Writer & critic : and other essays / [by] Georg Lukács. Edited and translated/ by Arthur D. Kahn.

Art and objective truth.--Marx and Engels on aesthetics.--The ideal of the harmonious man in bourgeois aesthetics.--Healthy or sick art?--Narrate or describe?--The intellectual physiognomy in characterization.--The writer and the critic.--Pushkin's place in world literature.

"Lukács, Georg (1885-1971)

Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream of European Communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His major contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed political control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation within industrial society. His What is Orthodox Marxism? and The Changing Function of Historical Materialism, demonstrated his creative and independent approach to Marxist theory.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Lukács had read Marx while at school, but was more influenced by Kierkegaard and Weber. He was unimpressed with the majority of the theoretical leaders of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, but had been impressed by Rosa Luxemburg. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. After the overthrow of Béla Kun's short-lived Hungarian Communist regime in 1919, in which Lukács served as Commissar for Culture and Education, the Hungarian white terror brutally persecuted former government members.

Fleeing the White Terror, Lukacs moved to Vienna, where he remained for 10 years. He edited the review Kommunismus, which for a time became a focal point for the ultra-left currents in the Third International and and was a member of the Hungarian underground movement. In his book History and Class Consciousness (1923), he developed these ideas and laid the basis for his critical literary tenets by linking the development of form in art with the history of the class struggle. He came under sharp criticism from the Comintern, and facing expulsion from the Party and consequent exclusion from the struggle against fascism, he recanted.

Lukács was in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, save for a short period in 1930-31, at which time he attended the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933 he left Berlin and returned to Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy. He moved back to Hungary in 1945 and became a member of parliament and a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest. In 1956 he was a major figure in the Hungarian uprising, serving as minister of culture during the revolt. He was arrested and deported to Romania but was allowed to return to Budapest in 1957, where, stripped of his former power and status, he devoted himself to a steady output of critical and philosophical works...." - www.marxist.org

"For the greater part of his life, Lukacs lived and worked within the Soviet Union. His literary criticism worked largely within the restrictions imposed by the Soviet Communist Party (Lukacs 1963,1983). In various studies he articulated and defended a theory of realism, often in opposition to the modernism of capitalist culture. A realist novel (with Balzac being exemplary) expresses society as a totality that underpins the fragmentary surface that is encountered in everyday life. Lukacs is thus critical of the naturalism of Zola or Flaubert, precisely because it remains a description of the surface. In contrast, the characters in Balzac’s novels represent social forces. What is perhaps disappointing about Lukacs’s approach to literature, especially in contrast to the insightful materialist reading of philosophy in History and Class Consciousness (and even the literary criticism of his pre-Marxist work), is that he judges literature against a pre-existing model of society. He does not allow the novel to teach him what society is like. His debate with Ernst Bloch over expressionism is instructive (Bloch et al. 1977). For Lukacs, expressionism is indicative of bourgeois decadence and irrationality – and thus the very inability of the bourgeoisie to grasp or acknowledge the totality of social forces — while for Bloch it is indicative of the fragmentary (or in his terminology, non-synchronous) nature of capitalism." - https://literariness.org/2017/05/22/key-theories-of-georg-lukacs/

From the library of Karl and Elizabeth Niebyl.

translated from the German