Not one regular Sunday meeting went by, it was reported of Max Weber's circle in prewar Heidelberg, when the name of Dostoevsky was not mentioned—often by Weber himself, who regarded the Grand Inquisitor episode in The Brothers Karamazov as one of the undoubted peaks of Western literature.Footnote 1 The Weber-Kreis was not alone in its interest: it would not be much exaggeration to speak in terms of a Dostoevsky mania across Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. This reaction was somewhat belated; for much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, first Turgenev and later Tolstoy had been the favored Russian authors in the West. As late as 1886, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s influential study on Russian literature had emphasized the virtues of these two, finding Dostoevsky lacking the rationality and presentation of acceptable values he found in the other two.Footnote 2 In Britain, for example, Dostoevsky was dismissed as “Gaboriau with psychological sauce,” relegating him to the ranks of common thriller writers.Footnote 3 But this was soon to change: by the end of the century, he had begun to receive greater recognition from all quarters. Only three years after de Vogüé’s book, Nietzsche—whose own star was itself by now on the rise—referred to Dostoevsky as “the only psychologist . . . from whom I had anything to learn,” and called him “this profound human being.”Footnote 4 Lombroso and Nordau, who devoted a chapter of Degeneration to an attack on Nietzsche, both cited Dostoevsky as an ideal. Robert Louis Stevenson based his short story “Markheim” (1885) very obviously on Crime and Punishment, although it was not until Constance Garnett's 1912 translation of The Brothers Karamazov that Dostoevsky-mania truly took off in Britain. Somerset Maugham recalled in Ashenden (1928) the heady days of Europe's discovery of Russia: Tolstoy and (especially) Turgenev were comprehensible to Westerners with little conceptual shift; Dostoevsky, Maugham argued, required a wholly different approach.Footnote 5 His vivid and passionate characters stood in stark contrast to, say, the familiar naturalism of a Zola. Such appreciation was more than literary: for many of his European readers, Dostoevsky represented the possibility of salvation from what they saw as a soulless, hyper-rationalized modernity. His works were described in terms that we would now recognize as orientalist: he was seen as the representative of some mystical Russian soul, emerging from a backwards land to save the West from itself.
The fetishized image of Dostoevsky underpinning this reception of his work makes it difficult to state definitively that he influenced any of this wide band of admirers: to a degree, he was merely appropriated as a cipher for concerns they already held. But for at least one of his devotees in the Weber-Kreis, I will suggest, engaging with Dostoevsky offered a symbolic and conceptual framework for developing an ethico-political theory. Before his turn to Marxism in 1918, the Hungarian literary theorist and philosopher Georg Lukács was one of Weber's favored students, in regular attendance at his Sunday gatherings. As a foreigner who already harbored a deep sense of alienation from bourgeois society, Lukács was particularly horrified by Europe's descent into war: he shared none of Weber's initial support for the German cause. It was these circumstances that led him to pause his work on an austerely Kantian philosophy of art, written towards Habilitation at Heidelberg, and turn instead to Dostoevsky. As he wrote to Paul Ernst in March 1915, “I have started working on my new book on Dostoevsky (and have put the aesthetics aside for the time being). The book will go beyond Dostoevsky, though; it will contain my metaphysical ethics and a significant part of my philosophy of history.”Footnote 6 The work was never completed; only a small part was ever published, as The Theory of the Novel, and the rest was forgotten. It was rediscovered by chance: on leaving Heidelberg towards the end of the war, Lukács deposited a sheaf of his notes, drafts, and correspondence in a suitcase at a bank, where it languished, unknown to anyone except Lukács himself, until rediscovery after his death. These papers indicate a deep fascination with Dostoevsky as he was interpreted at the time: Lukács's critique of contemporary society therein is intelligible in terms of this broader discourse. At the same time, he uses the language and motifs of this debate creatively, going beyond it in developing a moral case for revolutionary terror. Crucially, he later deployed the same ethical framework to justify Bolshevik revolutionary tactics after the Revolution—and to depict Lenin as an ethical hero. Thus, where many of his previous interpreters see a decisive break with his earlier concerns by the time of his book on Lenin, I point to important continuities in the structure of his ethics. Along with the Russian novelist Boris Savinkov, aka “Ropshin,” and the German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, Dostoevsky played a significant role in helping Lukács think his way through such moral problems, and imagining the heroes capable of resolving such problems in reality.
I will outline this account of Lukács's use of Dostoevsky in four stages. First, I will describe the general reception of Dostoevsky in Europe at the time from two angles. Sociologically, large swathes of educated intellectuals rejected what they saw as the cold impersonality of rationalized capitalist society. This rejection was often expressed through a discourse that saw Dostoevsky in particular as offering a quintessentially “Russian” soulfulness that counterbalanced cold “Western” rationalism. Second, I will outline the core themes developed by Lukács in his Dostoevsky notes: his emphasis on a conflict between content (in the form of “soul”) and abstract form pre-dated his engagement, but this interest made his turn to Dostoevsky comprehensible in terms of broader reception of the Russian author. Third, I will examine what emerges as specifically new in Lukács's thought during his reading of Dostoevsky (and, to a lesser degree, Ropshin and Hebbel): it is his focus on the figure of a hero defined by an ability to resolve the specific ethical dilemma of adherence to duty and moral law on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to restore spontaneous human community at a time when the social institutions embodying such laws had fallen into decay. Finally, I will explain the continued relevance of these themes in certain key texts of Lukács's early Marxist period—a period which he later characterized as messianic sectarianism. The particular forms his millenarianism took and the ethical problems it entailed are, I suggest, more intelligible when read against the context of Dostoevsky reception within which Lukács developed his moral–philosophical framework.
THE RUSSIAN SOUL
Looking back in 1943 on earlier European responses to Dostoevsky, Lukács compared his effect to that of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther: just as Werther had emerged from underdeveloped Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, “so too in the second half of the nineteenth century did Raskolnikov come from a distant, unknown, almost mythical Russia, for the whole civilized world.”Footnote 7 This inadvertently reveals much about the nature of this first enthusiastic embrace of Dostoevsky: in ways that seem orientalist to us today, certain groups of Central and Western Europeans treated both him individually and Russia more generally as a mystical, soulful Other that contrasted with the impersonal rationality of the “civilized world.” To understand why this was so, I shall first identify the social milieu to whom this image appealed, identifying the core of their rejection of Western society. I shall then sketch the fetishized image of Russia to which they looked as the spiritual counterweight to a soulless West, before turning to the particular fascination with Russian literature and Dostoevsky in particular that this entailed.
The son of a wealthy, self-made banker, Lukács was far from unusual in rejecting bourgeois capitalist society despite his privileged position within it. Michael Löwy's classic study identifies him as a typical intellectual, defined not as a class but as “a social category” of individuals drawn from all levels of society who operated as producers of ideology.Footnote 8 Löwy characterizes them first by their parallels with the class situation of the petty bourgeoisie: like them, intellectuals were direct producers rather than wage laborers, and were similarly threatened by industrialization and proletarianization.Footnote 9 However, the alternative to which the intellectuals looked was rather different from that of the petty bourgeoisie. Löwy describes them as living in “a universe governed by qualitative values,” and hence fundamentally opposed to the quantifying abstraction they saw in capitalist social relations: they could be seen as standing up for the “principles, values, and ideals of bourgeois humanism” in opposition to its actual material manifestations.Footnote 10
Though differing widely in the details of their complaints and remedies, many of these intellectuals started from the premise that modernization led to the fragmentation of society and the disempowerment of the individual. For example, Max Nordau's widely read Degeneration typifies a certain strand of thought of the time: he described the fin de siècle mood of the 1890s as a result of such enormities as industrialization, the spread of railways, and improved postal service.Footnote 11 (Lukács himself encountered the book as a child, but claimed to have sided with all those portrayed as degenerates, thanks to Nordau's extensive quotations from them.Footnote 12) Ferdinand Tönnies was another, distinguishing between Gemeinschaft, communities of people closely united by kinship, personal bonds, ethics, and culture, and Gesellschaft, modern, depersonalized societies of individuals brought together only by convenience.Footnote 13 These are but two examples of a much broader pattern of intellectuals bewailing the supposed fragmentation of a society originally unified by organic culture under the reign of capital and rationalization.Footnote 14 The discourse of these intellectuals, then, was governed by this logic of opposition between mutually incompatible ideals.
In this narrative, Russia appeared as an idealized Other, the counter to decadent Western rationalism. Such an image was certainly supported by certain strands of Russian exceptionalism itself. As Holquist argues, for much of Russian thought, the country was endowed with a peculiar holiness, capable of manifesting a moment of timelessness (kairos) within history (chronos). In Holquist's words, “the distinguishing characteristic of Russian historiography during the years when Dostoevsky was growing to maturity was the attempt to wipe out the distinction between kairos and chronos: history was practiced as a kind of Russ-odacy.”Footnote 15 The mystic philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev is typical of such beliefs: he preached the mysteries of the Russian soul as “completely different from that of Westerners.”Footnote 16 But such declarations found a ready audience among literary Europeans who had long come to see the country as the soulful counterpart to Europe's decadence. Though a target of Nordau's rabid invective, Nietzsche nevertheless shared some of his criticisms of contemporary society: linking Dostoevsky to a wild, untamed Russia, he described the country as “the only power today which has durability in it, which can wait, which can still promise something.”Footnote 17 Even Max Weber, Lukács's mentor in Heidelberg, agreed; Marianne Weber reports how, in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, he had quickly mastered Russian, in order to follow the events closely, as he “fully empathized with the psyche and civilization of the Russian people.”Footnote 18 His assumption that Russians had a distinct and somehow deeper character is illustrated by his wish that his seminars should be made up only of Russians, Poles, and Jews, for their greater depth of understanding.Footnote 19 Like so many of his peers, Weber took Russia as the symbol of a spiritual depth and instinctiveness lacking in an overly rationalized West. Within this socially critical discourse, it was the rhetorical antipode to depersonalized capitalism.
If Löwy is right in linking intellectual anticapitalism to romanticism, it is little surprise that the Russophilia associated with it would often focus specifically on Russian literature—and above all on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Edith Hanke's analysis of Tolstoy reception confirms Löwy's diagnosis in this respect. Hanke identifies a shift in the final decades of the nineteenth century: until the 1870s, she notes, it was Turgenev among the Russian novelists who enjoyed the greatest reputation in Europe. But after this point, his star began to fall—and he was replaced by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.Footnote 20 Above all, it was the educated sectors of society who turned most directly to them—and, increasingly, it was their combination of literature with social and ethical critique that shaped their reception. Tolstoy in particular was seen as a “Rousseau of the nineteenth century,” and his pacifist teachings and idolization of the agrarian lifestyle were interpreted as the diametric opposite of capitalist modernity.Footnote 21 As Hanke points out, conservative bourgeois Protestants tended to reject his reduction of religion to ethics, while more radical socialists and anarchists were uncertain whether he should be classified as reactionary or revolutionary.Footnote 22 Instead, it was, above all, Löwy's intellectuals, those of the generation born in the 1860s, who found Tolstoy's ethical ideas compelling—including, of course, Max Weber, who seems between 1910 and 1912 to have planned a book on Tolstoy.Footnote 23 For this cohort, Russian literature served as a proxy for exploring moral questions: both the vivid concreteness with which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky described the ethical problems of their characters and the ideal image they offered appealed to those in search of an alternative to an individuated, industrialized society.
By the time Lukács joined the Weber circle in 1912, it was increasingly Dostoevsky who symbolized the myth of Russian soulfulness. This may have occurred in tandem with the rise of Nietzsche's reputation. From around 1900, Hanke suggests, Nietzsche and Tolstoy were seen as opposed responses to modernity.Footnote 24 In contrast, the unpredictability and passion of many of Dostoevsky's characters meant that he could be aligned with Nietzsche; by 1923, the Marburg Kantian Paul Natorp was expressing his preference for the “life-affirming” Dostoevsky over the “life-denying” Tolstoy.Footnote 25 Löwenthal characterizes such reception by a sense that “the realm of real being” appears in his work, and notes the “aura of myth” around his work.Footnote 26 As Dodd explains, “it was his metaphysical and psychological profundity, his irrationalism and his hostility towards the ‘enlightened’ world-view which were now hailed as truly Dostoevskyan.”Footnote 27 Of course, Dostoevsky himself provided ample fodder for such an interpretation, at least on the surface. His early Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, for example, offers highly critical observations from a trip to Western Europe (the Crystal Palace in London is described as “Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse”), and itself fetishizes the unsophisticated Russian peasantry in contrast to the westernized elites.Footnote 28 Later, in The Idiot, Myshkin launches a diatribe against the supposedly power-hungry Catholic Church for trifling with “the most holy, truthful, sincere, fervent feelings of the people”; instead, he insists, Russia's “Christ whom we have kept and they have never known must shine forth and vanquish the West.”Footnote 29
In the German-speaking world at least, this rather romantic image was fed by the fact that many translations of Dostoevsky's works included introductions by “apocalyptic interpreters of the Russian soul” such as the cultural nationalist Arthur Möller van den Bruck.Footnote 30 More broadly, he was presented as the acme of this Slavic spirituality. John Middleton Murry's monograph on the writer is typical. After emphatically agreeing with Dostoevsky's claim that Russia should possess Constantinople on the grounds that the Russian spirit would supersede all Western claims to empire, Murry asserted that “the Russian thought which shall renew humanity found its most perfect expression in Dostoevsky's words.”Footnote 31 For Murry, “Dostoevsky believed that the regeneration of mankind rested upon a miracle, and he believed that the miracle was inevitable.”Footnote 32 Dostoevsky, he asserted, “was not a novelist”; his characters were superhuman.Footnote 33 Consequently, Murry argued, Raskolnikov had committed no sin, as he had acted for “the Good of All”; Dostoevsky had sought “not merely a consolation for his personal longings, but happiness for all men.”Footnote 34 Such universal happiness was not that promised by the protection of the abstractly defined universal citizen, but was, rather, individuated and affective. In similar vein, André Gide described Dostoevsky as concerned with “the relations between the individual and his self or his God . . . The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his characters . . . lives by virtue of his own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity.”Footnote 35 Gide thus presented Dostoevsky as grounding individuality on spirituality and particularity—rather than on the abstract, legal forms of citizenship of liberal bourgeois capitalism; he offered the possibility that we could remain substantially individual even in this modern world. And, like so many others, Gide saw Dostoevsky as quintessentially Russian in this regard: the Russian soul, he asserted, was defined by “a sudden feeling of sympathetic understanding” for one's fellow human.Footnote 36
European intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century, then, saw their subjective existence as under threat from the objectifying forces of modern society. They associated this with a cold, unfeeling, and abstract rationalism that sprang (so they suggested) from the West. From this perspective, Dostoevsky appeared as the representative of an imaginary Russianness characterized by feeling, soul, and a deeper relation to others than permitted by the abstract forms of liberal democratic society. However little such idealizations had to do with actual Russian society, they were part of the way Europeans regarded events in Russia: it was not only the land of the Tsarist knout, a backwards and oppressive autocracy, but also the source of a supposedly more primal spirituality that might counter the deadening rationality that seemed to rule in the West.
LUKÁCS'S DOSTOEVSKY
This broader European reception of Dostoevsky was manifest in Lukács's own intimate circles—not only the Weber-Kreis of which he was a part, but also amongst his friends in Budapest. In January 1912, the future sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote to Lukács of his own plans to write a book on Dostoevsky. Mannheim's plan, soon abandoned, was to write a biography of Dostoevsky, in which the author's life and work would serve as an ethical ideal: the problems of centuries of philosophy were, he stated, able to “live on, to develop further, to find resolution in the novel or in the life of a Dostoevsky.”Footnote 37 Mannheim was not the only one of Lukács's associates to show an interest in Dostoevsky. Lukács was the accepted leader of the Sunday Circle, a group of young Budapest intellectuals. As Gluck has recorded, much of their discussion centered around the likes of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky; perhaps significantly, roughly half of the circle were also to join the party around the time Lukács did so.Footnote 38
Such context is indispensable for understanding the young Lukács's own engagement with Dostoevsky: it cannot be explained solely in biographical terms. For example, his preoccupation with the novelist is sometimes presented as a result of his catastrophic marriage to Ljena Grabenko, a Russian Socialist Revolutionary, in 1914. Lee Congdon maintains that Lukács's “own ideas were in the most literal sense expressions of his relationships with three women—Irma Seidler, Ljena Grabenko, and Gertrúd Bortstieber,” while Julia Bendl insists there is “no doubt” that his relationship with Grabenko drew him to Dostoevsky.Footnote 39 However, his enthusiasm for Dostoevsky antedated his relationship with Grabenko; it is at least as plausible to suggest that Dostoevsky led Lukács to Ljena as the reverse. Others locate the Dostoevsky book primarily in relation to his broader intellectual project. Andreas Hoeschen, for example, offers illuminating insights on its relation to Lukács's engagement with neo-Kantians such as Rickert and Lask.Footnote 40 Similarly, placing the Dostoevsky book in the broader development of Lukács's aesthetic thought, Nicholas Tertulian notes that “ethics, philosophy of history and aesthetics are constantly connected” in Lukács's thought.Footnote 41 Yet none of these arguments fully explains why it was that Lukács would choose the Russian author as the focal point for such diverse philosophical concerns at this point. Rather, in doing so, he was participating in a widespread discourse of the time. The social critique he expressed in his Dostoevsky notes drew on the motifs of this broader debate. As Pocock puts it, “human beings live within the possibilities of their language systems.”Footnote 42 Even when he went further in substance than the bulk of this debate, he did so in the terms set by this discourse.
To show how Lukács's innovative ethical claims were shaped by existing discourse on Dostoevsky, I shall begin by tracing his long-standing interest in Dostoevsky, pointing to the ways in which both his earlier work and the notes for the Dostoevsky book do indeed parallel the broader reception of the novelist in seeing contemporary civilization in conflict with spontaneous feeling. His most direct treatment of the problem in the Dostoevsky notes takes the form of a distinction between two models of morality, the First and the Second Ethic. However, in contrast to previous interpretations of Lukács's notes, I will suggest that these two do not simply represent opposed and contradictory values. Lukács is not arguing for the timeless superiority of the Second Ethic over the First; instead, the Second is only called forth by the disintegration of the First. By drawing on the figures of Dostoevsky reception, he was able to beyond that discourse's sometimes reactionary implications.
Referring to his earlier literary writings, Galin Tihanov suggests that “Lukács's own development up to 1914–15 . . . makes his turn to Dostoevsky predictable.”Footnote 43 Indeed, the opposition between a form that has become detached from and comes to dominate its content was a central preoccupation of Lukács's early writings: it is at the core of Soul and Form, his early collection of essays (which includes such essays as “The Foundering of Form against Life”).Footnote 44 This concern may indeed have sprung in part from biographical factors; however, many of the terms of its expression were shaped by the wider discourse. From 1907 to 1911, Lukács was involved in an unconsummated love affair with Irma Seidler, sister of his later revolutionary colleague Ernő Seidler. Guided by a rather excessive adherence to Kantian morality, Lukács had not acted on their shared feelings. Irma entered into an unhappy marriage, and had an abortive affair with Lukács's friend Béla Balász (Bartók's librettist); ultimately, she had committed suicide in 1911. Lukács felt enormous guilt over her death, blaming his own prioritization of formal moral commands above felt intersubjective life.Footnote 45 He expressed this in his 1911 essay “On Poverty of Spirit,” within which, as Tihanov rightly notes, there are numerous references to Dostoevsky that importantly prefigure the book project.Footnote 46 As the essay makes clear, Lukács believed he had allowed himself to be too dominated by abstract ideas, and had failed to achieve the connection of souls that might have saved Irma. In the course of the dialogue, he refers to several of Dostoevsky's heroes—Sonya (Crime and Punishment), Prince Myshkin (The Idiot), and Alexei (Alyosha) Karamazov.Footnote 47 These characters are characterized by their Goodness: in contrast to Ethic, which is “general, binding, and far removed from men,” Goodness is “a knowledge of men that illuminates and makes transparent everything, a knowledge wherein subject and object collapse in to each other. The good man no longer interprets the soul of the other, he reads it as if it were his own; he has become the other.”Footnote 48 The conflict he describes is between the immediate, affective spirit and objective forms that are alien to what is truly human. In expressing particular problems in terms of this dichotomy, Lukács was drawing on the rhetoric common to Löwy's intellectuals—and he was no less typical of this group in referring to Dostoevsky to clarify the point.
Given his long-standing preoccupation with Dostoevsky, then, it is almost surprising that it took Lukács as long as it did to attempt a full-scale work on the Russian author. The delay was in part due to his plans of Habilitation at Heidelberg by producing a systematic philosophy of art, which he had to put aside in early 1915 to work on his Dostoevsky book. (Weber was horrified, seeing this as typical of Lukács's unfortunate tendency to essayistic writing, rather than systematic scholarship.) Lukács explained the motivation for his choice in the letter to Paul Ernst in which he informed him that he had begun to work on the Doestoevsky book: it was, he indicated, a philosophical reaction to the war. At such times, “the power of structures seems to be increasing unabatedly, and for most people it represents the existing reality more accurately than does the really existent. But—and for me this is the ultimate lesson of the war experience—we cannot permit that. We have to stress again that after all, we and our souls are the only essentiality.”Footnote 49 Setting himself apart from the general militaristic air, he argued that “the problem is to find pathways leading from soul to soul. Everything else has an instrumental quality and serves as means to that end.”Footnote 50 Evidently, the war served to crystallize Lukács's long-held preoccupations with the clash between personal soul and abstract structures—and to spur him to use them as the basis for the long-awaited Dostoevsky book.
This distinction is the most obvious feature of the central conceptual distinction of the Dostoevsky papers. Lukács's notes circle around the difference between two basic moral outlooks, which he refers to as the First and Second Ethics. The exact definition of these two ethics has puzzled most interpreters of his drafts. Hoeschen states that the Second Ethic is never specifically defined in them—and, indeed, that too strict a definition would risk reproducing the restrictiveness of the First.Footnote 51 Tihanov suggests that Lukács's definitions of these terms are somewhat fragmentary and inconsistent, and that the two are best understood as “in conflict.”Footnote 52 Drawing on Lukács's correspondence, he sees these categories as formalizations of his long-standing preoccupation with the clash of duties towards objective structures on the one hand and those of the soul on the other. In this respect, Lukács's basic formulation of the problem clearly speaks to the broader discourse around Dostoevsky as a specifically Russian answer to the malaise of modern civilization.
The First Ethic—implicitly, that of Western Europe—was the path of convention: ethical codes were to be taken from objective structures. Most basically, this simply meant conformity to the requirements of society and the state. More abstractly, the object of such forms of morality was to create a formal structure for social coexistence, in which the individual was considered as an abstract entity interacting with other equally formal beings. Lukács summarized it thus: “1st Ethic: Truthfulness: Sublation of misunderstanding. Relationship in the spheres: life and not construction (even the Ought is experienced—Kant on duty) Struggle and conflict in the soul between work and convention (happiness as mere immediacy; therefore to derive honour: fidelity as the virtue of the 1st Ethic.)”Footnote 53
What was important was the objective manifestation that gave backing to this form of morality. There should be no ambiguity, no hidden meaning. By “relationship in the spheres,” Lukács meant that the simple relations between individuals would not be between them as human subjects, but considered as fellow citizens within the state. This was an inherently formal construct, the citizen being defined by laws, rights, and duties to objective social structures; this relationship became the reality of life, rather than merely a functional construction. The “ought is experienced” insofar as the existing apparatus of society and state commands certain actions; these are not internal commands, but imperatives found in the external world, making the state a purely external form of ethical obligation. But this, Lukács hinted, precluded the possibility of direct interpersonal moral relations: we owed our moral duties to impersonal structures, rather than to a specific individual. His notes circle around the problem, attempting a couple of tripartite categorizations of the relation of individual and other. In one place, he expresses this in religious terms:
1) India: Identity with the Atman. Disappearance of individuality.
2) Germany: the individual soul—in a relationship to God.
3) Russia: the individual soul—in a unity with other souls willed and created by God.Footnote 54
Elsewhere, he reformulates the problem as one of a direct relation to other humans:
a) Orient: You are the other (the others: even the enemy); for you and I are a deception.
b) Europe: abstract brotherhood. Way out of loneliness. The other is my “fellow citizen,” my “comrade,” my “compatriot.”
c) Russia: the other is my brother; if I find myself, insofar as I find myself, I have found him.Footnote 55
In both cases, Lukács's schematization shows clear traces of Hegel's philosophy of history: his description of “India” or the “Orient” echoes Hegel's account of the same, while his critique of the “European” form of unity makes similar points to Hegel's critique of the Roman world. The problem is that the individual in European unity would not relate to others directly, as Russians supposedly would. But seeing others only as fellow citizens meant treating them merely as aspects of the social structure. The true relationship was with the objective form, giving only false unity to the humans beneath. This kind of social bond also affected one's self-perception: the objective structure seemed to have become integral to the soul, and one thus considered oneself exclusively as citizen. “The absolute Spirit has passed over into objectivity,” he suggested, thus gaining apparent legitimacy.Footnote 56 It was the omnipresence of this objective spirit that made the imperative to fight for the state seem so strong: individual moral scruples were less “real” for the First Ethic than were the commands of objective state structures. As evidence for the failure of such an ethical system, Lukács needed only point to the battlefields—on which lay, by this time, his friend and mentor the Kantian Emil Lask, who had obeyed the call of duty with tragic consequences.
Opposed to this was the Second Ethic. Where the First Ethic looked to social structures or objective laws of duty for both the contents of its imperatives and their validity, the Second Ethic looked to the self as subject and to direct relations of subjects to one another, undistorted by objective structures. This Second Ethic was, for Lukács, characteristically Russian and Dostoevskyan: it involved finding universal brotherhood with all others through love. “The Russian problem,” he asserted, was that “the soul's coming to terms with itself is the discovery of the other. Ivan [Karamazov] (and Versilov etc.), who doesn't have this (doesn't believe in God) is no Russian.”Footnote 57 Here Lukács explicitly connects the duties of the Second Ethic with Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. In Lukács's reading, Ivan Karamazov is radically separated from all around him; Dostoevsky depicts him as strongly influenced by European ideas, and it is his deployment of such ideas in conversation with the servant Smerdyakov, especially those of moral relativism, that leads the latter to kill the brothers’ father. Ivan, who, unlike his two brothers Dmitri and Alexei, is never referred to by the diminutive form of his name, is seen to be almost wholly cast adrift from Russian society and the soulfulness it embodies. At the end of the novel, he lies in delirium as his abstract, external, rational system has collapsed.
In contrast to Ivan's misguided relation to others through the framework of abstract ideas, Lukács finds in Dostoevsky a command to love one another as pure subjects.Footnote 58 It was this, he had indicated in “On Poverty of Spirit,” that he had failed to do for Irma. For Lukács, Dostoevsky's heroes embody this quest for direct and unmediated relations to the other—and it is this thought that he later attached to the Second Ethic. As he put it in his drafts, it “has no strict content” analogous to the specific demands of the First Ethic.Footnote 59 But its central imperative was far more demanding in its very generality: as Lukács defines it, “2nd Ethic—fullness of contemplation (as enduring condition) keeps out not only original sin, but also solidarity, the duty to love.”Footnote 60
Thus far, the contrast between the First and Second Ethics seems fully in line both with Lukács's own earlier works critical of abstract, objective forms that constrain feeling, love, and direct human connection, and with the broader European discourse around Dostoevsky of the time. The latter's works are presented as the embodiment of a quintessentially Russian and hence “soulful” counterbalance to a dead and empty European system. For most interpreters of Lukács's Dostoevsky notes, this is about as much as we can say about the distinction between the two ethics: they represent different values. Dannemann, for example, rightly points to the sense in which the Second Ethic follows “imperatives of the soul” instead of impersonal structures, while Machado sees it as “collectivist moral philosophy” that would help overcome the split between our rational–noumenal and our substantial–phenomenal selves.Footnote 61 There is, however, a distinct element in Lukács's reading of Dostoevsky that goes further than the straightforward contrast of cold European rationalism and loving Russian spirituality at the heart of the broader conversation around his work. Obviously, this discourse could tend towards a reactionary antimodernism—one that sought to go back to a prelapsarian social unity. Rather than calling for such a restoration, Lukács looks forward: his ethical paradigm is posited as a justification of revolutionary action, not as the expression of different values. That is, they are not distinguished by what they command (objectively), but rather by how the individual is expected to relate and respond to moral commands as such. Consequently, the First and Second Ethics are not in straightforward opposition—rather, they are deeply entwined. The First generates the Second in that the failure of the former produces an objectively hostile world within which it falls on the individual to take action in the spirit of the latter.
The nature of this problem is clearer in the one part of the Dostoevsky project that did come to fruition—The Theory of the Novel, originally intended to serve as the introduction to the longer work. Here, he connects literary forms to the question of “integrated” versus “problematic” civilizations. His language here would have been quite comprehensible to participants in the broader Dostoevsky discourse. He draws a contrast between the world of the epic and that of the novel. Pre-classical Greece was (through Lukács's rather rose-tinted spectacles) an integrated civilization—one that is perhaps closed and limited in some respects, but whose “frontiers necessarily enclose a rounded world.”Footnote 62 That is, the ethical substance within which individuals lived seemed complete in and of itself: their social world was meaningful, familiar, and coherent. Its paradigmatic literary genre was the (Homeric) epic, and its heroes were exemplary social types. They might suffer and die, but even such suffering had meaning within this social context. In contrast, the genre of the present era—one that Lukács, following Fichte, described as a time of absolute sinfulness—is the novel, “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer given.”Footnote 63 In such an era, the individual is cut off from the fabric of society: its structures “neither carry the consecration of the absolute within them nor are they the natural containers for the overflowing interiority of the soul. They form the world of convention, a world from whose all-embracing power only the innermost recesses of the soul are exempt.”Footnote 64
At first glance, Lukács seems to be calling for a return to the integrated world of the epic. But this picture is complicated by his description of the era between then and now. Classical Greece—the time of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the great tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—was a period “when the substance had already begun to pale.”Footnote 65 Tragedy is the consummate form of this epoch, and the tragic hero is one whose still-possible task is to rekindle the social essence that had begun to dim. By implication, such a restoration is not possible in the era of the novel: we cannot aspire to return to the era of the epic. Moreover, in both epic and tragedy, custom and convention are far from threatening: rather, they are the context that gives meaning to the individual's life. Obedience to these objective structures—First Ethical behavior, in other words—would be the way to fulfillment.
The Second Ethic is not, therefore, an absolute value in itself, but should instead be understood as a demand to act when the objective social forms of the First Ethic have failed. We cannot simply await the restoration of meaning, as Lukács makes clear in the closing pages of The Theory of the Novel. Here, he contrasts the different resolutions offered by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the loss of meaning and social integration that both diagnose. He dismisses Tolstoy's descriptions of “great moments” (such as Levin's sense of meaning while at work in the field) in which a character “suddenly glimpses and grasps the essence that rules over him and works within him, the meaning of his life.” In Tolstoy's telling, such integrated meaning is a property only of nature, not of culture, and it is not our duty to bring it about.Footnote 66 In his notes, Lukács suggests that the reverse is true for Dostoevsky, explicitly connecting him to the Second Ethic and the problem of redemption:
The Kingdom of God is within you: The substance of the soul (second Ethic) of D[ostoevsky]’s world makes the condition of redemption an existential problem; in every other poetry one looks for the individual soul—since the empirical world is insurmountable there. In D. this is only visible as though through a veil: his world is the chaos of ethical solipsism.Footnote 67
Lukács's focus on the “existential problem” is telling. The Second Ethic has none of the explicit standards of the First: it concerns the element of decision and responsibility that falls directly on the subject. Its very indeterminacy is what defines it: it entails the problem of moral action when the rules fail. It is not, therefore, a romantic rejection of convention—but rather expresses the problem of what to do when convention fails. Pre-classical Greece (as described in The Theory of the Novel) could have no use for the Second Ethic, because there the objective structures of the First Ethic had not become alienated. In Lukács's words, the Second Ethic is “adiaphoron for the Polis”: it is a matter of indifference, entirely irrelevant to the tightly woven social fabric that Lukács imagines in ancient Greece.Footnote 68 The redemption of the individual becomes a problem only when these social structures fail, leaving the subject unmoored from the ethical substance that normally provides such guarantees; the Second Ethic is a symptom of the decoupling of subjects from their world.
In short: Lukács's work on Dostoevsky—in his published essays, in his unpublished notes, and tacitly in The Theory of the Novel—clearly makes use of the idioms and conventions of the broader cultural reception of Dostoevsky. The contrast between the First and Second Ethics echoes the widespread motif of a conflict between rationalized social relations and an organic community of affectively bonded people. But Lukács subverts this language in using it, turning him away from the reactionary implication that we need only return to traditional norms. The difference between the two is not so much in what they command as in the kind of moral action they expect of the individual. The First looks for conformity, and so places the responsibilities of moral decision and the way we relate to one another on objective social structures: all the individual need do is follow customs or rules. Whether or not this is experienced as an imposition by individuals depends on the state of society at the time. The Second instead places those burdens of responsibility directly on the individual, who must look to their own soul for guidance that society can no longer provide.
THE ETHICAL HERO
It is the failure and rejection of objective standards that gives the Second Ethic its distinctive twist. Because its characteristic problems emerge precisely when objective structures fail to join individuals to one another and to their society as a whole, it aims at the kind of subjects capable of redeeming a fallen world. It is perhaps not surprising that the second-most-cited author in the Dostoevsky notes was Kierkegaard, for whom this very problem was central: Lukács's reading of the former was clearly shaped by what he learned from the latter.Footnote 69 Lukács was not alone in connecting these two writers, but he may have been one of the earliest: Löwenthal notes a rising tendency after the First World War to place Dostoevsky “in the intellectual context of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and the whole of dialectical theology.”Footnote 70 Intriguingly, Lukács's unsuccessful application for Habilitation at Heidelberg included a proposed project on Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel, thus suggesting an intention to extend his own work on the chasm between individual moral responsibility and objective social structures. Lukács secularizes Kierkegaard's proto-existentialist theological problem, the moment of choice under the shadow of sin, by making it a matter of redemption of a fallen world. This is indicated by the texts Lukács focuses on: he concentrates chiefly on the works Kierkegaard published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death (with five citations) and Practice in Christianity (with eight). The central preoccupation of these texts is the tension between the possible and the necessary, or the finite and the infinite aspects of the human self. Governed by a fatalistic sense of necessity, the self falls into despair, seeing no hope beyond death. In relating itself to itself through the infinity of God, or in taking the “leap of faith,” the soul can be redeemed. Crucially, Kierkegaard argues fiercely against any attempt to persuade the individual to believe by way of rational proofs: faith is ultimately a matter of individual self-determination.
Throughout Lukács's discussion of the Second Ethic he shows a clear fascination with this Kierkegaardian motif of the individual's responsibility for ethical action. It is here that his use of Dostoevsky as the vehicle for his theory was most effective: it allowed him to describe the kind of individual capable of taking such responsibility, and the circumstances in which they found themselves called to do so. The Second Ethic is, in other words, an ethic of heroes—and Lukács sought such heroes in Dostoevsky's works. This is perhaps why Tihanov finds the two ethics so difficult to define in his illuminating comparison of Lukács and Bakhtin: he explicitly steps back from any consideration of Lukács's typology of the hero.Footnote 71 For Lukács, however, the hero figure is the moral agent, and is hence bound up with the kind of moral demand made by each ethical paradigm. As he put it, “the tragedy of D[ostoevsky]’s heroes is that there is no pre-established harmony between the idea and life.”Footnote 72 It is this experience of contradiction that generates Second Ethical problems that require a hero capable of resolving them.
Dostoevsky's heroes are, of course, sophisticated and often ambiguous creations: even those who might seem most obviously “good” are typically more complex than they at first appear. But what is striking about Lukács's analysis in the notes for his book on Dostoevsky is that he turns away to a degree from the likes of Sonya or Myshkin—the ostensibly Christ-like characters he had held up as exemplars in his earlier writings—and towards those who seem antithetical to Dostoevsky's own views as they were understood at the time. Thus he claims (rather implausibly) that “the atheists (Stavrogin, Ivan) are always the preachers of D[ostoevsky]’s views.”Footnote 73 Figures such as Ivan Karamazov are “atheists who believe in God,” caught in the indeterminacy generated by the collapse of an external system of rules.Footnote 74 This paradoxical characterization encapsulates the problem of the Second Ethic, that of being both distant from yet tied to objective structures and moral demands, and of feeling the call of moral duty without the reassuring certainty offered by faith in God. It is those who experience doubt, those for whom the good is not obvious, who are his models.
The decisive requirement of these problematic heroes, for Lukács, is that they be capable of shouldering the moral burden of sinful action to achieve the redemption of the community. He lays out the problem most clearly in his letter to Ernst outlining the Dostoevsky project. His concern here with specific individuals—the politician and the revolutionaryexemplifies his formulation of ethics in terms of the type of person who might take action:
The order of priorities always includes characteristic dialectical complications when the soul is not directed toward itself but toward humanity, as is the case with the politician and the revolutionary. Here the soul must be sacrificed to save the soul. One must become a cruel Realpolitiker out of a mystical ethic and has to violate the absolute commandment: “Thou shalt not kill,” which is clearly not an obligation towards structures.Footnote 75
Note here the apparent contrast between the “mystical ethic” (of universal love) and the demand to be a “cruel Realpolitiker”: it is the willingness to take on this dilemma that characterizes the Second Ethic. In order to explore the problem further, he asked Ernst to help procure The Pale Horse, a novel by Ropshin, the pseudonym of writer and Socialist Revolutionary Boris Savinkov.Footnote 76 First published in 1909, the book had been a succès de scandale for its apparent justification of acts of revolutionary terror at key historical moments. The central figure, George, was a clear mirror image of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov—but with the opposite conclusion. Lukács called it “a new manifestation of an old conflict between the first ethic (duties towards social structures) and the second (imperatives of the soul).”Footnote 77 As he put it to Ernst, the problem was “expressed most pointedly perhaps by Hebbel's Judith: ‘and if God had placed sin between me and the act ordered for me to do, who am I to be able to escape it?’”Footnote 78 There is an instructive contrast here with Zosima's statement that “each single one of us [i.e. the monks] is indubitably guilty in respect of all creatures and all things upon the earth, not only with regard to general guilt, the guilt of the world, but also individually—each for all people and for each person on this earth.”Footnote 79 Zosima's is a Christian guilt, accepting sinfulness and shouldering the responsibility of sins past, even those of others; Lukács, in contrast, calls on the hero to commit an act that brings guilt, in full knowledge thereof. As he formulated the problem in his notes, “the real sacrifice of the revolutionary is (literally): to sacrifice their soul; out of the Second Ethic, to do only the First.”Footnote 80 This last comment reinforces the sense that the two Ethics are not opposites in the sense of commanding contradictory acts. Rather, they are entirely different ways of thinking about ethics as such: the First requires obedience to a set of commands and prohibitions; the Second concerns the seriousness and attitude with which one acts. This is encapsulated for Lukács in Dostoevsky's fallen heroes: what (in Lukács's eyes) distinguishes them from those of other authors is that his criminals are deeply aware of themselves as criminals—and it is this that transforms acts that outwardly conform to the First Ethic into Second Ethical behavior.Footnote 81
Thus, when Lukács's Dostoevskyan heroes have to perform acts of grievous immorality, they do so in full acknowledgment of their sinfulness. The moral necessity of the end result does not cancel out or make good the means used to achieve it. There are intriguing parallels here between Lukács's heroes and Max Weber's explorations of political ethics—all the more surprising, perhaps, given Weber's distaste for Lukács's Dostoevsky project and his rejection of his protégé’s revolutionary road later on. Weber identifies violence as the central ethical problem of politics: at some point, it may be necessary for a political leader to sanction state violence.Footnote 82 Like Lukács, he is concerned with the type of person suited to the “vocation” of political leadership, depending on the type of ethic that person feels bound to. Consequently, he argues, bureaucrats make poor leaders: their calling means obedience to rules and procedures, and the performance of their tasks sine ira ac studio. They must always act on the authority of others, never being responsible for their actions; there are echoes here of Lukács's First Ethic. But Weber draws a further contrast between what he terms the ethic of principled conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The ethicist of conviction follows an absolute moral principle without any regard for the consequences: even if their actions result in death and destruction, they are content in the knowledge that they did what was “right.” In contrast, the ethicist of responsibility may seem to compromise on principle—but only when this is unavoidable. If it is necessary to do evil (to deploy the violence of the state), the ethicist of responsibility will do so—but will, like Lukács's fallen Dostoevskyan heroes, bear the full weight of their immorality on their own shoulders, not denying their sin. Such an individual, Weber suggests, is truly “a hero.”Footnote 83 Given the closeness between Lukács and Weber, it is possible that there was some cross-fertilization of ideas here, or at least that the problem was discussed in these terms in the Weber circle. If so, this aspect of the Dostoevsky book may be interpreted as an intervention within this very specific debate, in which Lukács tries to frame revolution in terms of ethical responsibility and guilt, rather than of moral certainty. Where Weber's ethically responsible politician works within the bureaucratized modern state, though, Lukács's heroes presuppose its disintegration. By drawing on Dostoevsky, Lukács could offer a version of an ethic of responsibility that justified revolution in the language of an author whom Weber admired. His teacher was, of course, entirely unpersuaded: ironically, Weber's critical remarks may have been aimed at Lukács—whose then recent conversion to Bolshevism seemed to his former teacher like an act of conviction ethics.Footnote 84
What sort of moral duties, then, might justify taking on such sin? For Lukács, the Dostoevskyan hero is tasked with restoring the connections between humans directly, unmediated by social structures. Many of Dostoevsky's characters are defined by the degree to which they are cut off from others. This is most obvious in Crime and Punishment. The very name of Raskolnikov, the chief protagonist, embodies this: раскол (raskol) means “schism,” and the Раскольники (raskol′niki) were the “Old Believers,” who refused to conform to the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon under Peter the Great and instead adhered to the old forms. Fleeing persecution, they lived in self-enclosed communities far from the eye of the authorities and cut off from the rest of society. However, Raskolnikov is not in fact a member of such a sect—unlike Mikolka, the Old Believer who falsely confesses to the crime. As Harriet Murav argues, “His name indicates his participation in a schism of his own devising . . . Mikolka [is] the true sectarian and Raskolnikov . . . the false one.”Footnote 85 Raskolnikov has put himself away from others. In the same novel, even the clearly villainous Svidrigailov seeks some kind of union with another: though he tries to rape Dunya, he still seems surprised when he realizes that she could never love him, and kills himself in despair.Footnote 86 Stavrogin in The Possessed is a magnetic figure for others, but finds nothing to bind himself to them; in the end, he chooses suicide.Footnote 87 Such characters are saved only when they are reconnected with others, often by way of more saintly figures such as Sonya Marmeladova—but, Lukács implies, it was necessary for Raskolnikov first to commit the sinful act in order to overcome the alienation that led him to it.
Here, however, Lukács's interpretation runs into difficulties that perhaps partly explain why the book was never finished. It remains unclear exactly what sort of action on the part of these singularly individual heroes could bring about redemption. In Dostoevsky's accounts, salvation is not always guaranteed—and when it is, it emerges as a complex product of the relations between people. Raskolnikov, ostensibly the protagonist of the novel and the epitome of the problematic figure Lukács sees as the real representative of Dostoevsky's views, needs the Christ-like Sonya in order to achieve reconciliation.Footnote 88 In contrast to the problematic figures Lukács points to, Sonya exemplifies, in the words of Joseph Frank, “the ethic of Christian agape, the total, immediate, and unconditional sacrifice of self that is the law of Sonya's being (and Dostoevsky's own highest value).”Footnote 89 But even such figures offer no guaranteed redemption in Dostoevsky's oeuvre. Confronted with her religious faith, Raskolnikov mutters to himself, “She's a holy fool! A holy fool!”Footnote 90 As Murav explains, the holy fool or yurodivy (юродивый) is a figure of long-standing significance in Russia—one whose renunciation of the self and humility before God goes so far beyond social norms that they appear mad. Dostoevsky, Murav suggests, draws on such figures as “a site of resistance to the ‘age of positivism and science.’”Footnote 91 But while Sonya fulfills this role in a fairly straightforward fashion, other “holy fools” are more ambiguous: as Murav argues, Dostoevsky's treatment of this figure varies in his works.Footnote 92 In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin's epilepsy presents his holy foolishness as a medical condition; the prince remains isolated from other characters, unable to effect reconciliation. Holquist sees this as a result of the incompatibility of two temporal schemes: Myshkin exists (at least in the moments of ecstasy preceding his seizures) in kairos, the eternal present of messianic time, while the other characters live in chronos, everyday secular time.Footnote 93 Finally, even Alyosha—who seems at the end of The Brothers Karamazov to have succeeded in bringing together a group of quarreling schoolboys—is not an unproblematic holy fool: there is evidence that the sequel to which Dostoevsky's narrator refers in the preface would see Alyosha attempt to assassinate the tsar.Footnote 94 It is ironic that this unwritten work might in fact have been the one in which the protagonist came closest to the revolutionary ideal imagined by Lukács—for in the extant works, there is little that seems to confirm his interpretation. Obviously, it lies beyond the remit of this piece to make any judgments on the exact meaning of Dostoevsky's characters, but it is clear that they offer a more complex picture of salvation than Lukács allows, either in his earlier essays or in the notes for the book.
In this regard, Lukács's analysis of Dostoevsky perhaps falls short of that offered by Bakhtin. The latter's reading is closely related to that of Lukács: as Tihanov has shown, Bakhtin was well aware of Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, and many of his claims about both the novel in general and about Dostoevsky can be understood as responses to Lukács's work.Footnote 95 Indeed, pointing to the common motif of homelessness in both critics’ work, John Neubauer reads Bakhtin as subverting Lukács by “carnivalizing” his work.Footnote 96 In contrast to Lukács's search for individual heroes, Bakhtin sees the strength of Dostoevsky's work lying in its dialogism and polyphony—its multiplicity of voices.Footnote 97 Thus, rather than a vitiation of society, the disintegration of all-encompassing social institutions permitted new forms of meaning from the diverse range of voices it permitted.Footnote 98 Dostoevsky's apparent refusal to allow one authorial voice to dominate embodied this.
Of course, Bakhtin's own reading has not gone unchallenged.Footnote 99 It does, however, bring out the limitations of Lukács's account. Though the ethical framework he developed entailed a creative subversion of the discourse of Dostoevsky reception, he was still trapped at this point within its basic idioms, seeing modern society as depraved rather than liberated. His solution might have been different, but his diagnosis of the problem remained within the same paradigm. At any rate, though the book was supposed to serve only as the introduction to the broader project, Dostoevsky only appears in the final lines of The Theory of the Novel, as the image of a new world. “Art,” Lukács explains, “can never be the agent of such a transformation”—only real social change could bring about redemption. And it was in order to effect such a transfiguration of society that Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party not long after, throwing in his lot with the proletariat. Having failed to find salvation in literature, he had to turn to revolution instead.
A HERO OF OUR TIME
Lukács's conversion to Bolshevism was perhaps both unexpected and inevitable. What made it unexpected was his essay “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” in which he argued quite clearly against revolution. Drawing on Dostoevsky, he stated unequivocally that “Bolshevism rests on the metaphysical assumption that good can issue from evil, that it is possible, as Razumikhin says in Crime and Punishment, to lie our way through to the truth. This writer cannot share this faith.”Footnote 100 With spectacular timing, Lukács had in fact converted to Marxism by the time the article was published. This is perhaps less surprising in the light of his Dostoevsky notes—and in particular the way he toyed with the very idea that he drew on Razumikhin here to deny. As we saw earlier, the Second Ethic that Lukács winnowed from his reading of Dostoevsky, Hebbel, and Ropshin might indeed demand that the individual become a “cruel Realpolitiker,” and even act in apparent accordance with the First Ethic—provided that this were done with eschatological intent. What these literary models offered Lukács was a way of thinking through such ethical conundrums: while he did not draw his revolutionary ethic directly from Dostoevsky (and would most certainly have been in error had he tried to do so), these works provided material problems that allowed him to clarify his own thoughts on revolutionary problems.
That Lukács's choice was in line with the spiritual, ethical, and literary concerns of his earlier years was recognized by his contemporaries. Kadarkay reports the response of the writer József Lengyel, who on hearing the news of Lukács's conversion asked explicitly what Dostoevsky had to do with Marxism.Footnote 101 Lengyel described the conflicts between “Lukács's group” and the “orthodox” Marxists (including himself and party leader Béla Kun); he had no time for these “spirits,” derisively labeling them “the ethical group.”Footnote 102 Kun himself later expressed a sardonic surprise at discovering that theological problems had been posed in Marxist terms by Lukács's circle only two doors from his office during the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. For Kun, Lukács was a “mad Heidelberg philosopher” incomprehensible to everyone else: he spoke a different language from his Marxist contemporaries, that of the cultural critique of the alienated intellectual, not the debates between Luxemburg, Kautsky, and the like.Footnote 103 Similarly, Lukács's policies in the Ministry of Culture in 1919, such as organizing public readings of fairy tales for proletarian children, can hardly find precedent in the Third International's economic discussions. Whatever the thought processes behind Lukács's conversion, it was understood by both friends and critics as a continuation of his earlier cultural, literary, and ethical concerns—and not the consequence of careful study of historical materialism.
Lukács's early Marxism was characterized by a number of often contradictory strands: his growing knowledge of Marx's works, his conflicted attitude towards Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary zeal of Sorel, and the residual influence of his Heidelberg academic colleagues—both the sociological thought of Simmel and Weber, and the formal philosophy of Emil Lask.Footnote 104 One strand, I suggest, was an outgrowth of his engagement with Dostoevsky—his hope for a hero figure capable of resolving the moral conundrum of the Second Ethic. This guided in part his reception of Lenin (particularly as a representative of the Russia romanticized by Lukács), and helped reshape Lukács's initial Luxemburgist belief in the spontaneous rising of the proletariat as a whole. These Dostoevskyan preoccupations can be seen in two different elements of his early Marxist thought—his continued focus on the problems of ethical action and moral responsibility in a time of socio-structural disintegration, and his hope of finding a hero capable of resolving these problems by taking on the responsibility of acting.
The ethical tone of Lukács's early Marxism is clear enough from the titles of essays such as “Tactics and Ethics” (1919), “The Role of Morality in Communist Production” (1919), or “The Moral Mission of the Communist Party” (1920). These essays demonstrate the continuing significance of the distinction Lukács expressed in the First and Second Ethics. The last of these shows his concern with First Ethical alienated social structures. A postrevolutionary society must build its own new institutions, imbued with a new morality—and the “mission” of the Communist Party is to guard against the “grave danger that these institutions will degenerate or ossify even before they have had a chance to develop properly.”Footnote 105 In such a society, he argued elsewhere, “freedom of morality will take the place of legal compulsion in the regulation of all behaviour.”Footnote 106 Communism was thus to produce a “new spiritual epoch,” in which community was based on a freely unified society where social relations were no longer governed by institutional force. All of this, of course, is redolent of the hopes he expressed in The Theory of the Novel and his Dostoevsky notes of a world in which objective social structures were no longer alienated from the people they were supposed to bond together.
Even more striking, though, is the recurrence of the individual moral problem of action. In “Tactics and Ethics,” Lukács explicitly returns to the example of Judith that he had cited four years earlier in discussing his Dostoevsky book with Ernst: he states, “to express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel's Judith: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me—who am I to be able to escape it?’”Footnote 107 His answer to Judith's question is unchanged from his earlier declaration that the real sacrifice of the revolutionary is the sacrifice of their own soul: “everyone who at the present time opts for communism is therefore obliged to bear the same individual responsibility for each and every human being who dies for him in the struggle, as if he himself had killed them all.”Footnote 108 There is here the same sense of taking on a moral burden for decisive action that was echoed in Weber's description of the ethicist of responsibility. Where the First Ethic might exonerate such acts as necessary, a true Second Ethical perspective would not leave the burden of moral responsibility on social or historical structures—and this sense of moral culpability permeates Lukács's revolutionary vocation.
Of course, such an ethic required—as in the case of Dostoevsky—a particular kind of hero. Initially, Lukács seemed to have little need for such a hero. His Luxemburgist faith in the spontaneity of the revolutionary proletariat, without any need for leadership by the party, is shown by his rather starry-eyed declaration regarding the effective union of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and Bolshevik Party in March 1919: “The parties have ceased to exist—now there is a unified proletariat,” he declared, insisting that “the Hungarian revolution has demonstrated that this revolution is possible without fratricidal struggles among the proletariat itself.”Footnote 109 His statement illustrates the same hopes of an unproblematic organic unity that he had sought in Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, his optimism was a touch premature: the revolution lasted less than five months, failing in part due to a lack of support among the various working classes. Lukács's hopes were thus increasingly vested in individuals capable of cutting the Gordian knot of the Second Ethical problem.
At first, as his friend Anna Lesznai reported, the “hero” was Ernő Seidler, whom Lukács described as a man who epitomized all that he believed, saying he now realized “only a consciously redeemed man can create the empirical world.”Footnote 110 Seidler was, of course, the brother of Irma, over whose suicide Lukács felt such guilt. As Kadarkay makes clear, Lukács's decision to join the Bolsheviks indeed had the character of a religious conversion, inspired more by Seidler's charisma than by anything else: trembling as he spoke, he told his friends that he had met a pure, transcendent individual capable of transforming the world and restoring humanity.Footnote 111 In other words, Lukács's explanation of his conversion to Bolshevism framed his decision in terms of the discovery of a hero figure similar to those in Dostoevsky. Another figure played a crucial role too: his wife, Gertrud Bortstieber. Looking back much later on his conversion, he noted that her influence on his decision to embrace Bolshevism in full had been decisive: noting the “spiritual bond” between them, he emphasized that “the need to be approved of by her [was] the central question of my personal life.”Footnote 112 He stressed the need to be of one mind with her as something quite distinct from his previous relationships, where the differences had been more significant. What Gertrud offered was the kind of personal connection to the rest of humanity—and indeed to feeling as such—that the alienated intellectual Lukács had lost. In Lukács's descriptions of her, she played a role like that of Sonya Marmeladova. Gertrud and Ernő Seidler seemed like the redemptive Dostoevskyan characters that Lukács had sought.
Seidler at least was, however, soon replaced by the more imposing figure of Lenin. Lukács later characterized the period from his conversion to Bolshevism up to the publication of his moderate Blum Theses (1928) as a combination of “messianic sectarianism” in regard to the international situation, and “realpolitik” in the case of Hungary.Footnote 113 The collapse of the Hungarian Council Republic, the failure of revolution to spread beyond Russia, and the Soviet Union's increasingly authoritarian turn contributed to Lukács's increasing disillusionment—but this was countered by his faith in Lenin as the totemic figure of revolutionary genius. His hagiographic Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (1924) is unusual in its praise for the personal, subjective qualities of Lenin as an individual. In Lukács's telling, Lenin was no Hegelian world-historical figure, unconsciously and inadvertently advancing the unfolding of Geist while pursuing limited ends. Rather, Lukács describes Lenin as “the genius,” with a unique ability “to see both [capitalism's] totality in any one of its phenomena and the dynamic of its structure.”Footnote 114 He explicitly states that his study “does not for a moment claim to deal in any way exhaustively with the theory and practice of Lenin”: it is, rather, the person of Lenin as ethical model that is his concern.Footnote 115 Lenin steps forth as a heroic figure, possessed of unique qualities that make him capable of overthrowing the forms of capitalism.
His Lenin offers strong evidence for the continuation of the ethical framework of his Dostoevsky study as late as 1924. Though the book is by no means a pure expression of his earlier approach, a number of motifs from that work recur here. The conflict of First and Second Ethics is embodied in his attitude towards the alienated objective structures of the state. For Lukács, “tactics of legality at any price and those of a romantic illegality conceal an equal lack of theoretical freedom towards the bourgeois state.”Footnote 116 The two possibilities he rejects here are both, in a sense, First Ethical. This is obviously the case in the adherence to legality and hence acceptance of these objective structures—but even “romantic illegality” entails a tacit acceptance of the separation of people on the one hand and of the structures that are to be undermined on the other. Recall—Lukács's Dostoevskyan revolutionary was to be capable of acting as if in accordance with the First Ethic but doing so in response to the call of the Second. The Second Ethic did not imply an unconditioned opposition to the First so that the two were irrevocably sundered; rather, it emerged out of and remained embroiled in the disintegrating structures of the First Ethic. While Lukács himself had earlier rejected parliamentarism as a tool in revolution, he had altered his position after a rebuke by Lenin for his ultra-leftism. His modified stance was, in this regard, closer to his own previous arguments. He took a similar approach to party organizations, repeatedly warning against “all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in practice.”Footnote 117 In place of fixed structures, he repeatedly insists on “Lenin's concept of organization”—thus personalizing the fluid social relations that are supposed to bring together the proletariat.Footnote 118 Lenin here fulfills the unifying role of Lukács's Dostoevskyan heroes: he is the one capable of uniting humanity in a malleable, direct way that is not subordinated to alienated objective structures. He is cast as a redeemer, able to bring together the fragmented classes and individuals of modern society that had been kept apart by the reified systems of capitalism.
Moreover, Lukács's justification of Leninist revolutionary realpolitik follows the logic he had worked out in his Dostoevsky notes—where a realist accommodation to objective First Ethical structures is justified if motivated by Second Ethical attitudes. In his Lenin, Lukács contrasts the Bolshevik leader's realpolitik with the Social Democrat version. For the latter, Lukács suggests, realpolitik is “based on the belief that the real revolution is still a long way off, that the objective preconditions of social revolution do not yet exist . . . and that for these reasons the proletariat must make compromises with the bourgeoisie.”Footnote 119 Were revolution closer, it is implied, there would be no need to compromise. This represents surrender to existing objective conditions—whereas Lenin, he suggests, only engages in realpolitik precisely because of the imminence of revolution. Compromises with objective structures are permissible only because such compromises can directly aid the revolution—which is possible only with a “correct appreciation of the whole historical process.”Footnote 120 Lukács is at pains to stress, then, that Leninist Realpolitik does not imply an entirely amoral attitude to action—as he states, there is no suggestion “that it is a question of knack, of cleverness, of an astute fraud.”Footnote 121 It is only a goal as total as world revolution and the transformation of society that can justify actions that would, on the surface, seem entirely similar to the typical behaviour of bourgeois politicians. He is, in Lukács's framework, acting in line with the First Ethic—doing what is necessary within the existing structures, appealing to the objective interests of other classes to forge alliances—but only because of his Second Ethical goal of a total transformation of the structures of society. Lukács's justification of such behaviour draws, then, on the logic he developed in reading Dostoevsky.
But what is most striking is the eschatological tone of much of the book. Lukács repeatedly speaks in the language of end-times. Leninism is the philosophy of “the onset of the last phase of capitalism and the possibilities of turning the now-inevitable final struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat in favour of the proletariat—of human salvation,” as Lukács puts it in one of his less moderate moments.Footnote 122 The proletariat's decisions are crucial “both for itself and for the whole of mankind.”Footnote 123 He repeatedly insists in millenarian tones on the “actuality” of the revolution in the present moment, and of the imminence of a new society. There are hints, too, of earlier hopes in the Russian people as the saviors of Europe: he notes that the country's state of development meant that “the Russian proletariat was to a great extent spared those hesitations and regressions” found elsewhere.Footnote 124 Above all, it is Lukács's focus on Lenin as active that makes him the classic Dostoevskyan hero. Recall the distinction he makes between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: where the heroes of the former are granted glimpses of an integrated naturalistic world that remains ultimately out of reach, those of the latter actively bring about such reconciliation themselves. What marks out Lukács's interpretation of Lenin as a figure is his decisive break with the determinism of the Second International. Time and again throughout the book, he rejects the “mechanical fatalism” of those who would treat “proletarian class-consciousness as a mechanical product of its class situation” or assume that “revolution itself was only the mechanical working out of fatalistically explosive economic forces.”Footnote 125 What Lenin—and Lenin alone—is able to do is to perceive both the need and the possibility of fostering objective tendencies towards revolution and social change. Above all, this means fostering the class consciousness of the proletariat, actively bringing them together in party and soviet in order to restore their self-generated unity, undistorted by the structures of capitalist society. Lukács downplays the Blanquist elements in Lenin's theory of the party, whereby its task is simply the practical seizure of power. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of organizational work as such for generating class consciousness: it is, he states, only “by working through a party” that people can “become real professional revolutionaries.”Footnote 126 Thus Lenin's influence has a transformative effect: he restores community and transforms each member of it. Lenin's task, in Lukács's eyes, is precisely that of the Second Ethic: it is to overthrow the obedience to objective structure, to dogmatic adherence to a set of rules of action, and to the fatalistic acceptance of existing conditions, and in consequence to make possible a new unity between the workers that is constantly renewed rather than existing in alienated and objective form.
Many of Lukács's writings on the morality of revolution, then, continue to use the language and motifs of his earlier work. Though now intervening in Marxist debates, in doing so he often resorted to the idiom of the prewar alienated intelligentsia and the discourse around Russia and Dostoevsky associated with them. But it is, above all, in the depiction of Lenin as an ethical revolutionary hero that Lukács's early Marxist works most strikingly exhibit continuity with his previous work. Lenin is no pure ascetic, willing to take on the sins of others; rather, he accepts the responsibility of actually committing sin in order to bring others together. In this respect, he is described in ways that parallel Lukács's earlier accounts of Dostoevsky's most problematic characters. In the sense of his own earlier analyses, Lukács's account of Lenin is millenarian—but he is a Dostoevskyan, rather than a Christian, messiah.
CONCLUSION
Towards the end of his life, Lukács would fully acknowledge the idealism of his youth, speaking of it explicitly in terms of his messianism. By the late 1920s, world revolution no longer seemed imminent; Lukács himself stepped back from active political engagement after the Blum Theses, and concentrated on his literary and philosophical work. For the young Lukács, however, the seeming disintegration of the alienated structures of contemporary society had posed an ethical dilemma: to what extent are we bound to norms and structures that no longer seem to function?
Lukács's response to this, I have suggested, was expressed in the language of a broader discourse among the literati of Western Europe that saw in Dostoevsky the epitome of a certain kind of fetishized “Russianness.” Russia was depicted as a primitive land of direct spiritual unity among humanity—and Dostoevsky, with his passionate and unpredictable characters, seemed to stand for this more than anyone. Lukács was directly exposed to such Dostoevsky-mania through friends such as Karl Mannheim in Budapest, and the Weber-Kreis in Heidelberg; this image of the writer fed in to his own interpretation. Dostoevsky thus became the core of a wide-ranging attempt to understand and explain the problems he found; Lukács drew too on Kierkegaard, Ropshin, Hebbel, and others—but it was a Dostoevsky understood in the context of a broad European reception of his work who formed the central point of the theory he developed here. We today might not be persuaded by a moral philosophy drawn from literature, but it was quite intelligible—even rational, in the sense described by Skinner—in the context of Lukács's contemporaries.Footnote 127
Earlier interpretations of Lukács's notes—and particularly of the distinction he makes between the First and Second Ethics—have typically stopped there, seeing them primarily as contradictory values, or cold, impersonal duty against warm, spontaneous social unity. But, I have suggested, this distinction must be supplemented with a more complex account of the tension between these ethics, resulting in an indeterminacy that demands a particular kind of hero capable of facing the problem of moral responsibility. The First Ethic is indeed the right ethic for the classical world; it is only the disintegration of objective structures that demands the Second Ethic and calls forth the hero capable of taking responsibility for the potentially sinful action required to redeem humanity. Because the sinfulness of the act (and hence also of the agent) is not cancelled out by its necessity, I have suggested, Lukács's account has some surprising parallels with his mentor Weber's account of ethics in Politics as a Vocation, and perhaps the more local context of moral debates within the Weber circle helps illuminate the development of Lukács's own theory further.
The lack of previous attention to this existential aspect of the ethics in Lukács's notes means that their significance for his later revolutionary theory has not been fully appreciated by those who have written on them. Some, such as Gluck, Keller, and Löwy, contain the Dostoevsky project within Lukács's romantic anticapitalist period and do not trace specific conceptual relations to his later work; his Marxist theory is presented as discontinuous with his younger romanticism, either explicitly or implicitly, by omitting systematic consideration of such links.Footnote 128 Conversely, where critics such as Lee Congdon do suggest continuity, Lukács's Marxism is framed as a direct extension of the more widespread neo-Romanticism of the time.Footnote 129 In contrast, I have suggested that Lukács was able to use the terms of contemporaneous Dostoevsky discourse to go beyond the relatively straightforward conflict it assumed between Russian soul and Western rationality. Quentin Skinner points to something similar in Machiavelli's advice to princes that they should learn how not to be good: the Florentine, Skinner points out, was using the conventions of humanist advice books to princes in order to subvert their conventional message.Footnote 130 Lukács was similarly able to subvert the potentially reactionary and conservative implications of the Dostoevsky discourse and turn it to revolutionary ends. His justification for revolutionary acts retains the same focus on moral responsibility, and—as his response first to Seidler and then to Lenin illustrates—he continued to center his hopes on redemptive heroic figures.
Of course, Lukács was soon to turn away from his literary idol. Condemned by Lenin, Dostoevsky was viewed as vehemently reactionary—as Lukács recognized in “Stavrogin's Confession,” a short piece published in the 1920s on the rediscovery of a lost chapter of The Possessed.Footnote 131 (Had the planned sequel to The Brothers Karamazov ever been written, this picture might have been complicated.) As Tihanov recounts, some of Lukács's subsequent writings on Dostoevsky were no more than dogmatic condemnations, or straightforward orthodox Marxist analyses of his work as reflections of modern urban life.Footnote 132 The perpetual tension of Dostoevsky's work, the presentation of figures who stand outside and subvert social institutions, and his obvious religiosity would make it impossible to write too favorably on him in the stifling atmosphere of Soviet orthodoxy. But perhaps other historical circumstances were equally responsible. The more moderate politics of the Blum Theses of 1928 illustrate the fading of Lukács's belief in the imminence of revolution; at the same time, Dostoevsky's chiliasm might too have grown less appealing. Nevertheless, at a crucial time in his development, Lukács's participation in the wider discourse of Dostoevsky reception helped him give voice to his ethical concerns—ones that, despite Dostoevsky's reputation, were decisively revolutionary. In accepting the diagnosis of modern society offered by this debate while offering such radical solutions, Lukács was both limited and enabled by the language he used.
