154
PARTISAN REVIEW
Tar makes it clear in the introduction that they "aimed at
highlighting Lukacs's complex personality and extraordinary divers–
ity .» Thus, in addition to some instructive dialogues with Max
Weber, George Simmel, Martin Buber, Karl Mannheim, and Paul
Ernst , they have included personal exchanges with those who in one
way or another exerted a lasting influence on Lukacs's thinking: Leo
Popper, confidant and art historian who died of tuberculosis before
he could fulfill his considerable promise; Irma Seidler, the woman
who brought him first love and, when she committed suicide , early
sorrow; Ljena Grabenko, the Russian terrorist whom he married
against his family's wishes ; Gertrud Bortstieber, the wife with whom
he formed a
"Gemeinschaft
in life and thought, in work and struggle";
and Adel Wertheimer, the mother whom he still despised decades
after she had died . Taken together, these letters recount a tale of
loneliness, alienation , and the search for human community . They
make it possible to discover new meaning in
The Soul and the Forms,
The Theory of the Novel,
and
History and Class Consciousness.
But Lukacs's personal life is important not only for the light it
casts on his work.
It
is intrinsically fascinating, not least because of
his dramatic conversion to communism and unswerving loyalty to
the Party even during the nightmare years of Stalin's rule . Like the
Russian revolutionaries who held him in such thrall, he has always
represented a challenge to novelists who seek to explore uncharted
regions of the human psyche . Andras Nagy's
Dear Lukacs: Gyorgy
Lukacs and Irma Seidler
is only the most recent of the novels that at–
tempt to uncover the secrets of Lukacs's soul and thereby to plumb
the depths of motivation and illuminate the inner history of an
epoch. In Anna Lesznai's
In the Beginning Was the Garden,
he is the
leader of an esoteric circle of spiritual pilgrims; in Ervin Sinko's
Op–
timists,
he is a Pascalian wagerer, betting his soul on the Party ; in
Jozsef Lengyel's
Ferenc Prenn's Storm- Tossed Life,
he is an otherworldy
intellectual remote from the working class, and in Emma Ritook's
Adventurers of the Spirit,
he is a messianic Jew.
These Hungarian novels may be virtually unknown in the
West, but the same cannot be said of Thomas Mann's
The Magic
Mountain,
in which Lukacs appears as Leo Naphta, the Jesuitical
Jew who is an alarmingly cunning defender of political terror . Judith
Marcus has already written an outstanding study of Mann's Lukacs
portrait, and she and Tar are well acquainted with the other novels I
have mentioned. They therefore appreciate the difficulty of mapping
out Lukacs's journey to the Party. Yet while they reject any easy ex-
