LU KACS
233
with the profound cnoClsms of society made by the great novelists
he loves, that he should be antagonistic to Zola and to naturalism
generally, and obviously uninterested in most Soviet novelists after
Maxim Gorky, himself not a product of Soviet civilization. LuHcs's
old-fashioned admirations-the only novelists he seems to enjoy after
the great masters are Thomas Mann and Maxim Gorky- are a
symbol of a taste which has refused to yield anything in artistic
matters to the contemporary world, whether communist or capitalist.
And in nothing is the essentially individual,
if
not always independent,
spirit of Lukacs's literary criticism so clearly revealed as in his un–
convincing efforts to praise the mechanical products of "Socialist
Realism," in his obvious unconcern with working-class experience
itself.
Lukacs, like many Marxist intellectuals who speak mechanically
of the proletariat and of its "mission" in history, knows nothing at
first hand about the working class. He was born (in 1885) the son
of a wealthy Hungarian banker ennobled for his financial services
to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the many works of his
Marxist period, which began during the First World War, seems to
be fulfilling what a particularly close student of Lukacs's career, Mr.
Morris Watnick,
3
has conclusively shown to
be
the "elitist" point of
view that marks Lukacs's first, philosophically idealist writings on art.
Indeed, Lukacs's work is particular proof of the way in which the
supposedly objective content of Marxism lends itself to his kind of
aesthetic humanism. For the spell of Marxism to intellectuals has
always consisted in the belief that history has a mission, that one
"stage" of society must inevitably develop into another in accordance
with laws of inevitable economic and social change that represent
progress in man's conquest of his material environment and his
eventual liberation from "things"; this will permit him, for the
"first" time in history, to be wholly a creative human being, instead
of being the 'exploited, divided and alienated man he is now. And
to no one is this vision of man seeking his proper destiny, his true
estate as a human being, so likely to be sympathetic as to a sensitive
literary and philosophic intellectual who, like Georg Lukacs, is able
3,
In
Soviet Survey
(London), nos. 23-27,
1958-1959.
This is the best documented
study of Lukacs's life and writings.
