,
YOUNG LUKACS
SOUL AND FORM.
By Georg Lukacs. The M.I.T. Press. $12. 50.
THE AESTHETICS OF GEORGY LUKACS.
By Bela Ki ralyfalvi.
Princeton University Press. $9.00.
T he pre-Marxi st literary essays of the youn g Georg Lukacs,
written between 1907 and 1910, published as a coll ection in Hunga rian
in 1910, and in a full er version in German in 19 11 , will continue to be
read no t so much for wha t they have to say about Ki erkegaard, Stern e,
Nova lis, Stefan George, T heodor Storm , and o th er lesser known
writers, but ra ther for their uncommon specul a ti ve energy, spontane–
ity, and beauty.
Sou l and Form
translates certa in central intell ectual
tendencies of the earl y part of thi s century in to pass iona tely abstract
and fascin a ting p rono uncemen ts on litera ry form.
It
is something of a
classic, like Lessing's
L aocoon,
alth ough its most sign ifi cant immedi–
a te precursor is Dilthey's
Experience and Poetry.
T he openi ng essay,
"On the Na ture and Fo rm of the Essay," poses fund amenta l q ues tions
always as ked by young critics coming o f age, such as: Is criticism an
au tonomo us discipline or is it dependent o n litera ture? Wha t is its
subj ect ma tter? Does it have its own form o f express ion ? T he o ther
essays all have to do with th e idea o f form, its genes is, na tu re, and
signifi cance.
Sou l and Form
is a work o f brilli ant independence within the
traditi on of German aesthetic theory. Lacking tha t "passion for
destruction and nega tion ," which for Bo ri s Eichenbaum in sp ired the
Ru ss ian Fo rma li sts, Lukacs is inn ova tive whil e mainta inin g hi s ties to
subj ective philosophical and aestheti c theori es. By contras t, the Rus–
sian Forma lists wanted to sever litera tu re's conn ecti o n to any di sc i–
pline but lingui sti cs. T hus, for Lukacs, form is not autonomo us, as it
was for the Fo rmalists, but a special kind o f nonreg imentcd tho ught
whi ch refers back bo th to sys tema ti c aes theti c thought and to the
unpa tterned fl ow of life. Lukacs's con cepti on is simil a r, [o r example,
to Croce's definition o f fo rm as intuition , something conscio us but not
l'
theoretical, a merely rudimentary idea, but very different from the
Ru ss ian Forma li sts' no ti on o f form as a perceptibl e stru cture o r as that
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