[Hass mobilisation of Hungarian workers. 1919, 10 defend…]

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Hass mobilisation of Hungarian workers. 1919, 10 defend proletarian dictatorship It is just that, for Lukacs, But trouble still loomed that organic society is now ahead. An essay of 1926, placed in the future and Moses Hess and the called socialism. Dialectic, giving perverse History and Class Con- praise to the later reactioniciousness was roundly con- ary Hegel's submission to lemned by the Comintern the status quo signalled and Lukacs made the first Lukacs's desertion of his if his many submissions to early ultra-leftism, and his iuthority. new craven capitulation to More correct But just as Lukacs was In 1924 he published a abandoning his ultra-leftism brief study of Lenin, which to please Stalinism, Stalinadvanced much of mone ism was in the process of orrect version OI the swinging to the suicidal elations between party and ultra-leftism of the so-called class than that to be found Third Period. aciousness, and so helped to • History and Class ConCaught on hop preserve his official standing within the international Lukacs was caught badly Communist movement. on the hop.

In 1928, as General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist : Party, he drafted the celebrated, "Rhim' thecee i Toftor: hic party pseudonym), which argued for the need to create a Hungarian social democratic republic, and so fell foul of the Third Period's condemnation of social democracy as "social Lukacs once again recanted-totally hypocritically, as he was later to reveal.

Faced with this set-back, Lukacs retreated from political theory into • the literary and cultural writings for which he is today perhaps best known. These essays are included in such works as The Historical Novel, Studies in European Realism and Writer and Critic, written mainly in Moscow where Lukacs had taken refuge from the rise of Nazism. ..

Classic contribution There is no doubt that this work, for all its faults, represents a classic contribution to the Marxist theory of literature.

Disdaining any mechanical reduction of literature to ideology, Lukacs finds in the very forms of the novel itself its deepest historical signicance.

The major tradition of realist fiction, he argues, is produced by the bourgeoisie at a still progressive stage of its history.

At this point, bourgeois writers are still abel to 'totalise' their societies, to grasp historical processes in all their complex interdependence, and to embody this in characters and events which are at once sharply individualised and socially 'typical".

Totality

The great realist novel is thus a complex, rounded totality, which penetrates mere surface appearances to flesh out the most historically significant trends underlying them.

With the demise of the bourgeoisie as a progressive force, this realism begins to shatter and collapse.

From 1848 onwards, realism declines either into 'naturalism'-the mere static, surface recording of detail-or into various forms of subjectivism, as with the twentieth-century novel.

Perceptive

Characters and society become drained of meaning, history becomes pointless or cyclical, metaphysical despair grips the novelist's vision, objective relity becomes blurred and distorted into fantasy.

Much of what Lukacs has to say of realism and its decline is sharply perceptive. But it also springs from the worst form of Stalinist cultural 'dogmatism.

For Lukacs, realism is not just one art-form among many, appropriate to a certain historical epoch, but the art-form, from which all deviations are •to : be denounced as 'bourgeois decadence'.

Almost the whole of modern experimental artart which tried crucially to produce new forms of perception-is contemptuously written off. And this includes revolutionary experimental art.

While writers like Bertolt Brecht were making a mass impact on German proletarian audiences by their expliation of new artistic techniques, Lukacs's role in the 1930s was to act as the Stalinist watchdog over culture, denouncing all art which failed faithfully to copy the bourgeois realist tradition.

This dogmatic insistence on bourgeois forms. of culture reflected the political realities of the Popular Front period; but once the class collaborationism of Stalinism was in full swing, Lukacs came back into favour. Stalin (right) in 1940 For just as the Popular Front betrayals rested on a collaborațion between Stalinism and the international bourgeoisie, so Lukacs's literary theory insisted on an essential harmony between bourgeois and 'socialist' art.

Lukacs had no great love for the Stalinist doctrine of "socialist realism' in art; but hy, as a higher errsion orversion of his only true love, bourgeois realism.

In 1945, Lukacs returned to Hungary, as professor of aesthetics in Budapest. When the Hungarian workers' uprising broke out in 1956 he became-some, what half-heartedly -minis ter of culture in Nagy's The events of 1918 repeated themselves with a vengeance: when the workers' uprising was smashed by Stalinism, Lukacs was deported by the Russians to Rumania for a year, and was later allowed to return to Hungary.

He spent the rest of his life at work on the problems of aesthetics, and died in 1971:

For all: the apparent contradiction between Lukacs's early, ultra-leftist idealism and his later Stalin+ ism, his career in fact reveals a hidden unity.

What unites the two phases is that Lukacs was never able to break free from the grip of bourgeois culture. He adopted Marxism because it seemed to him the logical culmination of the great bourgeois traditions of humanism and rationality-a rationality all the more urgently needed as history moved towards the barbaric irrationality of His early Marxism is thus a kind of materialist' res working of the bourgeois idealism of Hegel.

But once he had committed himself to Stalinism, this belief that Marxism is in continuity with the best of bourgeois humanism, rather than also a decisive break with it, stubbornly remained.

This can be seen by looking at when exactly Lukacs is in favour with the Stalinists, and whèn he is out of favour. He is in favour whenever the Comintern lurches to the right, collaborating with the bourgeoisie; he is out of favour whenever it lurches to the 'left'.

Thus he is out of favour during the Third Period; back in favour during the Popular Front; out in the cold once more during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; back in -from the cold during the rest of the world war; denounced at the height of the Cold War; rehabilitated during the ludicrously termed 'deStalinisation' period, an era of 'peaceful coexistence' As Michael Lowy has pointed out in a recent useful, book on Lukacs, it was not so much that Lukacs zig-zagged; it was more that he stood still and Stalinism zig-zagged around him.

To dismiss Lukacs as just another Stalinist' is clearly inadequate.

That he was indeed a Stalinist is clear; that he also produced work of enduring theoretieal richness sand. value is also true.

Grave blow

One example of this contradiction can, in conclusion, be given. Lukacs's defence of the rounded, "totalised' realist novel represented a grave blow against the pioneering work of revolutionary artists like Brecht.

For Brecht saw, brilliantly, that if revolutionary art deals with contradictions in history, then it must also display these contradictions in its very forms. And no neatly: "rounded' unified work of art is able to do that.

Instead, Brecht boldly broke up the 'reassuring 'harmony' of bourgeois art, tore it apart at the seams and so opened it up to the critical scrutiny of his audiences.

On the other hand, Lukacs's defence of bourgeois realism was also a rearguard attempt to combat the most brutal philistinism of Stalinist art.

By striving to keep alive that rich bourgeois tradition he implicitly criticised the crude, dreary efforts which passed under the name of 'culture' in the darkest epoch of Stalinism.

But. implicit criticism is the right word. If Lukacs privately, individually dissociated himself from some of the barbaric excesses of Stalinist culture, he remained, in most of his public political life, cravenly conformed to that counterrevolutionary movement.

It is a sign of that conformity that the only comments ever made by this immensely cultivated intellectual on Trotskyism were of a cheap, sneering crudity which would disgrace a political illiterate.

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