ORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC: ON GEORG LUKÁCS
Pachter, Henry
This April Georg Lukacs would be 90 years old. When he died, four years ago, he was eulogized for a number of conflicting reasons: • To some, he was the guardian of orthodox Marxism and the only...
...39Lukacs, Marxismus and Stalinismus (see note 14), p. 240...
...Only the consciously directed effort of a disciplined party, guided by a correct theory, can crystallize the revolutionary energies during a period between revolutions...
...Along with the radical Left, Lukacs concluded that this wretched middle-class world was doomed...
...In a similar situation Marx had decided that "the next revolution is as certain as the next depression...
...He then quoted Lenin as saying: "Anybody who accepts the Bolshevik principle of party organization must believe that we live in a time of proletarian revolution...
...1, p. 95...
...it had not yet been translated into German...
...Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, with 1962 Preface, transl...
...In his opinion, Western theory was so far gone in its decadence that he expected his partners to capitulate, and he never accepted coexistence in the area of ideology...
...modem culture was able to produce only a poor substitute, the novel, and even that had by now sunk to the level of psychology and naturalistic description, reveling in the sensuous experience of matter instead of placing man in his universe...
...180 HENRY PACHTER Lukacs had fallen into the trap that Marx had accused Hegel of having set for himself...
...Augustine and from a St...
...Lukacs, by contrast, bought his "entry ticket" to further political activity (the Preface of 1967 candidly admits) by recanting...
...But more was at stake for him: the coherence of a world in which the revolution was possible...
...Interestingly, Lukacs also had artistic reservations about Solzhenitsyn: "What is not realized in literary terms does not exist...
...to be outside the Communist party meant to be deprived of class consciousness and even of "history...
...but it still was supposed to be the substratum of man's creative potentialities...
...artistic resolution is "imperturbable faith in the progress of mankind and nation...
...The respect owed to such an endeavor also forces us to consider the seriousness of the substitute goal...
...The translator says "plebeian" and fails to point out that in the Soviet context "narodnik" is a grave accusation...
...According to Marx, cognition follows existence: Lukacs's transformation called for a change in his understanding of the proletariat's role...
...Ernst Bloch suggested vainly that criteria that helped to understand Balzac and early 19th-century literature might not apply to contemporary works...
...Yet, he was simply too intelligent and too well trained in dialectics to be able to fool himself...
...Morris Watnick in Revisionism, ed...
...Lukacs willfully shut himself off from modern literature...
...Class war had been transferred to the international theater...
...For in the meantime he had changed over from the Communist ultraLeft to the Communist Right and had accepted Stalinism...
...This could be done only by applying a strict canon of aesthetics that excluded almost all experimenting and in particular the literary avant-garde, which Lukacs himself, together with Ernst Bloch and others, had sponsored in the early 1920s...
...on the contrary, in that war it was enlisted on both sides...
...When theory and practice are united, it becomes possible to change reality...
...King Lear is interpreted as a drama dealing with the dissolution of the feudal family...
...Lukacs, who supported the idea of "socialist realism" (though not its stupid application by illiterate culture czars), felt that avant-garde expressionism and futurism sanctioned individualistic, irrational, petty-bourgeois sentiments that threatened the Five-Year Plan in Russia and helped fascism abroad...
...it also had to fit the conditions under which it had been conceived: Lukacs had to build his own tower of orthodoxy into the ramparts of Stalin's fortress...
...There is more of this "crap," and the better it achieved its purpose at the time of writing, the less can the unedited work be used as a guide to literature for the uninitiated reader...
...Even after he had admitted Kafka's power of expression, he kept insisting: but it's wrong to have such fantasies...
...see also Die Seele and die Formen (Berlin: Fleischel, 1911), and Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen, 2 vols...
...ORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC 187 15' 'Man becomes truly himself when he creates his own world in the reflection in him of the world and makes it his own...
...they knew how to construct a story, and they knew how man stands in his world...
...The Preface notably lists two "fundamental errors" in H&CC: in 1923 Lukacs had denied "dialectics in nature," and he had failed to distinguish between "alienation''—the specific estrangement of the worker from his product— and "objectification," the general category of things as they appear to us...
...only, now the medium of that liberation is no longer aesthetic intuition but the action of the Party, the identical subject-object...
...But the central piece is the famous essay "Reification," which maintained the old concern: that the Whole Man should be liberated from all estrangement (alienation and objectification...
...In contrast, he preached the style of classical "realism" that alone, in his view, is revolutionary: it shows the world in the right relationship to man...
...34 Yet with equal zeal he opposed "positivism"—the very opposite of irrationalism...
...Rarely has a scholar's reconstruction of a lost text been so strikingly vindicated.' 1 But meanwhile Lukacs had repudiated his own book...
...Having devoted a lifetime to the fight against philosophies of "passivity," he ends by accepting a practice that is entirely theoretical contemplation...
...Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Preface by Irving Howe (Boston: Beacon, 1962...
...Having meant to "realize philosophy" in the world, he now is seen striving to save it from the world's harsh demands...
...It was rumored, however...
...After noting that Marx was able to learn from Darwin and Morgan, he says: "Nothing similar is happening today...
...Augustine to a St...
...Another consequence was that "a good Communist could not tolerate any criticism of the Soviet government' '—not only in the hour of greatest danger, as when it was "facing Hitler...
...such a pragmatic argument might still be understandable, 13 although it does not gibe with the judgment, made in the same essay, that the Hitler-Stalin Pact was a "tactically correct decision...
...In despair, Lukacs wrote a parable, The Theory of the Novel...
...Only a sycophantic esprit de systeme, an Aristotelian anxiety about the "correct" rules can label a style as petty-bourgeois without even a hint of analysis...
...To answer it, we need a minimum of biographical data...
...He has rejected Gramsci, the Yugoslav Marxists, Erich Fromm, Leszek Kolakowski, and of course Marcuse...
...They are tragically mistaken...
...Moreover, the sociological function of a style may change, or be ambivalent...
...Lukacs has never said so himself...
...28 One might even understand why he forgot to mention the Dreyfus case in an article celebrating the centenary memorial for Zola—the year happened to be 1940, when Hitler was Stalin's ally...
...This was truly a paradoxical way to end his philosophical career...
...But since Stalin was at the head of the Soviet state, he had the historical duty to destroy the opposition.' 4 It is hard to say what one should admire more: the candor, the naivete, or the esprit de systeme...
...Incomprehensibly, this essay was printed unchanged in postwar East German editions (Aufbau Verlag, 1951...
...42 Lukacs's direct answer to Sartre in Existentialisme ou Marxisme (Paris, 1948) is surprisingly unphilosophical and weak...
...Lukacs is immune to such temptations...
...After a vain attempt to coexist with Matyas Rakosi, Stalin's henchman, he joined Imre Nagy's insurgent government in 1956, albeit reluctantly, and left it before the end of its heroic stand...
...Iron laws were governing and are still governing the accumulation of socialist capital: this is the only excuse for a rate of exploitation that exceeds those in the Western capitalist countries...
...While academic teachers had spoken with resignation of the gap between humanity's yearnings and its chances of fulfillment, of the split between ethics and knowledge, or of the tragic conflict between essence and existence, Lukacs proclaimed that theory and praxis form an indissolvable unity, that doing and knowing are one, that action can lead to salvation, that it is in the grasp of human reason to perceive the transition from "is" to "ought...
...But there was also the deeper, metaphysical argument of "historical necessity...
...Anna Bosteek (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971...
...Class consciousness meant to support the Soviet Union...
...19 "Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehungen in der Aesthetik" in: Logos (1917...
...No doubt Lukacs was right when (in the Preface of 1967) he claimed that "a whole host of good [people] were won over to Marxism because the problem of alienation had been taken up by a Communist...
...The last psychologist Lukacs had read was Pavlov, and the Comintern vocabulary lacked the word ambivalence...
...The practical command of ethics now was to side with the Soviet Union...
...their lives have not only been demystified but "objectified...
...Heinrich Rickert also condemned the illusion that "true history" can be written without "a definite idea of cultural values...
...Neither the Party nor the Soviet government was that identical subject-object he craved to see, and the suppressed yearning found its natural outlet in a return to his first love—literature...
...but maybe it will help keep Faust in the libraries while Ilya Ehrenburg is raging against everything German...
...He launched a literary offensive against Brecht, Bloch, and expressionism in general...
...Hegel, Aesthetik (Stuttgart, 1927) vol...
...2. Mr...
...38 Nuovi Argomenti, 196'., #62...
...Aragon, Eluard, Brecht, Gide, Malraux were Communists at least in the 1930s...
...32 "Grosse and Verfall des Expressionismus," in Fritz Raddatz, Marxismus and Literatur (Hamburg, 1969), vol...
...When he opened an Institute for Historical Materialism, Lukacs announced that a new epoch in History had begun in which even the laws that Karl Marx had discovered would be abolished.' The revolution was beaten, and Lukacs fled to Vienna...
...Ernst Bloch answered sharply in Erbschaft dieser Zeit...
...But the public function of a thinker often differs from his private, narrow world...
...29 For connoisseurs, Lukacs mentioned Voltaire's defense of Calas, to save his conscience...
...Even in a socialist society man will be subject to general laws that govern his necessary dialogue with nature...
...The point was not whether a little more or a little less freedom was enjoyed there by individual proletarians but that the whole metaphysical entity had made that leap into the realm of freedom...
...Although Lukacs has often been hailed as the founder of the "Sociology of Knowledge," it is fair to acknowledge his neo-Kantian sources...
...It is here that a humanist Lukacs seems to emerge: neither a rigid doctrinaire nor a flaming rebel—but a sensitive man of letters who fought valiantly to preserve good taste in the midst of totalitarian horrors...
...Although the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics excludes an ontology and epistemology separated from logic, Lukacs did write an "Ontology" at the end of his life, just as he then recognized the "dialectics in nature...
...22 Lukacs, Sorzhenitsyn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971...
...The proletariat, by contrast, is being pushed farther and farther away from the revolution, right up to the moment where its utter despair must reverse the situation...
...it deals with man on the human scale...
...The older Lukacs does not relate to the science of his contemporaries as Marx related to those of his time...
...In Art, Thought materializes itself and matter is not determined in any extraneous way but exists freely...
...41 He did not think that Marxism needed any complement from modern sociology, psychology, or anthropology...
...Advanced in a letter to Nuovi Argomenti, 1962, #57...
...Yet to fit an admiring passage in Marx's letters, they have to be representatives of "capitalism...
...Lukacs did not understand what Bloch called the "utopian potential" of modern art...
...Balzac and French Realism, 30 his much-admired book, begins as follo* vs: "The Peasants.—In this novel, the greatest (bedeutendste) of his maturity, Balzac wanted to write the tragedy of the doomed landed aristocracy...
...31 These examples must suffice here to show that from the late 1930s on Lukacs was writing below the level of his intellectual eminence and that these works cannot serve as a guide either to literary appreciation or to Marxist analysis, or to the significance of Lukacs's work...
...Nor have these figures found occasion to quote him...
...These assumed that in daily combat the proletariat acquires more and more "class consciousness," culminating in the moment of revolution...
...Its consciousness had been usurped by the Party...
...Armed with such insight, the reader then will be able to rebel against false pretenses and inauthenticity in bourgeois society ("das Verzerrende and Falsche in der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft...
...Classical or neo-Romantic culture offered no shelter from the in-rushing age of the barbarians...
...23 The same reasoning applied even more strongly to the Nazi regime...
...with Der junge Hegel, this is Marxist intellectual history at its best...
...For the significance of the early Lukacs, see Judith Marcus-Tar, "Georg Lukacs and Der Tod in Venedig," in Weltwoche (Zurich), July 2, 1971, p. 31...
...Lukacs deplores both as unconstructive and decadent...
...on the contrary, on numerous occasions he has warned the Communists that "right deviations" and "revisionism" are—in typical Comintern language—``the main enemy...
...The Frozen Flame IT IS DIFFICULT to describe today the electrifying effect Lukacs's book had on an intellectual vanguard back in 1923...
...The young Lukacs had praised Marx for using the science of his contemporaries and developing his own truth through immanent criticism of their findings...
...How different had things been 50 years earlier, when the word was pressing to realize itself in the flesh, and the deed was the answer to the question of philosophy...
...Hence the necessity of a "system," the way every church has its theology...
...Wars are no longer fought by heroes, and the novel is no longer carried by characters that typify man's eternal nature...
...Throughout his life Lukacs differed with other socialist critics like Plekhanov who grudgingly acknowledge the genius of a Dostoevsky and add a sigh of regret that such a great writer could not have been at least a little "progressive...
...15 Empathy was certainly no substitute for reason in Lukacs's philosophy...
...It originated in man, but is inhuman, indeed antihuman...
...In fact, with revolution in the West far away, the twin existence of the Party and of the Soviet Union now was substituted for the quest of the identical subject-object, or was passed off for its realization...
...Labedz (New York: Praeger, 1962...
...he was forced to take in more and more territory and expand his pronouncements into areas where he had no expertise...
...41 He has fought a long, consistent, and often bitter fight against all humanist, existentialist, 42 and other "sentimental" or "revisionist" interpretations of Marx, against all attempts to link Marxism to Freudianism or to any other science...
...At that time, debates in the Communist movement were still lively...
...Lukacs's involvement with literature was not an evasive action...
...books were condemned when they were written by the wrong authors, and it so happened that in the Hungarian refugee squabbles Lukacs supported a faction that was out of favor in Moscow...
...John to a St...
...In the West Lukacs's work has given rise to a considerable body of academic scholarship, and many of his followers may feel that to teach Lukacs means to do revolutionary work...
...38 Was Lukacs at least an anti-Stalinist...
...Thus in the programmatic Realism in Our Time (1956) he charges that Proust "separates time from objective reality, transforming the inner world into a sinister flux...
...Both his anticapitalistic yearning and his search for a return from alienation were characteristic of Max Weber's circle in Heidelberg...
...He was temporarily interned and suspended from the Party for ten years...
...One might readily forgive Lukacs an occasional boost for a mediocre writer who was a fellow traveler...
...I shall argue, therefore, that the caesura in Lukacs's development did not occur when he joined the Communist party but much later, when he revoked the reification essay...
...We have seen how after the defeat the idea was crystallized and preserved in the Party...
...they can neither teach nor do research—and yet, Agnes Heller, his favorite, has repudiated his early masterwork.'° 186 HENRY PACHTER Yet, if Western scholars hoped for a "dialogue," Lukacs made it clear that it would not be a two-way communication...
...If that system was to be maintained, the revolutionary process had to be declared closed: once the Soviet system had been established, it had to be a self-contained unit in which no further dialectics took place...
...He objected to modern art for the same reason that caused Lenin to condemn modern philosophy...
...With all his dialectical skill he could not banish those "wrong reasons" that he had conjured up and that came to pursue him like Peer Gynt's "imagined sins...
...his judgments are incorruptible...
...44 1n these works I certainly would include Lukacs's preMarxist writings...
...H&CC, chap...
...He came down severely on his former friends, the German neoRomantics...
...he accused Bertrand Russell and Herbert Marcuse, of all people, of spreading imperialist and religious propaganda...
...Now Lukacs saw that this pattern of revolution was true only for the bourgeoisie, whose economic power and social position were increasing long before it achieved political recognition...
...fight against social democracy as mainstay of fascism...
...This is the famous "unity of theory and praxis...
...It was as though a new Prometheus had stolen the fire from Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind (written under similar circumstances) and transplanted it into our century...
...Such an easy answer no longer was possible for Lukacs...
...Here is the point where Lukacs turns orthodox...
...Stephen Eric Bronner points out, in an unpublished summary of the Expressionismus debates, that Lukacs was settling old accounts with Toiler and others who had belonged to the Independent Social Democratic party...
...The Dialectical Paradox FOR ALL THAT, the thought of the early Lukacs remains as a leaven throughout the satellite countries—and there its study may be as dangerous as the study of the young Marx...
...that Lukacs, on emerging from Dracula's castle in deepest Transylvania (where he had been interned after the 1956 revolt), was overheard murmuring: "Maybe Kafka was a realist, after all...
...5: "The Case for Georg Lukacs...
...His life's work, one critic felt, was "a continuous meditation on the narrative, its basic structure, its relationship to the reality it expresses and its epistemological value...
...39 Stalin was a historical necessity in his time...
...178 HENRY PACHTER Lukacs had at first sympathized with syndicalist ideas and with Rosa Luxemburg's spontaneity theory...
...now the time for critique had come...
...Lukacs has passed for a revisionist not only because his early works have stimulated revisionist' thinking but because repeatedly—however much against his wish and will—he clashed with the Soviet authorities...
...But that could not be otherwise, since only the standpoint of H&CC could have provided a satisfactory foundation...
...It sets up the specialized sciences to rule on problem-solving procedures in the several fields of human endeavor and thereby withdraws from a polyhistor such as Hegel or Lukacs the right to make pronouncements on matters outside their own field—and "reading outside his field" is the classical definition of the intellectual...
...moreover, in the Soviet Union all energies had to be bent to the increase of production...
...Se non a vero a bene trovato...
...His late works have been savagely criticized in the East European press...
...30 English transl...
...see especially Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1964...
...The original title of this work—The Uniqueness of the Realm of Beauty—reminds us of Friedrich Schiller and points to Marcuse...
...When the Comintern leadership changed and his own faction was in sympathy with the new line, Lukacs repeated his act of self-criticism...
...Moreover, the publication of Marx's Early Manuscripts in 1932 proved that Lukacs had been right: they showed that for the founder of Marxism the proletarian revolution had been more than the emancipation of the workers—it was the emancipation of philosophy and of man himself...
...what Marianne Weber called Lukacs's "eschatological hopes" continued long into his Marxist period...
...who detested the colorless, schematic productions of "socialist realism," rejected agitprop art, and felt brutalized by the Five-Year Plan on the cultural front...
...3 With Lukacs, most commentators believed, Western intellectuals might hold a "dialogue"— provided there were any who could match his vast erudition or the breadth of his concerns...
...Just as his political decision had frozen all revolutionary dynamism into the order of the Party, and just as his revolutionary dialectic was being frozen into a dialectical system, so he did not Amour: Judith goes out to seduce Holofernes, the enemy general, and to kill him in order to save her people...
...Since Lukacs was convinced that good literature is essential for both a struggling proletariat and a socialist state, he appointed himself a teacher of taste in communism...
...in Telos 10...
...As the young Lukacs found his way to the forgotten draft manuscripts of the young Marx, so the work of the young Lukacs, disowned by the older Lukacs, is now taken up by a generation of young critics who will forever love the search more than its fruits...
...Incidentally, it can be shown that even in his romantic beginnings Lukacs had never made concessions to...
...And not only would the system have to explain the phenomena of the outside world...
...between revolutions, the revolutionary idea can live only in the Party...
...There is a line running from the German classics through Lukacs's early work and right into the monumental Aesthetics of his old age: ORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC 181 in the realm of "beautiful appearances" man experiences a liberating communion with truth...
...He totally fails to see that the drama is in the revelation (as in, say, Oedipus...
...To freeze dialectical thought into a teachable canon is the opposite of revolutionary action...
...37 As late as in 1962, he called "revisionism the greatest danger" and expressed a fear that Communists abroad might interpret Khrushchev's "coexistence" slogan as a serious goal instead of a tactical maneuver...
...They were enthusiasts who went to war against the old world and would hardly ask the Hungarian peasants what they wanted...
...182 HENRY PACHTER Nature and Freedom, Senses and Reason find their right and gratification as one.' 20 In his Aesthetics, Lukacs assumes a special "realm" where art permits cognition in its own peculiar manner...
...In 1924, when Lukacs wrote his brief monograph on Lenin, this theory of the avant-garde was still linked intimately with the hope of an early renewal of the revolutionary elan...
...1-19...
...Lukacs's development to Leninism can be followed in the sequence of essays he collected in H&CC, notably "Rosa Luxemburg," "Organization," and "Illegality...
...35 Lukacs, Die Zerstbrung der Vernunft, his weakest work (see note 5...
...This was now separated from its revolutionary function as a class outside society that is forced to subvert it and therefore is able to disperse its mystifications, and labor is hypostasized into "work" as a metaphysical "foundation"— a veritable ideology such as the young Lukacs had denounced...
...28 E.g., Lion Feuchtwanger, a novelist then much in vogue, who asserted that the "confessions" in the Moscow Trials rang true...
...At a time when German criticism led a servile and insignificant existence, Lukacs's work stood prominent...
...Art "discovers the path of humanity...
...25 Lukacs, Goethe and His Age, transl...
...In an article on Dostoevsky, he comes to grips with the problem boldly: literature supports the proletariat's struggle not by narrow partisanship or correct ideology but by teaching the reader how to face a reality beyond appearances, by presenting him with typecharacters who make the working of society transparent...
...he was attracted to the fashionable "vitalism" of Wilhelm Dilthey's school and communicated with disciples of the esoteric Stefan George, too...
...I wish that were all...
...It is therefore not true that these two "reformists" were insensitive to the cultural and Hegelian side of Marx...
...q Notes 'Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, transi...
...it is above all the incarnation of class consciousness itself—` `the tangible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness," he says in Lenin, after quoting the Communist Manifesto...
...44 This was the message of H&CC back in 1923, and this message was a method...
...Therefore it is not surprising that the new Preface of 1967, reiterating the recantation once more, warns a new generation of romantic revolutionaries not to be tempted by the enthusiastic errors of the author's flaming youth: "I am afraid my book became famous for the wrong reasons...
...He saw the age of the barbarians coming, and he prepared a time capsule for the survivors: the message was humanist letters...
...4 Their romantic protest may have been intended first as a reaction against materialism, capitalism, and bureaucracy, but it led to the irrationalistic and antirationalistic ideologies of nationalism and Nazism, which Lukacs was to fight so bitterly in his later days...
...It is not true that he was forced to do so...
...32 The methodological error Lukacs made in his sociology of literature is surprising...
...In the Preface to History and Class Consciousness (hereafter quoted as H&CC), a veritable Apologia pro vita sua, Lukacs soberly states that then neither he nor his fellow revolutionaries had yet understood the workings and meaning of a social revolution...
...Lukacs stated that modern art justifies uncontrolled demonism and gives recognition to the irrational...
...Nonsense...
...Not Stalin's crimes were his crime but his philosophical myopia...
...not the schematism of Marx but of Aristotle that stands in the way of Lukacs's perception...
...Thomas is imperceptible to its victim...
...he had adopted the language of the dictatorship, his style had become dry and brittle, his thinking dogmatic and bureaucratic...
...What is not classical has no right to be...
...With a generous sprinkling of isolated Marx quotations, he thus created a system, a veritable summa of Marxist philosophy, where that which is superstructure— most ironically—is mistaken for the base (see my essay "The Right to Be Lazy," in DISSENT, 20th Anniversary issue, Spring 1974...
...He also says, there and elsewhere, that he used literary criticism to smuggle intellectual contraband into Stalin's barbarous empire...
...I have mentioned Kierkegaard, but I should now trace the ideology back to St...
...In that same work Lukacs remarks that Don Quixote is "a story of lost illusions...
...The mainstream of Western culture at the turn of the century passed elsewhere...
...It is ironical that in earlier essays Lukacs himself had asked for "Volkstiimlichkeit" (folkishness...
...The nascent bourgeoisie destroys the illusions of the still lingering feudal class...
...It was a failure that happens only to those who have tried for the highest goal...
...Their literature does not afford us the kind of insight that satisfies Lukacs's craving for truth and harmony...
...In Lukacs's case the esprit de systeme imposed its operating code almost automatically: he was forced to prove that his rigid canon applied to all fields and all questions...
...But when the First World War broke out, it was precisely the European Geist that broke down...
...even Rosa Luxemburg, with her utopian hope of spontaneous creativity in class war, was a revolutionary "merely subjectively...
...His studies with Georg Simmel and Max Weber had revealed the coming of an iron age where bureaucracy and purposeful rationality would rule human behavior, and where all thinking, even that which seems intended to oppose the system, would reflect that structure...
...pp...
...To the end of his life, beneath all the Marxist jargon, Lukaes remained an idealist...
...BLukacs, Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur (Berlin [East]: Aufbau Verlag, 1952), p. 147...
...but she is attracted by his ferocity and kills him in a rage of offended womanhood...
...29 But Lukacs never was to disclose, later on, which passages in his voluminous writings had been "admission tickets...
...He simply had no ear for Brecht, Kafka or Beckett, for poetry or music...
...Although it is true that Marinetti and Benn were militarists, Barlach and Chagall religious, Nolde and Celine anti-Semitic, still, the majority of the avant-garde artists, especially in countries where the bourgeoisie was nationalistic, sympathized with the Left...
...He blames Solzhenitsyn for uncritically accepting the opinions of his protagonist, whom Lukacs compares to the inarticulate peasant Platon Karatayev in War and Peace...
...The family must have been everything he hated...
...he rejected them as vulgar epigones and as products of a continuous decline from the heights that had once been reached in Hegel, Ricardo, Balzac, and Darwin...
...who recognized the great value of the classical (bourgeois) traditions and the permanence of their examples even for Marxists...
...There are, however, other diggers at work...
...an adverse review in Under the Banner of Marxism did not yet make a martyr...
...An innocuous poem of Goethe's is said to refer to ORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC 183 the Peasant War...
...It was with genuine joy, therefore, that he hailed the appearance of Solzhenitsyn as the "harbinger of a new socialist literature"22—although he had serious reservations about Solzhenitsyn's narodnik philosophy...
...2. 9 The point is elaborated by both Watnick, I.c., and Andrew Arato in Telos 11, 1971: "Lukacs's Theory of Reification...
...20Hegel, Aesthetik, vol...
...Gyorgy von Lukacs, born in Budapest, was the son of an influential Jewish banker who had been knighted by the Hapsburg emperor...
...all apocalyptic, millennary hopes, whether of the anarchist type or Lukacs's own previous ecstasies, are "abstract...
...He assigns one style to a class at a particular period...
...see note 5...
...It was not until Khrushchev gave the signal that Lukacs joined the de-Stalinizers, and then he boasted: "I can truthfully say that I was objectively [!] an enemy of Stalin's methods even at the time when I still believed myself to be his follower...
...The reason is obvious: positivism destroys the metaphysical certainty that gives the master of the dialectical method inside knowledge of the World Spirit's next move...
...THIS LEADS to a number of consequences...
...It does not detract from Lukacs's achievement if I note that he used Marx's "Introduction" of the now famous Grundrisse, which Kautsky had published as Introduction to Critique of Political Economy in 1902, and the German Ideology, which Bernstein had published in his Dokumente des Sozialismus...
...This time it is...
...The Spirit was pressing to be realized in the world, but did not know how to become praxis...
...34Lukacs, Die Seele and die Formen (see note 19...
...1, P. 477...
...but his works of literary criticism imply his conviction that the artist's intuition offers direct access to that truth and harmony that eluded him in the realm of politics...
...The literary criticism of his later years did matter to Lukacs...
...Dreyfus reappeared in a new edition, printed in 1963—but in West Germany...
...Nothing could be farther from the truth...
...With them, as with the early Lukacs, cultural criticism has replaced the permanent revolution, and it is a strange irony that "bourgeois" teachers of English or of sociology should now mine the treasures of Lukacs's system for textbook excerpts and ideas...
...This part of his "idealistic" H&CC he never retracted...
...In order to pass his beloved "classical realists" through the censorship office, for instance, Lukacs must touch them up a little with proletarian rouge: thus, the last act of Faust II is said to be a criticism of capitalism...
...3 'Both examples from Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, transl...
...2 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press), chap...
...in Studies in European Realism (note 3...
...Far from it...
...36Lukacs, Marxismus and Stalinismus (see note 14), p. 229...
...ss The Historical Hero IT IS A MISCONCEPTION that a Communist who cares for literature must be a revisionist...
...George Steiner, in the Preface to Realism in Our Time (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964...
...33Watnick, Revisionism, l.c...
...In Ibsen's Rosmersholm, Rebecca has allowed her rival to go mad "in slow, imperceptible steps," and the tragedy reaches its climax when Rebecca realizes she is a murderer...
...24 What a moving sight: while the Nazi barbarians were booting down German culture, a frail Hungarian Jew, an exile sitting in a Moscow library, tries to rescue Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, and Holderlin for future generations of Germansj 25 Or: that same Western Communist, not too sure that he will survive the purges, writes lovingly about the Russian character of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, while Stalin's flunkeys are scribbling poems on the beauties of the tractor...
...See Brecht's answers in his Werke, vols...
...16"My Road to Marx" in: Marxismus and Stalinismus (see note 14...
...When he died, four years ago, he was eulogized for a number of conflicting reasons: • To some, he was the guardian of orthodox Marxism and the only disciple who had ever dared to compose a complete "system," including the volumes the master had not gotten around to write: a massive Ontology, an equally comprehensive Aesthetics, and the adumbration of an Ethics, which only his death prevented from growing to similar dimensions...
...This insight permits us to measure the extent of Lukacs's failure...
...Literature as Political Weapon THIS SOUNDS almost trivial, but it is the essence of Lukacs's thinking in his last years: his loyalty to the Bolshevik conception of the revolution and to the Soviet Union through 50 years would be vindicated if Soviet culture were to produce a Tolstoy rather than a Semyonov...
...27 George Lichtheim, Georg Lukdcs, I.e...
...His eschatological mood drew him to the Russian Revolution: once again the Light was coming from the East and, incidentally, Lukacs was preparing a Habilitationsschrift on Dostoevsky...
...In this respect the disciples suffer from the same misconception as their master did when he taught the proletarian writers "realism...
...Lukacs had to defend modem realism against the Nazis and the Stalinists, excluding on one side romantic idealism and irrationalism, on the other positivist naturalism...
...It is obvious that the two kinds of "errors' are related...
...Humans have to see themselves as functioning parts of the system...
...Nonsense: the "doomed landlord" is a Napoleonic general whose father was an upholsterer and who is constantly referred to as a "roturier" (bourgeois), whereas his prosperous neighbors belong to the old aristocracy, and the peasants, as we should expect from Balzac's imagination, support these traditional nobles against the upstart intruder...
...Robert Anchor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969...
...But others remembered him as the iconoclast who, 50 years earlier, published a fiery book, History and Class Consciousness, r which had proclaimed precisely the opposite: that Marx had never intended a system, that the very idea of a system is repugnant to the spirit of dialectics, and that to be an orthodox Marxist one need not subscribe to any particular proposition in Das Kapital as long as one follows the Method of revolutionary dialectics...
...26 It will simply not do to dismiss Lukacs's literary criticism written in the Stalin period as "exercises in party regularity" or "crap...
...It is characteristic of sectarORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC 185 ians and paranoids that they see all their enemies as clever disguises of one and the same—and dialectics is very helpful in establishing that, too...
...Their works may urge us to ask where we are going, but they do not show the transcendence that matters to Lukacs...
...To a generation that had come out of the post-World-War-I revolutions somewhat numbed, this was an exciting promise...
...21 In Goethe and His Age, Lukacs concludes that "in the world he knew [Goethe] could not see any objective social force able to fight Mephisto"[whom he had previously identified as representing capitalism...
...The great writers of bourgeois realism from Walter Scott and Balzac (he thought they were in the same class) to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann were his models...
...Lukacs went to Berlin and Heidelberg as a dandy and aesthete, a brilliant adept of the exquisite circle of Max Weber and Emil Lask...
...Lukacs thinks the playwright should have allowed her to kill in cold blood so as to keep the tragedy "pure" and without "accident...
...As a student of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, he was aware of the universal trend toward technocracy...
...I suppose he no longer knew when he had been tacking...
...37 Lukacs, Tactics and Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1972...
...On reification see Heinrich Rickert,"Geschichtsphilosophie," and Emil Lask, "Rechtsphilosophie," both in Windelband, Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Festschrift fir Kuno Fischer (Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1905), vol...
...43See note 36...
...Karl Korsch, who had simultaneously published the same views, never repudiated them...
...One knows that the symbolist writers, who had enthusiastically greeted the revolution in 1917, were increasingly unhappy in Stalin's Russia...
...He asserted that all through the late 1920s and the 1930s and up to 1948-49, Stalin had been right "tactically as well as theoretically against all oppositions"— but that then unfortunately "he mistook tactical necessities for theoretical truths and thereby degraded Marxism into an ideology...
...English trans...
...2 Another had paid him the dubious compliment For numbered notes, see p. 187...
...The latter is, according to Hegel, a necessary condition of progress and civilization...
...His Leninist surrender to the Party, which terminated his independence as a revolutionary thinker, paralleled his turn to rightwing realism in defense of the Soviet Union and all its institutions and policies...
...Even in those famous "Blum Theses" of 1928, which he has quoted as proof of his independence, he rejected the slogan "democracy against fascism" in favor of Stalin's watchword: "No pact with pseudo-oppositions (against Horthy...
...Naturally he also rejected Maoism as "subjectivist...
...In that same article he pleaded that one should not forget Stalin's merits...
...In the light of his own self-evaluations, Lukacs was never a "revisionist...
...On the contrary, the essence of his teaching was that class war is also an intellectual (geistiger) struggle...
...He need change only a few words...
...In the Party resides Hegel's World Spirit or the "identical subject-object" for which the romantic aesthete had been yearning and which he now finds embodied in an institution...
...Lukacs decrees that this is no drama since no precipitous action is shown...
...But, in reality, creative artists react to their environment in highly differentiated ways...
...Thus at the end of his long life, after a diversion into politics that failed twice, Lukacs seems to have returned to his original position—whether neo-Kantian, Fichtean, or Hegelian is not important here19—that art offered a solution to his existential problem...
...5. A similar claim was made when he returned to Hungary in 1947...
...The Party is not just an instrument of class war, necessary as that may be...
...The revolution Lenin had accomplished was unique and irreversible, comparable to Kierkegaard's "leap...
...A story Lukacs wrote in 1912 clearly shows the influence of Weber's and Simmel's ideas on alienation: "The work grew out of life, but has grown far away from it...
...sensitive and intelligent, he was alienated threefold from everything "real" by his race and religion, his language and nationality, his class and education...
...Emil Lask referred to Marx and Simmel as having studied Verdinglichung (reification), the hypostasizing of abstract concepts (such as Natural Law) as though they had a real, independent existence apart from the social-cultural realities they symbolize...
...On its success depended the realization of what the Revolution had promised and so far had, failed to deliver...
...These friends may have fortified his own 177 neo-Platonic belief that "in the aesthetic sphere one might attain contact with ultimate reality through an act of intuition...
...Liberalism was no answer to his problem of identity...
...He considered his ideas on style a guarantee that socialism would survive the Stalinist distortion...
...or that he would encourage a criticalsatirical writer like Brecht when his allegorical plays take capitalist society apart...
...Great art restores the genuine and harmonious relations between people because it restores harmony to man: "This dream [of the golden age] is the real, authentic core of Dostoevsky's utopias, a state of the world in which people can know and love each other and civilization is no longer a hindrance to the development of man's soul.''' e This sounds almost like the young Lukacs, author of Die Seele and die Formen, where art is presented as a special form of knowing eternal truths, and it corresponds with the intention of his late Aesthetics, where art appears as the way of realizing that evasive unity of fact and value, knowledge and practice, object and subject, all coinciding at the act of creation...
...irrationalism...
...Miguel Unamuno confuted this delusion in 1914, and it can generally be said that whenever Lukacs does not invent an idea he is usually 40 years behind in scholarship...
...He regarded atomic science and biology as conspiracies to promote such vicious aberrations as positivism and irrationalism...
...Perhaps one might compare it to the impact, more than a generation later, of Sartre or Marcuse on a wider audience...
...Although Lukacs mentions the earlier debate in Die Neue Zeit, he does not seem to have known What Is To Be Done...
...Teacher of Taste THE TRANSFIGURATION from a St...
...it was Lenin's bugbear and it can provoke a member of the Frankfurt School to write a sentence that is comprehensible at first reading...
...Alas, contemporary Soviet writers did not know how to build full-blown characters, and contemporary bourgeois writers were concerned with all sorts of conceits rather than with substance...
...One should think that a Marxist critic would rejoice when a bourgeois writer like Kafka willy-nilly describes the disintegration of his world or his person...
...As his beloved Novalis said: Philosophy is really homesickness...
...Some have wondered whether these censorious and frequently unfair attacks on idealists, subjectivists, and positivists may not conceal guilty memories of those early associations.' The intellectuals wanted to oppose Geist (spirit) to gold...
...moreover, he criticized his romantic past in the guise of a study on Moses Hess, 12 the companion of Marx's Feuerbachian youth...
...He joined the Hungarian Communist party and took part in its unhappy venture, the seizure of power in 1919...
...not his system was at fault but a personal failing...
...Thought itself is a prisoner of the system...
...In The Destruction of Reason, 3S he attacked the modern sciences with ultraLeninist fervor: he called Wittgenstein a brother-in-arms of Heidegger...
...The Faustian moment, which he tried to catch in H&CC, passed him by;21 the unity of theory and practice eluded him...
...Twice at critical moments in his life, he tells us in his autobiography, 16 he forsook politics for literature: the first time after his efforts to reform the Hungarian Communist party in exile had failed, the second time after the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1956...
...His impressive collected works (Gesamtausgabe) in 16 volumes had to appear in West Germany...
...Lukacs, Realism in Our Time (New York: Mander, 1964...
...He can transform an appeal to the master's spirit into canonical quotations—and there is no Marxist worse afflicted with quotomania than Lukacs...
...ZBLukacs, Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur...
...The Preface of 1946 fulminates against "counterrevolutionary calumniators who pretend that the new Russia has rejected classical Russian literature...
...Only alienation, a specific mode of capitalistic production, will be overcome by the socialist revolution...
...A new variant of the discredited pauperization theory emerges: Even if the workers are not actually getting poorer, they are becoming poorer in spirit...
...the workers, with their trade unions and their parties, do not overthrow it but—through their activities—help it to survive...
...He never stopped being a disciple of Hegel—who saw Napoleon as "the World Spirit on a white horse...
...27 On the contrary: these exercises are adroit maneuvers in a literary guerrilla war...
...Rodney Livingstone, with Lukacs's new Preface to the 1967 edition (Cambridge: MIT Press paperback, 1972...
...Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963...
...184 HENRY PACHTER judge that revolutionary literature must be experimental or avant-gardist...
...One looks in vain for Mauriac, Martin du Gard, Melville, Dreiser, Malraux, Gide, Joyce, Proust, Musil, Broch, Hesse in The Historical Novel, a book that praises many second-rate writers...
...I hope they will not be interpreted as nit-picking, for I mean to ask why a man like Lukacs had to forget what he knew...
...Alfred Kazin, in the Introduction to Lukacs's Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964...
...Augustine: the City of God is the Church...
...Remembering the flimsy justifications for the operation of the guillotine in 1793, Lukacs also had no illusions about the charges in the Moscow mock trials of 1937...
...No act that is not directly related to that point of reversal can be called revolutionary, and "class consciousness" cannot be defined in terms of an ever-growing awareness but only as that "moment...
...The Quest THE QUESTION is not: Which was the "real" Lukacs?—but: How were these three characters related to each other at different times...
...In his critique of modern writing, Lukacs tried to reconcile his increasing conservatism with the revolutionary stance of his youth...
...1 ° All gradualist, meliorist tactics are called "passive...
...23 "Balzac" (1940), in European Realism (see note 3...
...It was the loss of something that had been central to Geist: "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God...
...My hunch is that for Lukacs, as for other Jewish intellectuals of his generation, Cabbalistic reminiscences took the shape of ultramodern philosophies...
...40In New Hungarian Quarterly, 24 (Winter 1966), a magazine published in Budapest, she speaks of his "valid work since the 1930s," excluding H&CC...
...Perhaps the key to the riddle of Lukacs can be found in the absurd grouping of positivism and irrationalism...
...Nor did the Comintern condemn a book because its content was unacceptable...
...Lukacs deplored the "fate" of Korsch, who had thought he knew better than the Party and was expelled, and thereby deprived of history...
...Intensely aware of their fascination, 33 he traced the protofascist ideas back to their vitalist sources...
...Style carries a message, too, and it must be commensurate with content...
...6 Under the guise of a somewhat pedantic analysis of various literary genres, the book proclaimed that modem man had forfeited his heritage: authentic cultures can produce myths and therefore leave epics as a residue...
...The Lukacs, however, whom the obituarists praised most was a scholar who had made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge and especially of literature and who had written sensitively on the theory of aesthetics...
...he charged that John Dewey considered changes in the social environment impossible...
...The obvious flaws in these essays often betray the contrivance...
...On Lukacs and Mannheim see Martin Jay in Telos 20...
...In this fire the dirty reality of class war was being purified ORTHODOX HERETIC, STALINIST ROMANTIC 179 and transformed into the gold of intellectual aspirations: Communism, Lukacs said, was not simply the substitution of the law of the market by a more intelligent or even more humane distribution system but the liberation of the Whole Man from alienation and solitude...
...George Lichtheim, Georg Lukdcs (New York: Viking, 1971...
...18 and 19...
...Marxismus and Stalinismus (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1970...
...These ideas profoundly influenced the thinking of the Frankfurt School and its friends—Erich Fromm, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, George Lichtheim, Jurgen Habermas—and through them, a generation later, the New Left in Europe and even in the United States...
...This, of course, was not a matter of taste, or of losing some embellishment of life...
...Lukacs mistook for consummated that which, in H&CC, he had announced as purpose: "As soon as mankind has understood and restructured its existence, truth acquires a wholly new aspect...
...Because of limited space I omit citations of the relevant passages from Friedrich Schiller...
...After his death his disciples were suspended from the University of Budapest...
...He also fails to see that Hebbel's Judith is a psychological drama whose theme is familiar to the post-World-WarII audience from Sartre's Dirty Hands or Hiroshima Mon Critic and Polyhistor AT THIS POINT, the price of tacking grew exceedingly high...
...One knows the allergy of neo-Marxists to positivism...
...that "Lukacs is actually a more bourgeois and academic humanist" than "the Luxemburgs and Trotskys, far more imposing figures...
...The world has been forsaken once again, but this time in a more serious way...
...We notice here both the heritage of Kierkegaard and Lukacs's own independent discovery of Lenin's theory of the party...
...H&CC was The Theory of the Novel turned political...
...now it lives on in art and literature and, to be precise: in classical literature, in the exemplary, the model, the ideal...
...He even made elementary mistakes unbecoming the great scholar he was.* *I will cite only a few examples...
...much as enthusiastic intellectuals would like to abolish it, this source of their Weltschmerz is likely to stay with humanity...
Vol. 22 • April 1975 • No. 2
