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an agent of the Comintern. By that time he had resolved not to res–
urrect his youthful correspondence, much of which would have been
politically embarrassing. In later years he declared that it had been
lost and that, in any event, his personal life obtained its sole mean–
ing from its identification with the proletariat, and hence with
History. It was for that reason, he said, that he had been reluctant to
republish his pre-Marxist works.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the extraordinary lengths to
which Lukacs went to minimize the importance of his personal life,
his most devoted disciples became increasingly curious, particularly
as they began to turn away from Marxism. One of them, the poet,
dramatist, and dissident Istvan Eorsi, spoke recently of his "long–
growing conviction that an unavoidable task for research on Lukacs
is to restore the contradictory unity of the personality and the
oeuvre."
Eorsi's point was that knowledge of the conditions of Lukacs's per–
sonal existence might serve a hermeneutic (not a reductive) pur–
pose- that of bringing his brilliant, but often baffling, writings into
sharper relief. After all, even Karl Jaspers and Ernst Troeltsch,
men of no little discernment, confessed their inability to decipher
The Theory of the Novel.
And so did Max Weber, who complained to
Lukacs "that the first part is almost unintelligible to anyone but
those who
know you
intimately."
No one familiar with the scholarly literature on that laby–
rinthian work is likely to disagree. More important, Weber's com–
ment lends support to Albert William Levi's more general conten–
tion that we can deepen our understanding of a philosophical text by
relating it not only to the age in which it was written, but to the life
of its author. Levi's interpretive strategy, masterfully pursued in
Phi–
losophy As Social Expression,
became more feasible in Lukac's case
when, a year and a half after his death in 1971, a Deutsche Bank
employee recognized the name "Dr. Georg von Lukacs" on the old
suitcase, the contents of which are now housed in the Lukacs Ar–
chives in Budapest. After the capable Laszlo Sziklai took over as
director of the Archives in 1978, he organized an ambitious publish–
ing program, among the first fruits of which was the collection of
three hundred-fifty letters that Eva Karadi and Eva Fekete issued
first in Hungarian and then, with one hundred fewer examples, in
German. Marcus and Tar limited this English-language edition to
one hundred sixty-one letters, but because they too possess an in–
timate knowledge of Lukacs and his work, they have chosen
judiciously.
