Studies in European Realism [Paperback]

Georg Lukacs (Author)

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 267 pages
• Publisher: Howard Fertig; 1st Howard edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865274215
• ISBN-13: 978-0865274211
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,591,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Everything is politics (G. Keller), December 17, 2010

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Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Studies in European Realism (Paperback)

In these ideological studies G. Lukács draws cleanly the Marxist line in literary matters.

Literature
As a Marxist, G. Lukács knows only `classes' (`Class characteristics are the chief, the decisive factor in the development of the psyche'). The individual as such (the nature of man) or society as a whole (a nation) are not important. The individual in literature should be a type (ideal-typical in the Weberian sense), a representative of important class tendencies, a man who mirrors all essential aspects of social evolution. In one word, he should be a (anti-) positive hero: positive if representing the proletariat, negative if representing enemy classes.
Literature should be the servant of the proletarian Party, a participant in the class struggle. It should educate people and transform public opinion; in one word, it should be propaganda, `a weapon in the ideological preparation of the democratic revolution.'

Realism, false objectivity and subjectivity
The central criterion of true realism is the `type', who organically binds together the general and the particular.
True great realists are Balzac with his themes (and types) of the tragedy of the peasant smallholder, the destruction of the parasitic nobility or the brutal force of capitalism; Tolstoy and the fate of the Russian peasantry; Gorky (`a proletarian humanist') and the fortunes of the industrial worker and the landless peasant.
If an author is not a participant in the class struggle, he is accused of false objectivity (Zola and his naturalism, `a pure spectator') or false subjectivity (Flaubert and his analysis of the subject).

Evaluation
By focusing only on classes and rejecting subjectivity (the nature of man) and objectivity (the world as it is), G. Lukács commits fatal errors. Classes are the sum of its members, nothing less, but also nothing more. And their members are individuals.
His theory of the representative type is a narrow-minded closed one, not an open one in the sense of O. Wilde (The Critic as Artist: `For when a work is finished, it has an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips.')
Great novels are based on characters, which evolve in the face of social, political, economical, psychological, psychoanalytical or scientific events, and not on (stereo)-types.
G. Lukács analyses literature with enormous blinkers. A few examples: for him, romanticism is a reaction against capitalism, not against reason. Leo Tolstoy, `a great educator and liberator', wrote anti-capitalistic masterpieces like `The Kreutzer Sonata', which in fact is a plea for the general physical castration of man, a wipe-out of the whole of humanity.
G. Lukács' kowtowing before `literary critics' as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin or Molotov is a serious embarrassment. (Not one word about Trotzky, a far better literary critic.)

Life
After being longtime blind for the real nature of man, G. Lukács was himself confronted with `new classes' (M. Djilas) after the proletarian victory in Hungary. He even became a member of the government of I. Nagy in 1956. As his compatriot and Nobel Prize winner, I. Kertesz, stated, `a communist equals a fascist dictatorship'.

These studies are an all important chapter in ideological literary theories and were highly influential among the Western left (e.g., J. Saramago, H. Laxness, M. Reich-Ranicki, J.P. Sartre).
However, the continuous churning out of the same phraseology, the desperate search for elements (`types') in the works of his literary champions to prove his main theory and the ideological jargon makes them a boring read.
Only for literary historians.