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Lukacss Hegelian Aesthetics and Leo Tolstoy

The topic of this panel is Hegel in Marxist aesthetics, and my aim in this talk will be to
explore the development of some Hegelian concepts in the aesthetic writings of Georg Lukacs.
But to get a clearer sense of what is, strictly speaking, Hegelian, in Lukacss literary criticism of
the 1930s, it will be necessary to begin earlier, with the work to which Lukacs has long owed his
reputation in the West and non-Marxist circles generally: The Theory of the Novel of 1914-15.
According to his own 1962 preface to the reissue of the book, Lukacs characterizes the period
just before World War I in terms of his transition from Kant to Hegel. The discovery of Marx
would come later - although in the preface to the republication of History and Class
Consciousness, Lukacs would famously characterize the central essay on reification as an
attempt to out-Hegel Hegel. The subsequent repudiations of Lukacss ostensibly Hegelian
earlier works seems to signal a gradual reduction in the Hegelian dimension in his writing over
time. It might seem that the place of Hegel in Lukacss essays on literature from the 1930s has
been reduced to occasional short quotations, and that the defense of realism is merely an apology
for socialist realist aesthetics. Yet I hope to show that at least in some respects, the literary
criticism of the Marxist Lukacs is truer to Hegelian philosophy than the pre-Marxist Lukacs of
the Theory of the Novel.

To focus my investigation, I will concentrate my attention on Lukacss treatment of Leo

Tolstoy, a figure who occupies a position of great significance not only in the work of the 1930s,
but also in the typology of the novelistic narratives in the Theory of the Novel. In the earlier
work, Tolstoy is the penultimate writer investigated by Lukacs, and Dostoevsky, who follows,
famously did not write novels. The positioning of Tolstoy is not based on a uniform pan-

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European chronology, however. Tolstoys novels owe their privileged position as culminations of
novelistic development and attempted resolutions to the basic contradiction of the novelistic
form to the greater closeness of nineteenth-century Russian literature to certain organic natural
conditions (145).1 This is reminiscent of the argument Lukacs will make in the 1930s to justify
his alignment of post-Reform Russian literature with the European realists before 1848. It is
curious that Lukacss discussion of the novel ends with realism, although this is not a term that
appears in the Theory of the Novel. There is no mention of Zola or Thomas Mann, whose Death
in Venice appeared in 1912.

The End of Art

The age of the novel had evidently already begun to approach its end with Tolstoy. The
epoch of absolute sinfulness was apparently giving way to something new, intimations of a
breakthrough into which Lukacs glimpsed in Tolstoy (152). This hint of a new stage in the
historico-philosophical dialectic brings us back to Hegel, in whose system art occupies only
one stage in the evolution of spirit. In the famous prediction of the end of art following the
culmination of its romantic stage, Hegel discusses how art falls to pieces, on the one hand, into
the imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent shapes; on the other hand, however, into
the liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency, in humour (vol. 1, p.
609). According to the account in the Phenomenology, the religion of art has served its purpose
when self-consciousness no longer needs to externalise itself in aesthetic representations of such
forces as gods, nature, and fate, but realizes that these are merely moments of itself (747).
1 All references to this text are from The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971).

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Religion in the form of art gives way to revealed religion and then absolute knowing. As
art becomes inadequate to the task of representing Spirit, it becomes inessential compared to
religion and philosophy.
It is immediately apparent that Lukacs has in his own way stood Hegel on his head in
the Theory of the Novel. Philosophy is always a symptom of the rift between inside and
outside, a sign of the essential difference between the soul and the world, the incongruence of
soul and deed (19). Lukacs traces the increasing alienation of the soul as the epic gives way to
drama, and drama to philosophy. This is an almost pure inversion of Hegel, for whom the epic
turns into drama and drama into comedy. For Lukacs, then, the novel is the epic form for a
philosophical age. And while there is some indication that a new age might be dawning - an age
that would have a new epic form of which Dostoevsky is perhaps the mere harbinger, art itself
will never reach obsolescence. But even the promise of a return to the epic wholeness of Greek
civilization would be, for a line of reasoning consistent with Hegel, more compatible with a
narrative of regression than with the promise of a new unity hinted at in the final pages. Indeed,
the avant-garde of the 1920s, whose literary production Lukacs would condemn, would, in their
calls for the replacement of art with intellectual-material production (Aleksei Gan) and of the
19th-century novel-epic with the newspaper (Sergei Tretiakov), appear more faithful to the
Hegelian conception of arts temporary centrality in human history.

But for the young Lukacs, art does not seem to be a stage in humanitys philosophical
development. Neither the contradictions of novelistic form nor the lived contradictions that
subtend them seem to promise the determinate negation that would preserve the progress of the
soul and carry it higher. The possible future unity, so dimly glimpsed, would still have its own

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epic, and, by implication, would somehow reunite the problematic modern soul with the
uninhabitable modern world. .
Whatever form such a future unity could take is in any case far beyond the horizon of the
existent literature. The fundamental disunity of the Tolstoyan novel, according to the young
Lukacs, stems from the three incompatible forms of time that constitute the narrative: the frozen
eternity of culture, the equally monotonous cyclicity of nature, and the moments of unity that
Tolstoys characters experience in moments of extremity on the edges of life. But these moments
cannot be integrated into the temporalized experience of life. They cannot truly live their lived
experience (150). The source of promise for Tolstoys novels - the closeness of the writers
historico-philosophical substratum to nature comes to naught because nature, even for Tolstoy,
is always-already perceived from within culture, and these mutually defining spheres become
equally inhospitable to the soul which is able to perceive them. Nature is subordinated to culture
which, borrowing and transforming a phrase from Hegel, Lukacs calls second nature. Second
nature is a complex of senses - meanings - which has become rigid and strange, and which no
longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities (64). The soul is
trapped among its own creations, now rendered illegible, having acquired an alien, objective
character. This description of second nature already prefigures the concept of reification, albeit
without the whole conceptual structure of Marxism in which the latter will be embedded. .

Realism and naturalism

Second nature is a problem for the novel because it is a problem for the lived experience
of modern human beings. In fact the formal problems of the novel are isomorphic with the

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contradictions in social life. But while the various types of novel in the Theory of the Novel show
the impasse of the soul among its own creations, their representation of the material world is
inessential to their historico-philosophical significance. The term that will occupy the central
place in Lukacss work of the 1920s and 1930s - realism - is unsurprisingly absent here. On the
other hand, another term does survive the transition from Hegelian idealism to Marxism: the
epic. However, even a cursory reading of the later literary criticism will show that the term epic
is serving a rather different purpose here from what it did in the Theory of the Novel. Instead of
the opposition between epic and novel which structures the earlier work, there is, in the later
essays, a blending together of the epic and the novel. While Lukacs cautions at various points,
following Marx, that the Homeric epic is impossible in capitalist and socialist societies, the great
realist novels of the 19th century nonetheless exhibit epic tendencies.
The word epic was widespread in Soviet literary discourse in the late 1920s and 1930s,
but its referent, whether generic or thematic, remained vague.2 Lukacs employs the term in his
essay on Tolstoy in a similarly indefinite way, sometimes emphasizing that it is only a tendency,
at other times quoting the characterization of the epic from Hegels lectures on aesthetics.
Although Lukacs never claims that the novel can regain the immanent totality of the epic, he
does nonetheless contend that the epic quality is sufficiently well-expressed in some novels to
distinguish them from other, more ideologically compromised works. Since the opposing term to
realism for Lukacs is naturalism, the epic quality, as the ideal to which realism tends, forms one
end of a spectrum where naturalism is the other extreme. A works epic quality then signals its
epistemological and revolutionary potential.

2 Cf. Galina Belaia, Fokusnicheskoe ustranenie realnosti (O poniatii roman-epopeia), Voprosy literatury 3
(1998): 170-201

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In the essay on Tolstoy, as in other works of the period, Lukacs establishes an opposition
between the true realist novel, which expresses epic tendencies, and the naturalist novel, which is
implicitly linked, by way of the earlier discussions of second nature in History and Class
Consciousness and the Theory of the Novel, to the denigration of mere nature in Hegels
aesthetics.
Hegel, in a radical departure from the hierarchy of values typical of romantic aesthetics,
makes a sharp distinction between natural and artistic beauty, by which he effectively consigns
nature to the realm of human unfreedom.3 In the Lectures on Fine Art, edited and published
posthumously by Heinrich Hotho, Hegel precedes his discussion of artistic beauty by discussing
the deficiency of natural beauty. The beauty of natural existence is marred by accidental details
and the unfreedom imposed on human beings by physical reality. Hegel writes about the
fragmentariness of human social life:
True, even immediate human affairs and their events and organizations do not lack a
system and a totality of activities; but the whole thing appears only as a mass of
individual details; occupations and activities are sundered and split into infinitely many
parts, so that to individuals only a particle of the whole can accrue; and no matter how
far individuals may contribute to the whole with their own aims and accomplish what is
in line with their own individual interest, still the independence and freedom of their will
remains more or less formal, determined by external circumstances and chances, and
hindered by natural obstacles. (The Dependence of Immediate Individual Existence,
italics mine, vol. 1, p. 150)

3 Cf. Robert Pippin, What was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel), Critical Inquiry 29.1 (2003): 124, esp. 8-10.

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Thus - Hegel goes on - it is from the deficiencies of immediate reality that the necessity
of the beauty of art is derived. The task of art must therefore be firmly established in arts
having a calling to display the appearance of life, and especially of spiritual animation (in
its freedom, externally too) and to make the external correspond with its Concept. Only
so is the truth lifted out of its temporal setting, out of its straying away into a series of
finites. At the same time it has won an external appearance through which the poverty of
nature and prose no longer peeps; it has won an existence worthy of the truth, an
existence which for its part stands there in free independence since it has its vocation in
itself, and does not find it inserted there by something else (vol. 1, p. 153).
It is only by the shaping of referential content in accordance with artistic form that natural
objects can be freed of their deficiently accidental features. This brings us more concretely to
Lukacss Tolstoy criticism. In a long essay of 1939, Lukacs elaborates the essential features of
Tolstoys epic narrative method, in large part by contrasting it to the naturalism of such writers
as Zola.4 At the heart of Lukacss analysis is the status of the individual detail in the artistic
methods of the two writers.
In Tolstoy, writes Lukacs, details are always elements of the plot (172). Despite its
abundance, all this detail is organized around the extreme possibilities of the major characters
(185). Stressing the distinction between the dramatic realism of Balzac and the epic realism
of Tolstoy, Lukacs characterizes these possibilities as extreme only intrinsically and intensively
(172). Tolstoyan characters are typical as opposed to the average characters of naturalist
writers. That is to say, they concentrate within themselves the contradictions present in society
4 The essay appeared in volume 35 of the series Literaturnoe nasledstvo, dedicated to Leo Tolstoy, as
well as the collection of Lukacss essays titled K istorii realizma, both in 1939. All quotations taken from
Tolstoy and the Development of Realism, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1964).

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and live out the consequences of these contradictions in the plots of the novels. Tolstoys heroes
confront a world characterized by its finished, dead, pre-given character - the second nature of
Lukacss earlier writings..They embody this world fully by living its contradictions honestly.
In contrast, the naturalist writer accumulates detail ostensibly for the sake of scientific
objectivity but produces in effect a static background of quasi-natural social conventions onto
which he projects characters, not typical, but average. The overabundance of under-assimilated
detail produces an effect of profound monotony (Aesthetics and Politics). This critique is not
altogether unfamiliar in its context. The literary theorist Leonid Timofeev, in a popular account
of the theory of literature published in 1938, writes
It is precisely by its power to generalize that realism differs from naturalism. We speak of
naturalism in art when the writer, having correctly represented his observations of
separate aspects of life, does not know how to generalize from them, typify them, and
instead as it were photographs them. . . In naturalism, what is valuable is its attention to
real life; what is dangerous is its harmful inattention to generalization, to the deep
cognition of life.5
What distinguishes Lukacs is how his critique of naturalism emerges from his reading of Hegel.
Lukacs characterizes this dead accumulation of empirical detail as bad infinity, explicitly
borrowing the term from Hegels logic. In the Hegelian system, bad infinity describes an infinite
series of finite things which fails to overcome the contradiction between infinity and finitude,

5 L. Timofeev, Stikh i proza: Populiarnyi ocherk teorii literatury (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel, 1938), p. 31.
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thus halting the synthesizing dialectic.6 This is far more than the employment of a Hegelian
catchphrase. By associating naturalism with bad infinity, Lukacs links it compactly with Hegels
critique of bourgeois political economy as Lukacs describes it in his Young Hegel, the doctoral
dissertation he evidently defended sometime in the early 1940s at the Institute of Philosophy of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences.7 Lukacss critique resonates further with the Hegelian critique
of nature, in which truth, in its temporal setting . . . stray[s] into a series of finites.

In his lectures, Hegel advocates a kind of optimization of reality by art:

In the case of the human form, for instance, the artist does not proceed, as may be
supposed, like a restorer of old paintings who even in the newly painted places
reproduces the cracks which, owing to the splitting of the varnish and the paint, have
covered all the other older parts of the canvas with a sort of network. On the contrary, the
portrait painter will omit folds of skin and, still more, freckles, pimples, pock-marks,
warts, etc. . . For in all this there is little or nothing of the spirit, and the expression of the
spiritual is the essential thing in the human form. (The Relation of the Ideal to Nature,
vol. 1, pp. 165-166)

6 "In other words, this infinity expresses only the requirement that the finite ought to be sublated. The process ad
infinitum does not go beyond the expression of the contradiction, which the finite contains, that it is just as much
something as its other, and is the perpetual continuation of the alternation between these determinations, each
bringing in the other one (Encyclopaedia Logic, 94)

7 Georg Lukacs, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975), p. 321. On the possible date of Lukacss dissertation defense, see Galin
Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000),
pp. 246-247). Susan Buck-Morss, discussing Hegels early reading of Adam Smith, writes that Hegel was
fascinated, perhaps terrified by the vision of limitless masses of pins being heaped upon the world, as well as the
deadening effect that the repetitive, segmented actions of labor had upon the workers" Hegel, Haiti, and Universal
History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), pp.4-5. This is bad infinity as commodity production.

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Freckles, pimples, and pock-marks are naturalistic detail, inessential to the image of the human
being. For Hegel, art must reveal the spiritual in man; for Lukacs, it must show the workings of
the historical dialectic beneath social reality. In both cases, what is at stake is the ability of art to
teach people about themselves. In a striking passage, Hegel describes the task of art as making
the spiritual visible through the sensuous material of the world:
"Now as the pulsating heart shows itself all over the surface of the human, in contrast to
the animal, body, so in the same sense it is to be asserted of art that it has to convert every
shape in all points of its visible surface into an eye, which is the seat of the soul and
brings the spirit into appearance. . . so, conversely, art makes every one of its productions
into a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point"
(153-154).8
Art humanizes the sensuous world, removing accidental imperfections and purifying and
concentrating what is most important, i.e. bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the
deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit" (7). Likewise, for
Lukacs Tolstoys novels are plastic presentations of human destinies, and their purpose [is] to
achieve social and moral effects by artistic means (195). Realist narration allows the
economically structured social reality to show itself in its dynamism.
In the essay on Tolstoy, as in many of his other works from the same period, Lukacs stops at the
socio-economic transformations of the October Revolution. The formal characteristics of
Tolstoys realism are conditioned by the socio-economic world in which he lives. Tolstoys . . .
art was the harbinger of the great revolt of the peasants in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917
(203). As Lukacs is careful to stress throughout the long essay, Tolstoys novels are not and

8 Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 1.

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cannot represent a true return to the Homeric epic. But if they exhibit a failure, or at least
imperfection, of form, it is because this form is in some ultimate sense isomorphic to socioeconomic reality. The 19th-century realist has no choice but to portray the city in its spiritual
desolation, but he must, if he is a great writer, find the poetry in the city and portray it, without
falsehood, in an aesthetically conditioned form. What distinguishes this account from the Theory
of the Novel is that the substratum, significantly no longer characterized as historiophilosophical is much more dynamic. History and art remain in a condition of evolution, and
the novel must change as a result of October. Lukacs does not foresee a Hegelian end of art in the
new era a view that would have been untenable in the late 1930s but the historical dialectic is
decisively present in the later work. The problematic of the Theory of the Novel, formerly
intractable, has been historicized. Tolstoy has given way to Maxim Gorki, who has created
perfect examples of Socialist realism and is at the same time immediately and vitally bound up
with the great traditions of bourgeois realism (203). This more properly Hegelian solution to the
contradictions reflected in the 19th-century realist novel also implies that the dialectic is still at
work, with all that this implies for the Socialist Realist literature about which Lukacs remained
so reticent throughout his stay in the Soviet Union.

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