Alfred Kazin
•
GEORG LUKACS ON EUROPEAN REALISM
Georg Lukacs
is
probably the only Communist philosopher
and literary critic in East Europe who still has the power to intereit
and to teach many readers in the West.
This
is due entirely to
his
intellectual gifts and to the systematically moral vision of history
that he has retained as a writer despite his many servilities to Stalin
and the betrayals of his own intellectual standards that he has in
times past committed as a Communist leader. Lukacs owes
his
reputa–
tion entirely to the logical skill and intellectual vision with which, as a
thinker rather than as a "party intellectual," he has sought to
il–
luminate the deepest aspects of Marxism. He gives the impression
that no other Communist philosopher has done for some time-that
despite official avowals and mechanical formulas, here
is
an individual
thinker who
is
fascinated by and thoroughly committed to Marxism
as a philosophy, and who uses it for the intellectual pleasure and
moral satisfaction that this gives him. Yet unlike the really noble
figures in the early days of Communist history like Rosa Luxemburg,
and brilliant writers like Leon Trotsky, who were truly revolutionary
intellectuals committed to Marxism as a basic philosophy of human
liberation, Lukacs is actually a more "bourgeois" and academic
humanist- who because of his inner detachment can stimulate and
provoke us by
his
insights into a text and his formulations of an
aesthetic issue. The Luxemburgs and Trotskys, far more imposing
and admirable figures, were as persons so much identified with their
thought that they have become the heroes and martyrs of an embattled
Weltanschauung. Georg Lukacs remains simply useful and pertinent as
a critic.
Although LuHcs has been called "the finest Marxist since
