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PARTISAN REVIEW
The story , more clearly than most of Lukacs's writings, reveals
the
two
souls in his breast: the one, seeking to be among the select
few who can prepare for "goodness"- to free himself from his "psy–
chological determination" (i .e . his own bourgeois past), to achieve
the "meta-psychic necessity," the "turn from the empirical state to the
authentic life," where the good men are the "gnostics of action"; the
other, the formal notion of ethical obligation, the finding of one's
dae–
mon,
accepting the idea of duty, and to be "possessed" by one's work,
which is the true virtue .
*
As Marianne Weber recalls and sums up those days and
moods , writing a decade later, following the death of her husband :
For Lukacs the splendor of inner-worldly culture, particularly its aes–
thetic side, meant the Antichrist, the "Luciferian" competition against
God's effectiveness . But there
was
to be a full development of this
realm, for the individual's choice between it and the transcendent must
not be facilitated . The final struggle between God and Lucifer is still to
come and depends on the decision of mankind. The ultimate goal is
salvationfrom the world , not, as for [Stefan] George and his circle, ful–
fillment in it (emphasis in original).
Lukacs had hoped to settle into the quiet academic peace of
Heidelberg, but the war, along with the support given to Germany
by most of the intelligentsia, including Weber, shattered those inten–
tions. In 1914-15, Lukacs wrote
The Theory of the Novel,
which is the
most concentrated of his writings on the novel as a form. The analy–
sis is cool throughout, until the last pages, where a burst of cultural
pessimism breaks through and Lukacs declares that "the novel is the
form of the epoch of absolute sinfulness, as Fichte said, and it must
remain the dominant form so long as the world is ruled by the same
stars." Only in Dostoevsky, he proclaimed, does one see the glimpse
of a new world, of a writer perhaps as great as Homer or Dante. "It
will be the task of historico-philosophical interpretation to decide
whether we are about to leave the age of absolute sinfulness," or
'That the episode and the dilemma possessed Weber as well is evident from the fact
that, as Arthur Mitzman reports, "Weber thought so highly of the story that he pro–
posed showing it to the lover of one of Marianne [Weber's] friends , together with
The Brothers Karamazov,
to dissuade him from the idea that moral behavior should be
judged by its results, rather than its inherent worth." What is equally clear is that the
sexual element, which seems to have lain behind Weber's nervous breakdown and
his two crucial extramarital affairs , was involved in Weber's identification with this
story.
