Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov was born into a writer’s family. In June 1941, he graduated from school in Moscow and entered the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow State University. In August 1942, he was drafted into the Red Army and sent to an artillery school. From October 1943, he fought on the Western Front, then on the 2nd and 1st Belarusian Fronts, and eventually reached Berlin. For his military valor, he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the II degree and medals. After the end of the war, he continued his studies at the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow State University, graduating in 1950 and becoming a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that same year.

After graduating from Moscow State University, Evald Vasilyevich decided to continue his scientific and philosophical work within the university. In 1953, he defended his thesis “Some Questions of Materialist Dialectics in K. Marx’s ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’”, which effectively marked the beginning of the emergence of dialectical logic as a direction of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. That same year, he became a junior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Ilyenkov authored a series of works devoted to the history and theory of dialectics, which were awarded the N.G. Chernyshevsky Prize.

In his works, Evald Vasilyevich elaborated in detail the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, which became one of the most important tools of dialectical logic as a method of cognition. In addition, he engaged in the study of the ideal, which remained one of the underdeveloped components of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and defended the idea of the identity of being and thinking. Evald Ilyenkov paid great attention to psychology and pedagogy: together with Alexander Meshcheryakov, he raised four deaf-blind children, who, thanks to the pedagogical work of Ilyenkov and Meshcheryakov, were able to successfully graduate from school and Moscow State University, and one of the students subsequently defended his candidate and doctoral dissertations (“The Zagorsk Experiment”).

The great Soviet philosopher Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov died on March 21, 1979, at the age of 55. His philosophical works are of outstanding value, representing a unique attempt to supplement and actualize the teachings of Karl Marx in the Soviet Union in the 1950s - 1970s.

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