Georg Lukacs During the First Soviet Emigration: Intellectual Strategy of a Marxist Aesthetician in the Situation of Thermidor

Abstract

Life and intellectual activity of Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian philosopher and theoretician of literature, are analyzed within several subject frameworks. The first framework: the intellectual during emigration (1929-1945, with the break between 1931 and 1933) and the following problem of the adaptation to the new rules of conduct in the field, to another style of polemics and to the new philosophical agenda. The paper demonstrates that Lukacs who actively participated in the functioning of the official Soviet institutions had a complex multifaceted position: of an independent intellectual working according to his own intellectual program within the Marxist paradigm; a western thinker of the left orientation contributed into the increase of the symbolic capital of the USSR and the Soviet ideological hegemony; professional worker of the intellectual labor worked for the state and party service. The second framework: motives and forms of the integration of the intellectual activity of Lukacs into the cultural turn of the second half of 1930th S, defined by him as the Thermidor. The paper demonstrates the coincidence of Lukacs' discourses (anti expressionist articles) and the official style of Zdanov's campaign of the struggle against formalism in art. The conception of the socialist art under the Thermidor offered by Lukacs based on the philosophical justification of the rejection of the modernist forms had emerged in his works long before the conservative turn of the Stalinist cultural politics and had been coherently developed during some years under different historical conditions. The found contradictions of Lukacs' strategy during the Soviet period can be explained by the deep connection of his philosophy to the life's practice justified in the conception of the problematical individual and interpretation of the Thermidor as a natural stage of the development of Revolution.