The Culture of People's Democracy

The Culture of People’s Democracy Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen, Paris Steve Edwards, London Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam Peter Thomas, London VOLUME 42 Lukács Library Editors Tyrus Miller and Erik Bachman 1945–1948 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm The Culture of People’s Democracy Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945–1948 By György Lukács Edited and translated by Tyrus Miller LEIDEN • bostoN 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lukács, György, 1885–1971. The culture of people’s democracy : Hungarian essays on literature, art, and democratic transition, 1945-1948 / by György Lukács ; edited and translated by Tyrus Miller. p. cm. — (Historical Materialism book series, 1570–1522 ; v. 42) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-21727-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23451-2 (e-book) 1. Socialism and culture. 2. Socialism and literature. I. Title. HX523.L827 2012 199’.439—dc23 2012029699 ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-21727-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-23451-2 (e-book) Copyright translated essays 2013 by Estate of György Lukács. Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Editor’s Introduction: The Phantom of Liberty: György Lukács and the Culture of ‘People’s Democracy’ ........................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xxxvii Literature and Democracy (1947) 1. Foreword to Literature and Democracy .............................................. 3 2. Democracy and Culture ..................................................................... 12 3. Lenin and the Questions of Culture ................................................. 26 4. Literature and Democracy I ............................................................... 45 5. Literature and Democracy II ............................................................. 66 6. Populist Writers in the Balance ......................................................... 81 7. Poetry of the Party .............................................................................. 105 8. Free or Directed Art? .......................................................................... 129 9. Against Old and New Legends ......................................................... 153 10. The Unity of Hungarian Literature .................................................. 163 vi • Contents Supplementary Related Essays, 1947–8 11. The Tasks of Marxist Philosophy in the New Democracy ............ 187 12. On ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Proletcult’ ............................................................... 212 13. Hungarian Theories of Abstract Art ................................................ 224 14. The Hungarian Communist Party and Hungarian Culture ......... 241 15. The Revision of Hungarian Literary History .................................. 265 Historical, Literary, and Biographical Glossary .................................... 291 References ................................................................................................... 301 Person Index ............................................................................................... 307 Subject Index ............................................................................................... 311 Editor’s Introduction The Phantom of Liberty: György Lukács and the Culture of ‘People’s Democracy’ I In 1992, the veteran-artist of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, Tamás Szentjóby, presented the residents and tourists of Budapest with the surprising sight of a public-art project entitled ‘Project for a Statue of the Soul of Liberty’.1 Atop the hillside on the Buda side of the Danube, the Liberty statue installed under Soviet occupation in 1947 and consisting of a sculptural group with an allegorical female figure of liberty at its centre was now completely wrapped in a white fabric, rendering it a ghost-like figure hovering above the Hungarian metropolis. The prominence of the monument and its own complicated history added layers of meaning to Szentjóby’s ambiguous ges- ture. Urban legend had it that the statue actually originated in a planned, but unbuilt wartime-memorial to the son of Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Miklós Horthy; its design, it was rumoured, had been disinterred to meet the pressing deadline imposed by the Soviet authorities – another token of the popular theory that the so-called liberation from fascism had been, in the end, a simple change of the oppressor’s uniform and insignia. During the years of socialism in Hungary, the sculptural group had included Soviet soldiers and an inscription celebrating the country’s liberation by the Red Army. Following the 1989 ‘political changes’, the inscription was revised to a more generically national sentiment and the sculptural group reduced to two figures, the female liberty-figure and a male figure throttling the ser- pent of tyranny. Literally wrapping up this petrified history of the past 45 years, Szentjóby’s intervention in 1992 was partly an exorcism: disenchanting, through ostentatious literalisation, Marx’s notorious ‘spectre of communism haunting Europe’. But, in equal measure, it was sceptically interrogative and disenchanted about the brave new order of liberal capitalism that had come to the ex-Soviet bloc as well. Implicitly, with a nod to Luis Buñuel’s 1. For more detailed consideration of this project, see Boros 2001, pp. 85–7. viii • Editor’s Introduction film ‘The Phantom of Liberty’, Szentjóby was asking whether the democratic liberty that had raised such hopes across East-Central Europe after the fall of state-socialism might not also prove little more than a haunting apparition – spectral as a phantom and fleeting as a sheet cast up in the wind. (Notably, we might add, his work met with considerable, negative, public reaction at the time, even as it has become something of a classic of post-socialist public art retrospectively.) It might seem ironic to suggest that the concept of ‘people’s democracy’, and, underlying it, the pretence of popular-republican sovereignty as it existed in Hungary between the fall of fascism and the clear dictatorial turn in 1948, might analogously be a fleeting moment in which ‘the phantom of liberty’ made an earlier haunting appearance in the skies over Budapest. After all, by 1989, nothing could appear more discredited than the democratic cre- dentials of those Eastern bloc and Asian ‘democratic republics’ dominated by the USSR and China, or the putatively popular or democratic character of the so-called ‘people’s democracies’. In Central Europe, in any case, rapid Sovietisation and the systematic dismantling of the briefly pluralistic popular- front governments of reconstruction crushed most illusions about the role the people had been assigned to play in the ‘people’s democracies’ that remained after 1948. Even the subsequent rebellions that occurred in Germany, Hun- gary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; even the occasional cracks and breaks that appeared in the Soviet bloc; and even the most serious post-Stalinist attempts at liberalisation never came close to restoring the fleeting historical chance at a new conception of European democracy that had been ventured – including, in some cases, by sincere, committed Communists – and lost. And, yet, our knowledge of the historical outcome, our certainty about the determi- native role of a Stalinist Soviet Union and its representatives in the ‘liberated’ countries, as well as the dubious motivations of some of the key actors on all sides, so strongly colour our view of the postwar years that when we attempt to understand the perspectives of the moment through contemporary eyes, we tend to overlook how much principled belief, sincere wishful thinking, and sheer uncertainty also influenced the events of1945 –8. Recognising the differences between the pace and process of Sovietisation in different countries, and focusing my remarks on Hungary, the first factor to consider in this regard is negative. The principal actors, Communists and non-Communists alike, were operating, even more than is normal in political and cultural-political life, in an environment of uncertainty. Although many historians have seen the period of 1945–8 as a process of step-by-step imple- mentation of a pre-existing plan drawn up in Moscow, there are reasons to believe that the actions of the Soviets, much less their local minions, were Editor’s Introduction • ix much more improvisatory, mutable, and ad hoc. The Soviets did not know and did not always accurately gauge the international situation, for instance the political strength of the Western-European Communist parties, which critically affected their actions in East-Central Europe.

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