PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG LUKACS

...his father, a prominent Budapest banker who loved him dearly ("I will make every sacrifice necessary so that you can become a great man, recognized and famous," reads a letter from József von Lukács), seems to have had little comprehension of what truly moved his son...

...But he insisted on the inadequacy of creating utopia "by purely artistic means...

...You wanted to redeem me . . . but I cannot be saved...

...Do not the Marxist Lukfics and the Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel ultimately find Dostoevsky compelling for the same reasons...

...As early as 1908 a schoolmate wrote of Lukács's "rapid conversion to socialism...

...instead of declaring "the gods of reality, of history" to be "obstinant and rash" as he had in Soul and Form, he discussed the novel as the epic form of fragmented contemporary society, one in which the individual is "problematic" and "transcendentally homeless...

...In contrast, the Platonist ("the critic") never dares to "think aloud about himself," and since he "can only experience life through the work of others . . . ," he always fails to "capture life...

...Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1885, he had poor relations with his mother...

...He explains that it is the ethical problem of terrorism that most concerns him, and he opines that 1905 showed that "we are now faced with a new type of man that we should become familiar with...

...His inability to provide an answer took on added urgency as the world war engulfed Europe...

...The poet speaks of himself and is never "problematic...

...The Bolshevik Revolution heightened his interest in Marx, although he was not yet "converted" to Marxism...

...And could art, perhaps, bring redemption to him—or to anyone else...

...This produced a utopianism, he said, a "view that the saving principle of all hardship may be found in pure human relationships...

...In The Theory of the Novel Lukics developed themes that were later given Marxist formulation in History and Class Consciousness...

...If Irma could not be his "salvation" while alive, could his work be, now that she was dead...

...LUKACS ASPIRED TO "HABILITATE" with a work on aesthetics, and later recounted that it was the formulation of his questions that intrigued Weber...

...Michael Lowy, Georg Luktics—From Bolshevism to Romanticism (London: New Left Books, 1979...

...Although Lukács appreciated Marx, he rejected the materialism he associated with Marxism...

...now I am jenseits von Chick and Ungliick [beyond happiness and unhappiness...

...According to Bloch, during the 1905 revolution Grabenko borrowed a baby in order to hide dynamite beneath its blankets...

...The sources of Lukács's philosophical fecundity can be discerned in 161 of his letters that have now been translated, and which span his early journey from aesthetic to ethical and political preoccupations.* Most of them come from a now famous briefcase found in a Heidelberg bank vault a year after his 1971 death in Budapest...

...It is, after all, hardly astonishing that in a time of world war and revolution a "problematic" intellectual, nurtured in romantic anticapitalism, immersed in German philosophy, and preoccupied with Dostoevsky, became a Marxist...

...She was described by Bilazs as someone who virtually had stepped out of a Dostoevsky novel...

...and Lee Congdon, The Young Luktics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983...

...here he was often harassed by those who can be called hares only with great generosity, and he himself stooped to their height on more than one occasion...

...Notes 1 Many of these studies are excellent and this reviewessay is indebted to them: Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Luktics and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979...

...Every art form, Lukics wrote, is "defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life which it accepts and organizes as the basis of a totality complete in itself...

...with a Raskolnikov's justification for killing the pawnbroker...

...Thus every great essayist writes with irony since he is preoccupied at once with the accidental (the work addressed) and the necessary (those ultimate questions...

...The problematic individual has no recourse but to "interiority" because the "is"—the empirical world—is opposed to the "ought"—how it should be...

...The "foundering of form against life" thus results in a tragic vision of the world...

...I pay by 'sacrificing' life...

...Indeed, Weber emerged as his great advocate: "I want you to become one of my colleagues as much as I want anything," the great sociologist wrote to him...

...Irma, the great love of this "Platonist," threatened his sacrifice...

...Lukacs refused because "be it only by way of suggestion" the material was "indispensable for the historico-philosophical comprehension of present-day reality...

...The result is "complete incongruity between action and soul...

...In Bloch, Lukács later reminisced, he encountered someone "who could do philosophy as if the whole of modern philosophy did not exist, and who showed that it was possible to do philosophy like Aristotle or Hegel...

...The Marxist Lukacs will later transform this into the idea of reification by arguing that in the capitalist world of the market one form, the commodity-form, becomes dominant...

...they must be) with Lukfics's writings, a remarkable portrait of the evolution of a radical thinker emerges...

...Everything else has an instrumental quality and serves as means to that end...

...2 See Gyiirgy Markus's "Life and the Soul: the Young Lukics and the Problem of Culture," in A. Heller, ed., Luktics Revalued...

...In Soul and Form Lukács's problem was that he saw an irreconcilable dualism between the realm of ultimate values ("Life") and the inauthentic empirical world ("life...

...Platonic and Kantian motifs structured these assertions...

...It had been unopened since November 7, 1917—a year before he became a Marxist at the relatively late age of 33—and Lukács apparently told nobody about it...

...Their] works become the highest, the most purely human works attainable, it is true, but . . . they themselves are the least blessed, the least redeemed of men of all...

...At a time when Marxist philosophy was becoming increasingly crude, Lukács forcefully returned the categories of classical German thought to it, provoking (predictably) the ire of both Social Democrats and Bolsheviks...

...The book will go beyond Dostoevsky . . ." we read in a March 1915 letter, "it will contain my metaphysical ethics and a significant part of my philosophy of history...

...Whereas Kant focused on aesthetic judgment, Lukács declared: "Works of art exist...

...373...

...In the half century after he became a Bolshevik, Lukfics lived as a problematic intellectual—a lonely Marxist elephant— in a communist Himalayas woefully distant from the socialist idea...

...In The Theory of the Novel, Lukfics did not yet posit world-historical action by the universal class...

...But "When the structures made by man for man are really adequate to man, they are his necessary and native home...

...and J.M...

...Neo-Kantianism emerged in the late 19th century as an attempt to rehabilitate—and delimit— philosophy in light of that progress...

...Whereupon Lukács quoted Hebbel's Judith again...

...And just as the individual who chooses between two forms of guilt finally makes the correct choice when he sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea, so it also takes strength to assess this sacrifice in terms of the collective action...

...In a 1943 essay on Dostoevsky, Lukfics again raises the notion of the emergence of a "new human type...

...He sought an answer, it seems, in the spirit of Dostoevsky...

...He at once wrestled with the fate and nature of literary categories and with his own fate and nature...

...This too Lukfics rejected and here we can see the parallel between his personal and philosophical evolution...

...Messianism...

...Where once Irma threatened his sacrifice of "life," where once the tragic was conceived by him in the metaphysical and individualized terms of Soul and Form, he had arrived at a vision of mass-historical action in which guilt was inescapable...

...Art is Lucifer's `making things better.' Seeing the world as homogenous before the process of becoming so...

...Revolution, redemption— making life into Life—imposes self-sacrifice in the form of necessarily tragic choices...

...As Lukfics's student György Markus has argued, the young Lukács was in fact pluralistic in his modes of analysis, at times metaphysical/existential, as in Soul and Form, and at times historically and sociologically oriented...

...This, it would seem, was Lukács's Dostoevskian response to Judith's dilemma, that is until he went rapidly "from Dostoevsky to Hebbel's position," as Michael Ltiwy puts it in his incisive account of Lukics's evolution...

...Through that form relations among human beings appear to take on "the character of a thing" and acquire "a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people...

...Mann's romantic anticapitalist tome Reflections of a Non-Political Man used him as a starting point...

...In Soul and Form Lukics argued that while the essayist (or "the critic") is generally assumed to be facilitating our understanding of a poem or painting, he in fact speaks "about the ultimate problems of life, but in a tone which implies that he is only discussing pictures and books...

...Its most brilliant product remains his 1923 classic History and Class Consciousness...

...This standard we call sacrifice...

...In a 1909 368 letter to Popper, Lukfics asserted that his aesthetics were based on "the assumption that all genuine and profound need for expression finds its own typical way—its scheme if you will—which is the form...

...For this Lukics, the issue is the creation, by means of the revolutionary proletariat's historical action, of a world in which structures made by humans are adequate to them...

...369 Could there be a real realm...

...with means and ends...

...3 See "Stavrogin's Confession" in Georg Lukfics, Reviews and Articles (London: Merlin Press, 1983) and "Dostoevsky," in Georg Lukacs, Marxism and Human Liberation (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973...

...He continued to wrestle with a theme we have already noted—the positing by art of a utopian wholeness which, as art, remained an illusory embodiment of redemption...

...In short, faced with the ultimate revolutionary question—that of means and ends—he projected a tragic unity of moral opposites...

...n his diaries, the poet Bela Bilazs wrote of his friend Georg Lukács in 1914: "Gyuri's great new philosophy...

...It was the home of Max Weber as well, and Lukács quickly became a member of his circle...

...Inside were an array of manuscripts and some 1,600 letters to and from a virtual Who's Who of the Central European intelligentsia: Max Weber, Thomas Mann, Karl Mannheim, Georg Simmel, Martin Buber, Karl Polanyi, Ernst Troeltsch, and Karl Jaspers, to list but a few...

...In essence, this is a very ancient problem expressed most pointedly by Hebbel's Judith: "If God had placed sin between me and the act ordered for me to do, who am Ito be able to escape it...

...True values, it was believed, were dissolving— perhaps irrevocably—before the march of a spiritless and misconceived "progress...

...I have only accomplishments, and I am aware that they alone can make me human...

...That Lukics envisioned this dichotomy not only in literary but in the most pressing of immediate terms is evident from his response to Weber's proposal that the opening half of his essay—which Weber warned was "almost unintelligible to anyone but those who know you intimately"—be cut for the sake of publication...

...In a 1909 letter he wrote: Any accomplishments fall from the tree of my life as so much overripe fruit, leaving the barren branches brooding in the autumn wind...

...They have no connection with my life and provide neither form nor content for it...

...If anyone could have saved her it was I. . . . " But then he told Popper not to worry, for "in a few days I'll be able to start working, and that is the only thing remaining for me and will forever be in the future...

...One must become a cruel Realpolitiker out of a mystical ethic and has to violate the absolute commandment "Thou shalt not kill," which is clearly not an obligation towards structures...

...they remain more silent, less outspoken than those men of everyday life...

...Salvation is neither in everyday life, nor in creating art...

...but how can they do that when they cease to be mine the minute they are born...

...The poetic vision was one that could "strip without effort . . . every character, human relationship, and conflict of the reified shell in which they are all presented today and pare them down, to reduce them to their purely spiritual core...

...This he contrasted with the "integrated civilization" of ancient Greece in which the "hero" is at home in an "organic—and therefore intrinsically meaningful—concrete totality...

...The Marx he knew was filtered through Georg Simmel, with whom he studied in Berlin in 1909-10...

...Mary Gluck, Georg Lukiics and his Generation, 19001918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985...

...3 In a 1922 article, he stressed the contradiction between Dostoevsky's politics and poetics...

...Plato postulated two worlds, a permanent and real one of forms (or "ideas") accessible to our reason, and an endlessly fluctuating empirical realm accessible to our senses...

...Dostoevsky had cast an imposing shadow over the Central European intelligentsia for some time...

...It is, he insists, literature's mission "to put questions, to raise problems in the form of new men and new fates of men," to ask the question properly, not necessarily solve it...

...The Theory of the Novel is dedicated to Yelena Grabenko, the Russian former Social Revolutionary (and unsuccess370 ful artist) Lukics wed in 1914...

...This orientation went against all the anti-metaphysical biases then current in German thought...

...His History of the Evolution of Modern Drama focused on its subject as "the drama of the bourgeoisie," the drama of a fragmented society contrasted with the organic one of the Greek polis...

...he was alienated from home and country...

...Raskolnikov's problem in Crime and Punishment was whether he could be a "Napoleon" who stepped over men "for the sake of great aims" and engaged in a "psychological experiment" that risked "the whole physical and moral existence of the experimenter...

...While he returned to work on his aesthetics, events ultimately distracted him...

...Young "Gyuri" gravitated to German culture...

...The homogenous world as the goal of salvation...

...My life possesses nothing but these fruits...

...The order of priorities always includes characteristic dialectical complications when the soul is not directed toward itself but toward humanity, as is the case with the politician and the revolutionary...

...Lukfics premised his definition of the ethical problem of terrorism on 371 a distinction between an ethics of the empirical world and one of the soul: I don't see in Ropshin...

...For while the latter takes on its own life and may posit a realm of wholeness and perfection in contrast to the empirical world, artistic utopia is illusion...

...For Lukics, Dostoevsky's work remained a protest against modern society and a yearning for a utopia in which men live harmoniously: "The spontaneous, wild and blind revolt of Dostoevsky's characters occurs in the name of the golden age...

...How are they possible...

...IN FACT DOSTOEVSKY does not appear until the very end of The Theory of the Novel...

...After Hegel's death in 1831, speculative philosophy had come into increasing disrepute, especially with the enormous strides made by the natural sciences...

...The reasons for his failure included his "foreignness" (particularly his Jewish origins), resistance by narrow pedants, and the impression that he was an "essayist" and not a "systematic" philosopher...

...the young Karl Mannheim, as we learn from one of his letters to Lukács, was planning a book on Dostoevsky...

...Between The Theory of the Novel and "Tactics and Ethics" Lukács was compelled to serve in the Army Censor's office in Budapest, and his presence led to the formation of the famous "Sunday Circle" of young Hungarian intellectuals...

...In early December 1918, before Saul became Paul, he wrote an article on "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem," which rejected bolshevism on the grounds that its premise was "the metaphysical assumption that the bad can engender the good, or, as Razumikhin says in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, that it is possible to lie our way to the truth...

...Matthew, Mark, Lukács and Bloch...

...Only the situation is new and the people are different...

...With this in mind, it is instructive to see what Lukács later wrote on Dostoevsky...

...a symptom of a disease but rather a new manifestation of an old conflict between the first ethic (duties towards social structures) and the second (duties of the soul...

...But at the same time it teaches us that, even faced with the choice of two ways of incurring guilt, we should still find that there is a standard attaching to correct and incorrect action...

...Many of these letters have been utilized already in the recent outpouring of Lukács scholarship.' Read alone they are difficult to appreciate by anyone not initiated into the German and Hungarian intellectual milieus of the first decades of this century...

...Thus Lukics saw in Dostoevsky a realist who presented imperatives at odds with his own political enunciations...

...Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Roman and Littlefield, 1981...

...And another of Lukfics's friends, the Heidelberg Neo-Kantian Emil Lask, is reported to have mused, "What are the names of the four Evangelists...

...Stefan Zweig and Freud later wrote on him...

...It was the problem of "culture" that linked Lukfics's intellectual and personal life...

...Balzac's ability to portray the classes with which he sympathized as doomed and others as "the real men of the future" led Engels, in a famous letter, to praise the French novelist as a realist...

...There is much irony in the fact that Lukács, holder of two doctorates and championed by no less than Weber, failed to secure a university career...

...Lukács only completed an introduction, which eventually appeared as his Theory of the Novel...

...See also Zoltan Tar's introduction to Selected Correspondence...

...Lukics's issue was whether his age was, in Markus's words, "an expression of the existential and ontological tragedy of culture or of an historical crisis from which recovery was possible...

...LUKACS ARGUED THAT Dostoevsky ultimately left no exit for his characters because he himself didn't believe his faith could be sustainable in his age...

...In fact, in "Tactics and Ethics" he goes from Dostoevsky to Hebbel via Ropshin in this telling passage: . there are situations—tragic situations—in which it is impossible to act without burdening oneself with guilt...

...in its final pages he only detected "intimations" of "a new epoch," expressed abstractly by Tolstoy but portentously by Dostoevsky...

...Lukács hoped to "habilitate" in Heidelberg, that is, write the post doctoral work required by German universities of young scholars to secure an academic post, and he and his spiritual comrade Ernst Bloch were renowned there for their eschatological and Dostoevskian concerns...

...it "may" not, but yet it "must" be committed...

...In fact, Lukfics now placed his own concerns as a "problematic individual" in a historically embedded context...

...318 pp...

...Lukacs saw himself as a critic and told Irma Seidler that he wrote essays because he could not write verse...

...Lukfics utilized a distinction between the creative artist (the "poet") and the critic (the "Platonist") and (sounding more like Schiller than Kant) he proposed that each represents a "type of soul" which expresses itself in its appropriate form: the poet through verse, the Platonist in prose...

...The most fertile Marxist mind of our times was surely that of Lukács, and it was a mind that matured beside many of the elephants that roamed Central European intellectual valleys in the early twentieth century...

...These lines from Friedrich Hebbel's play Judith, based on the story of a woman who must kill a tyrant, reappeared in his 1919 essay "Tactics and Ethics," which he later described as "an inner balancing of accounts" enabling him to become a Communist...

...It was to ethics, not politics, that Lukfics gave priority, as he makes evident in revealing exchanges with Paul Ernst in the spring of 1915: "The problem is to find the pathways leading from soul to soul...

...One pays for everything...

...with a Grand Inquisitor's contraposing earthly bread and human freedom...

...One sees his personal and intellectual development from the Kantian cum existential posture of his first volume of essays, Soul and Form (1910-11), through his unfinished "Heidelberg Aesthetics," to the more Fichtean and Hegelian Theory of the Novel (1914-15), and finally his conversion to bolshevism in 1918...

...This would seem to complicate the claim that Lukfics's conversion to Marxism was one from Dostoevsky to Hebbel...

...The question remained: Where was redemption to be found...

...In one of his novels Ropshin . . . put the problem of individual terror in the following terms: murder is not allowed, it is an absolute and unpardonable sin...

...But once this happened, his question was, "Who was to save us from Western civilization...

...We find this in theoretical formulation in his unfinished Heidelberg "Philosophy of Art" (1912-14) where he discussed "the superpersonal tragedy" of artists "which follows from the essence of art": They themselves remain unredeemed . . . all the perfection with which they endow their works . . . which flows out of them into the work, is futile for them...

...Weber was keenly interested in the Russian novelist, as was the poet Ady...

...Echoing Nietzsche, he told Popper in a December 1910 letter that "Once I was ungliicklich [unhappy...

...In other words, in Raskolnikov Lukfics reinvents the problem of Hebbel's Judith but in terms of an isolated individualism turned radically inward and lacking transcendent purpose...

...Forms were posited by Lukics as meaningful, atemporal structures through which human beings express their—forever unfulfilled—possibilities in the face of everyday, inauthentic "life...

...In the latter case, however, the idea represents an imperative of the world-historical situation, a historicophilosophical mission...

...Lukacs now historicized his formerly atemporal aesthetic categories...

...Both German and Hungarian were spoken in the Lukács house, and guests included the likes of Bela Bartók, Thomas Mann, and Max Weber...

...Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Luktics, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984...

...In a 1962 preface to its republication he reconstructed his mood at the time: he had had no objections if the war resulted in the collapse of the Romanovs, Hohenzollern, and the Hapsburgs...

...Lukács dialectically concluded that however reactionary Dostoevsky might have been, his denunciation of revolution "unexpectedly turns into an artis372 tic glorification of its absolute necessity...

...The book begins by linking the forms of epic literature to the civilizations that produced them...

...As yet this was the vague socialism of a radically alienated critic influenced by the Hungarian syndicalist theoretician Ervin Szab6 and the poetry of Endre Ady...

...For Kant a priori categories and intuitions of the mind structure our knowledge of the world...

...What Lukacs sought in Dostoevsky was a condemnation of the epoch of absolute sinfulness on the one hand, and a secularized religious projection of its opposite, a communion (or community) of souls, on the other...

...Could it be that the tension between Hebbel and Dostoevsky was never truly resolved...

...when contextualized and examined (as *Georg Lukács, Selected Correspondence 1902-1920, edited, translated, and annotated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar with an introduction by Zoltan Tar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986...

...A friend described his transformation as a religious one—within a week "Saul became Paul...

...Plato gave "form to the myth of Socrates," using his mentor's destiny as the "vehicle for the questions he . . . wanted to address to life about destiny...

...He asked: was the latter already "the Homer" or merely the harbinger of a new world to be born...

...As his letters vividly testify, he believed that normal life and happiness would of necessity destroy his work...

...The Heidelberg Lukács came to was the seat of one of the major Neo-Kantian schools in the persons of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Lask...

...It was an "adventure of interiority" and "the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them...

...Agnes Heller, ed., Luktics Revalued (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983...

...Thus Raskolnikov's "idea" becomes his sovereign, only to turn into "absolute emptiness" and tragedy as an inevitable consequence of its basis in "overstrained subjectivity...

...Dostoevslcy was preoccupied with suffering, faith, salvation, and guilt...

...The Hungary of Lukfics's youth was marked by rising reaction and anti-Semitism...

...My soul yearns for them but remains untouched by the possibilities...

...Elsewhere in the same book he sees, not the justification (that is impossible) but the ultimate moral basis of the terrorist's act as the sacrifice for his brethren, not only of his life, but also of his purity, his morals, his very soul...

...In retrospect, however, although this may have been the impression Lukács gave at the time, it simplifies his trajectory...

...The young Lukács must be understood within the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury romantic anticapitalist Weltanschauung of Central European intellectual circles, which contrasted Gemeinschaft (community), an idealized world of organic Germanic Kultur, with advancing "Anglo-French" Gesellschaft (society) with its mechanistic and utilitarian Zivilisation...

...There were also letters to Irma Seidler and Leo Popper, respectively the great love and closest friend of Lukfics's youth...

...Consequently, Lukfics proposed that "whether inner reality is superior to outer reality or vice versa" is "the ethical problem of utopia," that is, whether "the ability to imagine a better world can be ethically justified and . . . whether this ability can serve as the starting point for a life that is rounded in itself...

...He asks to be sent a novel by the Russian Social Revolutionary and assassin "Ropshin" (Boris Sakinov), who, Lulcics says, is of great importance "re: psychology of Russian terrorism, about which I'll have a lot to say when discussing Dostoevsky...

...To Popper he confided, "I am convinced that the source of my [intellectual] riches is my being what I am...

...In a later essay on Dostoevsky, Lukacs insisted that it is the manner of posing a problem that is crucial...

...2 How this played out for him is the key to Lukics's development, a development mediated by his sojourn in Heidelberg, by the Great War, and, importantly, by Fyodor Dostoevsky...

...Lukács took a radical antiwar position and turned from aesthetics to ethics by planning to write on Dostoevsky...

...Lucien Goldmann's important essay "The Early Writings of Georg Lukfics," Triquarterly, Spring 1967, is an abridged translation of an earlier piece...

...One notes that in a 1909 letter discussing these themes, Lukfics refers— proudly—to "my problematic existence...

...Through her," he commented, "Lukics married Dostoevsky, so to speak...

...In the fragmented modern world conventions appear to human beings as a "second nature" beyond them, "a charnel house of long-dead interiorities...

...That took place in December 1918, the month in which his "habilitation" was finally rejected...

...When his relation with Irma collapsed, Lukics contemplated taking his life, and a never-sent suicide note to her written in November 1908 speaks of his "total exclusion from all human community...

...I am on my way toward my center and I am convinced that nobody will be there to share the experience with me . . . " When Irma, following a failed marriage to a painter and an affair with one of Lukics's friends, jumped to her death in the Danube in 1911, a self-excoriating Lukics decreed that "loneliness, which I so desired, is upon me like a life sentence...

...Browning's Andrea del Sarto says "My works are nearer to heaven, but I sit here...

...And might this not help us understand his checkered relation to Stalinism...

...In other words, only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly—and tragically—moral...

...To characterize that context, he called the novel, using Fichte's phrase, the epic of "the epoch of absolute sinfulness...

...In other words, a tragic vision remains the structuring motif: for the Lukacs of 1909 or the poet he writes of shortly before the Great War...