232
ALFRED KAZIN
Marx,"l the brilliance of his best work no more confirms the truth
of Marxism as a total philosophy of history than the vindictive
attacks on him by the party bosses in Hungary after his return from
Russia in 1945 discredit Marxism as a serious philosophy.2 Marxism,
which uniquely among modern philosophies of history
has
proved
better at "changing" the world than at "interpreting" it, has become,
intellectually, the victim of its political success, and seems to need
so many bayonets to hold it up for the instruction of intellectuals
and students in Eastern Europe that it is now often rejected as a
serious philosophy. Certainly one cannot discuss literary doctrine with
Soviet writers without soon being made to feel that "Marxism" in
Russia is now just a cover for bureaucratic slogans. But it is exactly
because Marxism-Leninism has proved so useless to serious students
of literature that Lukacs can still be read and valued for his under–
standing in this book of the great nineteenth-century novelists and for
his genuine belief in the value of his philosophy of history to imagina–
tive force in literature. In Russia today, says the unknown Soviet
writer who signs himself "Abram Tertz," "Socialist Realism" has
never meant a genuine concern with realism itself, which by its very
nature is nothing if it is not critical realism, but has been only the
bureaucratic doctrine with which the Communist state protects its
"sacred" mission against the dangers of criticism. By contrast, the
reader of
Studies in European Realism
quickly discovers that Lukacs's
great enthusiasm as a critic is exactly for "critical" realism in the
spirit of Balzac and Tolstoy, the great novelists who adhered to no
school of realism, to whom realism in the modern sense of systematic
documentation would have been uninteresting, for to them the novel,
like great epic and classical drama, still represented the encounter
of a superior individual with a society unequal to his sense of pos–
sibility, his faith in a higher human destiny. And it is not surprising,
in view of Lukacs's identification of imaginative force in literature
1.
Gyula Borbandi in
East Europe
(November, 1962 ).
2. See Joseph Revai,
Lukacs And Socialist Realism
(London, Fore Publications,
1950). Revai, one of the ruling group of the Hungarian Communist Party
before the 1956 revolution, was its "literary commissar," and although by
many accounts he was a man of personal cultivation and had been a student
of Lukacs, his attempt to discredit Lukacs in the eyes of students and writers
is interesting only because of the contrast that its malice and obvious intel–
lectual dishonesty make with Lukacs own writings.
