study by the techniques of the natural sciences