THE WAY OF A SOVIET CRITIC
BORKENAU, FRANZ
The Way of a Soviet Critic By fRANZ BORKENAU GEORGE LUKACS was the only important Communist in the field of arts and letters to survive the great purge of the international old guard. But...
...Drills are drilling, shovels shovel, Pourers pour asphaltum...
...Germany, and contributes to German, Swiss and British magazines...
...And this fate now seems to threaten Lukacs...
...JUST FOR THI DEVIL OF IT Appearing at a dinner given by the Governors of the Federal Reserve System, President Truman said that he wanted the bankers to see that he neither wore horns nor had a tail...
...At present, he livas in Frankfurt...
...Maxim Gorky who, with all the charms of his narrative talent cannot be classed among the great epic creators of Russia, is praised to the stars...
...But Gogol is already falling into neglect...
...Nowadays, Lukacs in an enthusiastic brochure about Thomas Mann, expresses his views on modern music, and Arnold Schoenberg in particular, in the following terms: "Today Arnold Schoenberg makes himself ridiculous . . . For the originality of the music of theFaustus-Romance depends not merely on the atonality in itself but on the general character of the most recent music as the concentrated expression of spiritual and moral decadence . . . Music or composers sunk in the swamp of decadence, for whom nothing is more foreign than the consciousness of the tragedy of their own tendencies, who wish—rightfully —to have no connection with the tragic upshot of the art and the personality of Adrian Leverkuehn, automatically separate themselves from the spiritual world which has inspired the work of Thomas Mann...
...Since there appears a deceptive trace of Christian and idealistic metaphysics in his works on Marxlat theory of art, and since his Vienna...
...There is, of course, the prescribed paean in praise of Pushkin...
...Noting which, we add one more word...
...The moral of the fable, too: When most the city's moving forward...
...But it does not matter whether Lukacs interprets Thomas Mann correctly or whether he falsely ascribes to him his own opinions...
...ricspaper headline...
...Extremes meet...
...tt*e characterization of him "as "The poet of "the metropolitan interior"—a judgment that might have fitted Flaubert but which in a profound sense has no application to Dostojevsky...
...He was seeking a meaningful way of existence...
...The positions "or"" ^•rleuving change, naturally, according to their own attitudes toward the Communist Party...
...One cannot help wondering whether it is because in The Revivor he comes too close to dealing with things as they are today under the Soviet regime...
...It is sketched out for us in the stories and social prophesies of Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell...
...The citizen's least able to...
...Admirers of Dostojevsky must be content with the twenty pages devoted to him and with...
...Dead writers are accepted if they were, for their times, "progressive," not "reactionary...
...Whatever is indisputably great must, by definition, have been "progressive...
...This novel, to be sure, has already been written more than once...
...Georg Lukacs, a participant in Bela Kun's Soviet Government (like Matyas Rakosi, today, Soviet Hungary's new dictator, and Eugene Varga, the Kremlin's best-known economist), has for the last twenty yeara been the leading literary critic of Communism...
...Thus Lukacs writes hymns of praise about Tchernishevsky who is politically important but whose literary criticism is dull and whose peotry is simply ludicrous...
...1948...
...In flight from the despair of his age Lukacs threw himself into the arms of the Communist dogma...
...He is the author of World Communism, a History of the Communist International (New York 1939...
...Signs re-route around the rubble...
...Here we perceive the weakness of this Communist neo-classicism...
...I am no Socialist, no Red, You've not a thing to fear...
...the increasing abstractness of Goethe's later style he explains as a result of dissatisfaction with the Holy Alliance...
...The rank and level of this work is precisely determined by its tragic conclusion...
...It was no surprise, but it was irony...
...on the other hand, he is being used by his maatera to propagandize and apologize for those writers and thinkers who are needed by the party as fellow-defenders, but cannot be accepted according to the orthodox Marxist-Stalinist dogma of the day...
...It was no surprise, therefore, when Lukacs—only a modest professor after the Communist triumph in Hungary—was attacked by the orthodox Stalinists for "deviationism...
...The many-sided Faustus-Romance is so complex that it is difficult to determine to what extent this was the view of Thomas Mann...
...IN HIS PRE-MARXIAN DAYS Lukacs compared the happy ending of Tolstoy's War and Peace with the deep disillusion of Flaubert's Education Senumeniale...
...Tolstoi is endlessly discussed...
...We are justified in being fearful for the future of Lukacs, in fact for his very life...
...No tail upon my rear...
...Heidelberg and Berlin pasts have supplied him with a way of thinking unavailable to the run-of-the-mill Moscow militant, ne haa exercised a certain influance on Weatern intellectuals who are not party-liners, and sometimes not even Marxiats in the narrow sense...
...Today Lukacs glorifies precisely this "normality" and "soundness" which he formerly derided...
...He was placed under a decree of silence, which was not rescinded for many years...
...News Item, I have no horns upon my head...
...Living authors are praiseworthy to the extent that they are Communist or work with the Communists...
...Austrian-born Franz Borkenau went into British exile when Hitler came to power, and returned to Germany immediately after Hitler'a fall, to teach sociology at the University of Marburg...
...So Lukacs actually manages to present Goethe's enmity to the French Revolution as a proof of reaction...
...Or maybe, pressing ever left, They'd keep the fellow daied, bereft, Aid thus would pass these latest laws To kedgybirn from refreshing pause...
...Because of this the stature of Adrian Leverkuehn rises alone . . . above the cackling chorus of today's decadence...
...But the "soundness" of the Communist camp is not that of inner fulfillment, but that of a mechanical and external obedience to orders...
...Holes contrive to halt 'em...
...It is practically unbelievable that a literary critic of the rank which Lukacs one held makes no attempt to place Proust, Joyce and Rilke in their proper positions in the modern literary firmament...
...But the genuinely great Soviet poets of the early days, Blok, Jessenin, Pasternak and a realist of the overpowering stature of Pilnyak, remain in obscurity just because they do not satisfy the present demand for crude and hearty optimism...
...But decree or no decree, Lukacs has, ever since, carefully followed the principles he outlined two decades ago...
...The only perceptible difference consists in the fact that . Lukacs consistently uses the foreign neologism, decadent, while the Nazis stick to the regular German word degraded (entartet...
...There are similar absurdities in Lukacs' judgments of Shakespeare...
...The Reds would clap a further ban Upon the Gallic drinking man, Perhaps because they really think He might grow soft from our soft drink...
...Leadina With Mv Left KEEPING UP THI PRESSURE French Reds Press New Coca-Cola Ban...
...The rank asIpilfjBBkg^ie literary men of other days ..'^yW periods...
...It is difficult to distinguish between his attacks on "degraded art" and those voiced by the National Socialists...
...But Lukacs's attitudes toward the European literature of today are even sadder...
...Sholokhov, who certainly does not belong among the great figures of world literature, is placed in the front row just because he understood how to keep himself above water at every turn of the line of literary theory...
...Newspaper headline...
...In the works of these men we see the spiritual and physical degeneration of men who undertake to combine Communist doctrine with devotion to the values of the spirit...
...If I see horns upon your crowns And tails unon uour endsl MEN AT WORK Manhattan Streets More Torn Up Than at Any Time in City's History...
...He himself now offers the material for a first class "decadent" novel...
...And in this connection occurs the oft-quoted passage which employs Mann's Doktor Faustus as a justification for the decision of the Russian Politburo against modern music...
...Here the controlling impulse is an indiscriminate compulsion to enlist all literary greatness for political struggle...
...Any friendly approval of these great writers would have cost the critic his head...
...Even in the early days of his conversion, back in the twenties, Lukacs wrote a long and involved essay in an attempt to prove that the only yardstick of truth was the set of concepts at that time professed by the Communist Party, Frankness was no virtue in those days...
...The party leaders always viewed him with slight misgivings...
...By Richard Armour...
...In this case, however, they are less patent because anything in the nature of justification would have been more difficult to adduce...
...Lukacs was hauled on the carpet for his awkwardness in revealing the Bolshevik Holy of Holies...
...He damns them all as representatives of "imperialist decadence" and holds them responsible for the rise and spread of Fascist and Nazi influences...
...NON-RUSSIAN WRITERS fare even worse...
...The same sort of thing is observable in the treatment of the great epic writers of Russia...
...Excuse, though, my nearsighted frowns And pardon, banker friends...
...And the forms of modern art which express the depths of doubt and anguish which are characteristic of our time he showers with the same sort of denunciation, in substance if not precisely in form, as were hurled at them by the Babbitts of 1900...
...LUKACS'S CRITICISM has different standards for living and dead writers, but in both cases they are simple and easily identifiable...
...For few other ranking Communist intellectuals ever took as great and infinite pains to hew to the party line...
...Lukacs denounces modern music, modern psychological literature, expressionism in general— in short, all of the tendencies of art and thought which disturb traditional forms...
...The fact that, despite his glittering pseudo-heresies, he has not yet been purged, might be attributed to this valuable influence on the fellow-traveling fringe...
...The conclusion which he reached was to the effect that the kitchen and nursery atmosphere of Tolstoy's early period was a more basicdenial of the human spirit than Flaubert's frank acknowledgement of defeat...
...Lukacs has gone a long way since, in his Theory of the Novel, he called Flaubert, precisely because of his deep pessimism, the central figure of nineteenth century creative writing...
...In such a predicament men can be subjected to horrors which they deny exist...
...But to say he came through unscathed would be an exaggeration...
...This essay shows the intricate turns and twists by which even this "unorthodox" Stalinist must follow the party line in order to save his neck...
...a study of Wilfredo Pareto (New York 1936), an eye-witneaa account of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1937), and an analysis of German social history (Frankfurt...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 15
