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PARTISAN REVIEW
pression.
If
Marx's claims were admitted, "then it is necessary to ac–
cept evil as evil, oppression as oppression , new class rule as class
rule." The Bolsheviks in their belief that good (the classless society)
could issue from evil (dictatorship and terror) were demonstrating a
faith which was an instance of
credo quia absurdum est;
and he was un–
able to share that faith, since the better part of wisdom was the use
only of moral means to achieve moral ends.
Yet a week later, Lukacs had experienced a conversion. Like
Kierkegaard, Lukacs now staked his entire life on "a gesture." In an
essay of a decade before, Lukacs had been taken with Kierkegaard's
"stages on life's way," which Kierkegaard had defined as the aesthet–
ic, the ethical, and the religious . But these were not worlds of ration–
al ascent, since an "unbridgeable gulf' lay between each. The move
from one to the other could only be taken by a "leap" - that existen–
tial decision which Lukacs saw as "the metamorphosis of the whole of
a man's existence." And now Lukacs had also taken a "leap" - not
from the ethical to the religious but from the ethical to the political
-which was in its own way religious . With that leap, Lukacs be–
came one of the special breed of
virtuosi
whose lives are caught up in
(he endless rhythm of sin and atonement and the tragic sense of
never knowing whether the outcome is salvation or damnation.
The stumbling block for Lukacs had been the problem of terror
and the probability that the dictatorship would not liquidate itself.
He had meditated profoundly on Dostoevsky's
The Possessed,
had dis–
cussed the question with his wife, Yelena Grabenko, who had served
a term in the tsarist prisons for membership in the terrorist wing of
the Russian Social-Revolutionary Party and, unlike most intellec–
tuals who joined the party, he had the courage to gaze squarely at
that Medusa's head.
In an essay published in 1919, entitled "Tactics and Ethics ,"
Lukacs set forth his
apologia pro vita sua .
In the "age of absolute sinful–
ness" there is no escape for men who wish to preserve their moral
purity . All men are caught in the dilemma of the violence of the rev–
olution and the meaningless violence of the old, corrupt world. Yet
the choice was not arbitrary if one understood the idea of "sacrifice,"
which was the sacrifice of one's own moral self. Lukacs underscored
this by citing the novels of Boris Savinkov, the Russian Social-Revo–
lutionary terrorist who had been one of the assassins of the Russian
minister von Plehve:
Murder is not permitted; murder is an unconditional and unforgivable
sin. Yet it is inescapably necessary: it is not permitted, but it must be
