Lukacs and Solzhenitsyn

...Yet what have been a good many of Lukacs's own writings during the last few decades but parodies of Marxism composed under the pressures of the Party, for which he must subsequently have felt ashamed...

...A man as intelligent as Lukacs could hardly have been unaware that he kept praising Solzhenitsyn for precisely the virtues he himself had rarely shown...

...To some extent—I can't pretend to exactitude—this seems to me a misunderstanding of Solzhenitsyn's fiction, just as some years ago there was a similar misunderstanding of Pasternak's novel...

...Platon Karatayev may himself be an example of "ignorant perfection," but Tolstoy's act in creating him is anything but that...

...Yet it seems utterly characteristic of Lukacs that just as he shows his mind at its liveliest he should also show it still unfree...

...What such a literary structure then does is to sustain a prolonged interval of crisis in which the characters are put to a test...

...An indispensible book...

...11 ONE REASON LuxAcs ADMIRES SOLZHENITSYN the novelist is that he sees him as a realist in the nineteenth-century tradition who does not fiddle about with experimental techniques, clearly has large moral-historical scope, and puts a programmatically antimodernist critic like himself at ease...

...I refer to the problem of integrity, as a trait independent of and not reducible to political opinion or class status...

...it is tied by numerous filaments of attitude to the "plebeian social view" of such Tolstoyan characters as Platon Karatayev in War and Peace...

...More original and illuminating is Lukacs's notion that in the twentieth century there has appeared a kind of novel that enlarges upon the central structure of the novella...

...Something, one can only surmise, must have been fermenting in Lukacs's mind during his last years that the appearance of Solzhenitsyn's novels helped bring to fruition, something more heretical than he ever dared express in his own right...

...And the same, I would say, holds for certain religious responses...

...It follows from a major world-view,s in its own way at least as comprehensive as that of MarxOn the component of heretical Christianity inTolstoy and its political significance, Trotsky'sessays on Tolstoy are far more illuminating thanLukacs, perhaps because Trotsky writing under theCzar was less inhibited in expressing his views thanLukacs under the reign of the Party...

...Plebeian these certainly are, as in the wonderful remark of Solzhenitsyn's character Spiridon who, when asked to describe the difference between the guilty and the innocent, answers, "Sheepdogs are right and cannibals are wrong...

...Not a good Communist or adept dialectician, but "a human being...

...Having analyzed the relation of the structural principle in Solzhenitsyn's novels to that which he locates in the work of Mann, Lukacs must then come up with a preposterous remark that "Solzhenitsyn's works appear as a rebirth of the noble beginnings of socialist realism...

...it had much to do with his moral stature...

...In his study of Solzhenitsyn—perhaps because he found it easier or more prudent to express his deepest convictions through the mediated discourse of literary criticism than through the directness of political speech—Lukacs expresses fervently, as perhaps never before, the disgust he felt for Stalinism, at least Stalinism as the terrorist phase of the party-state dictatorship, if not as an integral sociopolitical system...

...One source, then, of his admiration for Solzhenitsyn seems to be the Russian novelist's deliberate refusal of "tactics," the whole stale jumble of "dialectics" by which thinkers like Lukacs have persisted in justifying their submission to the dictatorship of the Party...

...Plebeian, in that he has become the voice of all those who silently suffered through the decades of the terror and beyond...

...The first task of such a writer, as he takes upon himself the heavy and uncomfortable mantle of moral spokesman, is to remember, to record, to insist upon the sanctity of simple fact and uncontaminated memory...

...It would signify a struggle for human renewal, for the reaffirmation of the image of a free man as that image can excite our minds beyond all ideological decrees...

...In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann enforces the test through a confrontation with the reality of the characters' own death...

...I sometimes suspect thatthe current fad of Lukacs has something to dowith his imposing verbal opacity...

...It is "perfection" because it immediately sniffs out frauds and tyrants, but "ignorant" because it has not been raised to a level of generality or fortified with "dialectics...

...Writing about the social world portrayed by Solzhenitsyn, Lukacs comments: BOOKS Should bureaucracy become the dominant modeof life of those participating in it, should thedecisions dictated by it determine their way oflife entirely, then inevitably the tactics of theapparatus, dictated by its day-to-day needs, become the ultimate judge of all decisions between good and evil...

...During the years he spent under Stalin in Russia and Rakosi in Hungary he had no freedom at all...

...is an indispensable part of life, and here [in the special camp for scientists] hecannot befriend like-minded persons, while all i How admirable, even overwhelming, that courageis we can learn from the recently published collection of documents concerning the Solzhenitsyn"case" that has been edited by Leopold Labedz...

...In order to beable to exist accordingly, he repeatedly reciteshumorous parodies of poems . the onlyeffect of which is that he must subsequently beashamed of the role he has played...

...Completely fascinating in this respect is Lukacs's attitude toward one of the characters in The First Circle, the prisoner Rubin who is portrayed by Solzhenitsyn as a very decent man but intellectually still in the grip of Communist orthodoxy...

...Alsoincluded are articles by Russian writers, interviews, documents, letters, etc...

...He compares One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with by-now classical novellas by Conrad and Hemingway in order to work out a rough schema for the novella, or short novel, as a form: It does not claim to shape the whole of socialreality, nor even to depict that whole as it appears from the vantage point of a fundamentaland topical problem...

...At a number of points Lukacs writes with approval of Solzhenitsyn's independence and courage.' And it is precisely here that we encounter a painful problem...

...Lukacs's admiration for Solzhenitsyn clearly went beyond the latter's literary achievement...

...then the mounting struggle between theSoviet bureaucracy and the independent-mindedintellectuals over Solzhenitsyn's work...

...He had apparently reached the "instinctive" conclusion that in an authoritarian society the role of the writer is to recover fundamental supports of moral existence, direct intuitions of human fraternity, encompassing moments of truth...

...but it lacks, as it must, the historical perspective, the theoretical coherence that can alone be provided by the "socialist" outlook...

...Yet precisely these cogent words are likely to raise a tremor of distrust among readers experienced in the politics of Marxism...

...Long ago he had chosen the role of the (at times) semi-dissident Communist, but never an openly oppositionist Communist and certainly not a public opponent of the party-state dictatorship...

...Clearly this is the kind of analysis that serious readers can respect, since it makes an effort to see works of literature in their own realm of being and ventures upon comparisons in regard to structure and technique that leap across the dull hurdles of "socialist realism...

...A writer seized by such a vision—which in some sense must be regarded as religious in urgency and depth—is not likely to think first of all about innovations of technique, though there is reason to suppose that he may nevertheless achieve them...

...It really begins to look as if, in the end, Lukacs was badly tom between such entirely admirable sentiments, elicited and brought to sharp articulation by Solzhenitsyn's books, and his continuing persuasion, part canniness and part habitual abjectness, that he had to remain faithful to the Party...

...But in reality, as any student of Russian literature must know, the plebeian stress in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which one hears again in Solzhenitsyn, draws upon a strand of Christian belief very powerful in Russian culture, a strand that favors egalitarianism and ascetic humility, as if to take the word of Jesus at face value...

...Perhaps Lukacs was indulging in some sort of inside joke, with those in EasternEurope who do know Makarenko being tipped offnot to take this standard reference very seriously...

...That these words should now be cited with seeming approval by Lukacs, a man who knew his way around his shoulder, is a matter of high intellectual drama...

...But this is sheer nonsense...

...Solzhenitsyn embodies in his fiction that empathy with the lowly and the mute which links him both to the great masters of the nineteenth century and the still-uncreated future of free men...

...He had always to keep looking over his shoulder, sometimes literally and more often figuratively, so as to measure the latitude allowed him by the Party...

...Let us nevertheless stay with Lukac's argument for a moment, even granting, for the sake of that argument, the evident justice in his remark that "the inner 'ignorant perfection' of the common people is not sufficient to develop in man a positively effective and critical attitude toward the reform of his alienated society...

...To be free means in our century, first of all, to remember...

...That is why Solzhenitsyn's apparent indifference to literary modernism which so pleases Lukacs would seem to be less a deliberate repudiation than a step beyond the circumstances that had first led to modernism...

...For Rubin, writes Lukacs, friendship...

...If, by theway, it is Marxist literary criticism that interestssome young intellectuals these days, they will findit—to the extent that it can be said to exist—far more brilliantly, clearly, and elegantly achieved inTrotsky than in Lukacs...

...It is the problem of how men under an absolute tyranny struggle, as Lukacs well puts it, "to preserve their own human integrity even here...

...Lukacs refers to a striking phrase of Marx, the "ignorant perfection" of ordinary people, a perfection of healthy social impulse, a moral rightness that can spontaneously arise among the masses...

...Their decisions rested, instead, on moral-political grounds as these can be inferred from their novels themselves, namely, a persuasion that genuinely to return to the Tolstoyan novel, which the Stalinist dogma of "socialist realism" had celebrated in words but caricatured in performance, would constitute a revolutionary act of the spirit...

...In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, writes Lukacs, "the concentration camp is a symbol of everyday Stalinist life...

...Lukacs made one major bolt from the bounds of political orthodoxy by joining the Nagy government of 1956, but once the Russian troops destroyed it he gradually came back into the fold...

...The characters of this novel are removed from the "natural" location of their lives and movements, and are transplanted into new andartificial surroundings (here the sanatorium forconsumptives...

...BOOKS methods of Stalinism," nevertheless continues to function...

...And the same might hold in regard to Solzhenitsyn's "plebeian" sentiments...

...The course they chose, whatever its political merits, was not likely to encourage moral strength or forthrightness, since "if you always look over your shoulder," as a character in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle remarks, "how can you still remain a human being...

...Plebeian, yes...

...Not "progressive and reactionary," but "good and evil...

...Precisely this uncomfortable mixture of responses may account for the fact that in discussing Solzhenitsyn's novels Lukacs turns to a theme that has long preoccupied independent critics in the West (and secretly, no doubt, in the East) but has hardly figured in Lukacs's own work...

...Pasternak had already been for many years a modernist poet, and Solzhenitsyn, forced by circumstances to live apart from all literary tendencies or groups, seems not to have been interested in the dispute over modernism...

...Its truth rests on the factthat an individual situation—usually an extreme one [but has not modernism just enteredhere, through the back door?—i.h.]—is possiblein a certain society at a certain level of development, and just because it is possible, is characteristic of this society and this level...

...If not quite original, this is very keen...

...Such passages, and there are a number of them, are at least as revealing of Lukacs's inner thoughts as of Solzhenitsyn's well-known books...

...Lukacs's reasons for this choice were clear: the locomotive of history had gone badly astray, the best passengers had been killed, the engineer had turned out to be a homicidal maniac, yet somehow that locomotive chugged in the direction of progress...

...To have declared himself in clear opposition to totalitarianism, he believed, would have meant to isolate himself from History...

...The vocabulary of Leninism made a parallel distinction between ordinary trade-union consciousness, which the masses can reach by themselves, and revolutionary consciousness, which the vanguard party must bring to (or impose upon) the masses...

...FOR MOST of his life Georg Lukacs, the intellectual heresiarch of Communism, was unable to write freely...

...For Bukharin the result was death...

...What is Lukacs doing with his praise of these "trans-historical," these quite undialectical, these perhaps neo-Kantian categories...

...See Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, Leopold Labedz, ed., New York: Harper & Row, 229 pp., $7.95...

...2 III THE CENTRAL CRITICISM Lukacs makes of Solzhenitsyn is that the Russian novelist writes from the strong but limiting perspective of the plebeian mind, rather than from a socialist consciousness...

...he writes from his own version of Marxism-Leninism, and when he contrasts Solzhenitsyn's "plebeian" limitation with the largeness of "socialist" perspective, we can't avoid translating this into a contrast between Solzhenitsyn's "moral-social criticism of Communist society from the standpoint of freedom" and Lukacs's "criticism directed toward the resurrection of the Party within the framework of orthodox belief...

...That Lukacs could, however, write a book about Solzhenitsyn without so much as mentioning the problem of his religious inclinations, let alone those of the Tolstoy to whom he links Solzhenitsyn, is indeed a "dialectical" feat...

...more recently, under Kadar in Hungary, he was granted a measure of intellectual independence but only in a cautious, limited way...

...It was a choice like that of the old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, who in the early thirties paid a secret visit to some Mensheviks in Paris, trembling with fright and horror at the excesses of Stalin yet unable to face the prospect of exile...

...In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn has the prisoners confronted "not only by the slender hope of liberation, but by a very real threat of a more infernal region of hell" (that is, shipment to the worst camps in Siberia...

...Furthermore, it should be stressed that at a time when the "socialist" vocabulary is used for oppressive ends, the "plebeian" response, even if undecorated with ideology and world views, takes on a liberating, indeed a revolutionary character...

...It is a step that prompted Solzhenitsyn to revive—though with significant modifications—the Tolstoyan novel, a step taken out of the conviction that in our time the BOOKS claim for freedom is inseparable from the resurrection of history...

...rather this "chance" common terrain of their present existence creates new fundamentalforms of their human, intellectual and moral relations with each other...

...This point is of considerable literary and political interest, since it marks quite clearly the limits within which Lukacs, for all his onagain, off-again hatred of Stalinist society and the "new era" which "preserves the essential 2 Not one in a hundred of Lukacs's readers are likely to have read Makarenko, and that may lend his claim plausibility...

...and finallythe brutal clamping-down of the regime uponSolzhenitsyn and his supporters...

...Whatever Solzhenitsyn's novels may be, they really have nothing in common with "socialist realism," not even with the one, rather frayed instance offered by Lukacs of its "noble beginnings," the fiction of the Soviet writer Makarenko which he overrates simply in order to show that he does, still, adhere to a version of "socialist realism...

...But having struggled with anEnglish translation of Makarenko's The Road to Life, which Lukacs praises so highly, even to thepoint of linking it with The Magic Mountain, I can only testify that it is a characteristic exercise inagit-prop, though perhaps a shade better than mostSoviet writing...

...Strong words...

...especially when one remembers a little wryly the rebukes from Left and Right delivered to those of us who have been saying exactly the same thing...

...for Lukacs a captivity sometimes grating, sometimes silken...

...and second, of a meeting held a yearlater with the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers—here the discussion consists of a disgraceful badgering of Solzhenitsyn by party hacks...

...Simply as a literary critic, Lukacs often writes well in this book...

...Lukacs grants that Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Soviet society is "rooted in a genuine plebeian hatred of social privilege...

...Remarkable...

...For between the absolute candor of Solzhenitsyn's work and the deviousness of Lukacs's career there is a startling difference, so much so that one senses in this little book a measure of discomfort and defensiveness...

...What then becomes evident is that Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Russian society—even if limited by the "ignorant perfection" of the "plebeian" outlook—is far deeper, far more revolutionary, and far closer to the needs of a genuine socialism than that of Lukacs...

...There are two remarkable transcripts, the first of a group ofMoscow writers discussing with Solzhenitsyn in1966 his then uncompleted novel Cancer Ward— by and large, the discussion is serious, fraternal, ingood faith...

...his friends reject his views...

...Lukacs notices this, first of all, in The Magic Mountain, whose "compositional innovation" may be described...

...Neither the dissident nor oppositionist label really fits Solzhenitsyn...

...Stronger still is the remark of Nerzhin, the central character of The First Circle, which Lukacs quotes with evident approval: there "is no better place" than prison "to understand the part of good and evil in human life...

...Good and evil...

...It remains a healthy reaction to what exists, but by itself cannot lead to action in behalf of what might be...

...Each of these writers chose to go back to the capacious forms of the nineteenth-century realistic novel, with its interweaving of themes, narrative elements, and characters, but not, I think, because of a deliberate or ideological rejection of literary modernism...

...The small book Lukacs wrote about Solzhenitsyn at the very end of his life is a remarkable work, certainly far more so than the theoretical writings of his early years, which in their recent translations have given rise to a wavelet of Marxist scholasticism...

...In chronological order, these documents show theemergence of Solzhenitsyn as a new Russian writerwelcomed by the more open-minded of his colleagues...

...The major consequence of thisis that the characters do not come into contact with each other, as so often in life and even more frequently in art, in "normal" ways...

...Still more remarkable is Lukacs's reference, obviously made with an eye toward the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes, to "the BOOKS new era with all its changes which preserve the essential methods of Stalinism with only superficial modifications" (emphasis addedi...

...And still more striking is Lukacs's remark that "in the camps"—which you will remember he has described as "a symbol of everyday Stalinist life" such as he himself experienced for years —"a refusal to compromise in all human and social essentials thus forms a prerequisite for anyone wishing to remain really human...

...Brushing past the cant of Lukacs's world ("the leading role of the Party," "the Leninist heritage," etc...

...For Lukacs is speaking not merely in the abstract about the need for theoretical vision and generality...

...in a purely formal way, namely that the uniformity of the setting ismade the immediate foundation of the narrative...

...Now, historically Lukacs is being more than a little ingenuous in confining the dominant vision of Solzhenitsyn's work, as well as that in Tolstoy best represented by the character Platon Karatayev, to the level of the "plebeian...