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ALFRED KAZIN
character "detenruned" by society, must as an individual have the cu–
rious view and larger vision that lead to a new society. The creative
tension of this resolution and opposition
is
what makes literature
dramatic to Lukacs-and what makes realism the favorable ground
of this drama
is
the resolute marshalling of social detail which is
the modern version of what Hegel valued so much in classical epic–
the "totality of objects" it brings into play.
Yet even
if
we accept Lukacs's conception of realism as essen–
tially a struggle between a superior individual and a society that he
must master, not escape, it
is
hard to approve his marginal treatment
of Stendhal (who
is
discussed in the context of Balzac) and his
relative indifference to Dostoevsky and Dickens. Of course the book
is
a collection of essays and not a systematic study of realism; these
studies are certainly very selective. Balzac, whom Marx and Engels
admired above all other modern writers,
is
a passion of Lukacs's, but
he is also a curiously safe subject for a Communist critic to write about,
since he was a royalist and Catholic who cannot be accused, as
liberal and radical writers are, of "betraying" the cause that Com–
munists believe is in their keeping. Tolstoy in Russia as elsewhere is
unambiguously a classic, and Lenin thought very highly of him and
was able to "explain" the social source of his magnificent creative
power- which turns out to be the Russian peasantry. But LuHcs
is not inspired to the same enthusiastic flights of critical analysis by
S ~endhal,
Dickens and Dostoevsky- they are not comfortable subjects
for a Marxist critic to handle. Yet he has space in this book for a
chapter on the Russian nineteenth-century critics Chernyshevsky and
Dobrolyubov, who were less complicatedly concerned with realism
than were Stendhal and Dickens, and for a chapter on Gorky, who
in Stalinist days became (it was not entirely his fault), the figurehead
of a "great" novelist.
This prizing of certain authors and books for their "tendency"
only, and the automatic disparagement of valuable books because they
do not clearly show the "right" tendency, is the besetting weakness
of even the most intelligent Marxist critics.
It
follows from the habit
of thinking in social categories; one sees in the weaker chapters of
LuHcs's book the fact that he, who responds to the classics with
so much emotion,
is
not always aware of having substituted "progress"
for excellence as the prime categories in his inner consciousness as a
