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Georg-Luka?Cs-Writer-And-Critic.Pdf WIRJiliiEI� & Cl�llliiiC AND OTHER ESSAYS ""' GEOrtG ILUIIKACS WIRJTEI� & CI�ITIC AND OTHER ESSAYS Works by Georg Lukacs published by The Universal Library ESSAYS ON THOMAS MANN GOETHE AND HIS AGE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN REALISM WlRJilllEl� & ClRJillliC AND OTHER ESSAYS GEORG LUKACS Edited and translated by Arthur D. Kahn, Ph.D. Chairman, Department of Classics Brock University, Ontario, Canada ' The Universal Library Publishers GROSSET & DUNLAP New York A NATIONAL GENERAL COMPANY @ THE MERLIN PRESS LTD. 1970 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER: 73-158769 ISBN: 0-448-02500-0 (Hard) ISBN: 0-448-00259-0 (Soft) UNIVERSAL LIBRARY EDITION, 1971 BY ARRANGEMENT WITH THE MERLIN PRESS LTD. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents Page Preface 7 Art and Objective Truth 25 Marx and Engels on Aesthetics 61 The Ideal of the Harmonious Man m Bourgeois Aesthetics 89 Healthy or Sick Art? 103 Narrate or Describe? 110 The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization 149 The Writer and the Critic 189 Pushkin's Place in World Literature 227 Preface THE essays assembled in this book originally appeared in Moscow and Budapest during the thirties and forties, that is, under the Stalin and Rakosi regimes. It is not hard to see today that the main direction of these essays was in opposition to the dominant literary theory of the time. Stalin and his followers demanded that literature provide tactical support to their current political policies. Accordingly, all art was to be subordinated, both in the positive and negative sense, to these needs. Only acceptable characters and situations, ideas and emotions were to be introduced, only material adapted to their policies and nothing going beyond these policies. As everyone knows, no open polemics were possible during that period. Yet I did protest consistently against such a conception of literature. A revival of Marx and Lenin's views regarding the complicated dialectic, rich in contradiction, between the political and social positions of writers and their actual works, ran counter to Zhdanov's prescriptions. In expounding such and similar views through analyses of a Balzac or a Tolstoy, I not only offered a theory in opposition to the official line but also by clear implication a critique of the official literature. As many documents attest, those I criticized were well aware of what I was doing. The examples I adduced to contrast with the great works of the past were not selected from socialist literature alone but from works of decadent bourgeois schools as well. The reason was not simply tactical. During the thirties my Russian friends and I were not the only ones critical of the artistic qualities of socialist literature. There was, in addition, no small group who were prepared to cut themselves off from the Russian realistic traditions (that is, the traditions of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorki and Sholokhov) and were seeking a solution to their 7 8 PREFACE aesthetic problems in an appropriation of the Joycean style. They even considered the naturalism in fashion at the time, the "new objectivity" with its technique of journalistic mon­ tage, as a possible effective new direction. My critical studies thus were directed against two fronts : against the schematic deadliness and impoverishment of socialist literature and against those movements seeking salvation in following Western avant-garde schools. When I think back to this period now, more than thirty years later, I find this struggle on two fronts even more profoundly justified than I did then. For if certain exponents of the artistic avant-garde now represent themselves as inveterate anti-Stalinists, they can do so only because their work of that period has properly fallen into oblivion. In fact, it did not differ at all philosophically and politically from the crass naturalism and schematism of the Stalinist "construction novels". I sought, on the other hand, to revive the realist tradition of richness in content and form and to combat the barren schema­ tism of the official literature not only in regard to its technique and its artistic approach but also in regard to its funda­ mental principles regarding the representation of people and life and to open the way through my criticism to a new great literature capable of encompassing life in the age of socialism. Such was the rationale for the essays assembled here. If they are to reappear now a quarter century later in a new language, this rationale must be understood even though an understand­ ing of this rationale alone cannot justify their reappearance. In fact, however, the problems which they treat have not lost their significance and may have even more meaning now than at their original publication. My friend Arthur Kahn, who has painstakingly translated these essays, was, in my opinion, entirely correct in eliminating from the text polemics pertinent at the time of publication in order, by this pruning, to expose more effectively what is of lasting significance. As a result of this editing, the text presented in this volume is entirely relevant to current problems. Indeed the contemporary significance of these essays is attested by the PREFACE 9 current reactions to these and similar essays. I do not intend to multiply these arguments with rejoinders. Time will rule upon them. In all seriousness, essays like these have contemporary rele­ vance only if my conception of a two-front struggle actually rested on an enduring and important complex of aesthetic problems. I believe that such a unity and continuing timeliness are not difficult to demonstrate, for these essays constitute an indictment of the impoverishment in artistic content and in fictional representation both in western avant-garde movements and in what is customarily called socialist realism. Involved are not simply artistic questions. The author of these essays subscribes to Goethe's observation : "Literature deteriorates only as mankind deteriorates." In various essays I have ex­ posed the social bases for the frustration of man's noblest aspirations, contrasting the brutal manipulations of the Stalin period and its aftermath with the more refined manipulations of contemporary capitalism and its democracy. Our investigation leads in another direction. One should not seek the sources of literary problems in the unreliable phenomena of everyday life. Internal discrepancies in artistic form are manifestations of distortions in life patterns and result from unresolved (and therefore especially compelling) social contradictions. To characterize the contemporary artistic deterioration briefly, one might say that literature has lost that richness in dimension which provides the unfailing attraction and timeless effectiveness of earlier literatures. It makes little difference whether the multidimensionality of the outer and inner worlds or of their uninterrupted interaction is reduced ultimately to an internalized monotonous stream of associations in mono­ logue or whether an autonomous external, self-sufficient world emerges in the trend toward lifeless objectivism, a world which can have no relation to men and with which they can have nothing in common, where every meaningful interaction be­ tween an individual's inner life and his environment is pre­ cluded by the very mode of representation. The contemporary movements displace one another, faster or slower, more or less 10 PREFACE completely, but a common principle remains: each particular technique creates a corresponding single-dimensional world, and this single-dimensionality excludes and eliminates all other aspects of life as irrelevant and unworthy of the mode of repre­ sentation. At first sight, this single-dimensionality seems to be merely a question of artistry and technique, and from a superficial artistic and technical point of view such is the case. Under-. lying the problem, however, are questions of ideology, often unconscious but sometimes explicit. The philosophy of Karl Jaspers, long widely disseminated, is based on the premise that man is essentially unknowable. In modern literature outstand­ ing and even famous writers, whether acquainted with Jasper's thought or not, base their creative work on this view of man. One need only point to Frisch or any of the exponents of the "nouveau roman", all of whom, despite superficial differences, share this view. In this essay we can merely touch upon this question. Of greater significance, in any event, are the artistic consequences. Artists have long been aware of the problem. Reporting a conversation he had had with cezanne at an exposition of the latter's paintings, Osthaus, a director of an art gallery, declared : "He pointed out precisely how far he had succeeded in providing a suggestion of depth and where his painting had failed, where the colour had remained mere colour without providing any sense of perspective." In thisinstance, admittedly involving a simple, specific question, the great master's decla­ ration of war against single-dimensionality in artistic expression is clear. But as one studies Cezanne's conversations and letters, one sees that distance was far from the only dimension the master expected to achieve with colour. The rendering of the many-sidedness and many levels of visible reality as well as of what is not directly visual but is transmitted through various mediations is what Cezanne was accustomed to call "realiza­ tion". For him the function of drawing and colour in the total work as well as in the details, was to render,visual the essential aspects of all sides of reality. For Cezanne to say that colours remained nothing but colours was a sharp criticism. It is signifi- PREFACE 11 cant that he repeatedly declared that Gauguin had made the problem too easy for himself. What would he have said about Matisse or Mondrian? It is not too difficult to apply the lesson of Cezanne's artistic intentions to literature. The multidimensionality of colour in painting has its analogue in the multidimensionality of word and phrase. With its forms of organization, its science and its techniques of manipulation, modern life moves relentlessly to­ ward reducing the word to the mechanical simplicity of a mere sign.
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