Georg Lukacs

György Lukács, (born April 13, 1885, Budapest, Hungary—died June 4, 1971, Budapest),
Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream
of European communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His major
contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed
political control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of the theory of
alienation within industrial society originally developed by Karl Marx (1818–83). Lukács
formulated a vision of Marxism as a self-conscious transformation of society.

- A Marxist work
- Class distinction between working class and the bourgeois be eliminated
- Equal distribution of wealth by the state
- The antitheses of capitalism
- Aims for an equal society- both socially and economically
- Dictatorship of the proletariat

‘Critical Realism and socialist Realism,’

- Juxtaposing critical realism to socialist realism

- A special pleading for socialist realism
- Equating critical realism with the existing tradition of realism
- Realism is often equated with Naturalism
- Critical realism belongs to the realm of the bourgeois whereas social realism belongs to a
classless society
- Both critical realism and social realism have their roots in the revolution of the proletariat
- A kind of a for/against approach
- SR discusses socialism from the inside and views society as an independent entity whereas
CR discuses socialism from the outside and uses the capitalistic model as the yardstick(One
of the major distinguishes he gives)
- Writers tend to see the present from the inside but fail to see the past and future from the
same lens- prescribing what a SR would do
- SR is closer to the classical period in terms of narrative method than CR
- Calling for a new utopian social order that ends all distinction: possible only through
scientific approach and human endeavour
- He criticizes many authors of the past like Swift who is a critical realist because (in Gulliver
Travels) he starts with the individual and works towards the society and doesn’t so anything
to change the status quo.
- He contrasts Swift with Dickens who views his working class characters from the inside and
his upper class characters from the outside (combining the two in an effective manner)
- Another SR is Tolstoy and Shakespeare who manage to view even the unfamiliar characters
from the inside
- CR are not able to view things historically and hence cannot view life comprehensibly
- He then juxtaposes CR and SR with modernism: a lot of 20 th C works can be disregarded by
the Marxists for their decadence
- He talks about the post revolution when the proletariat have taken over and how CR will not
have anything to write then (The more empowered you are the lesser you can write)
- A writer has to probe the difference between the old order and the new to the best of his
abilities
- He introduces the concept of fellow traveller: one who acknowledges the inequality and
sympathises
- He recommends forms like war novels and Bildungsroman that allow for life to be
represented as multi-faceted
- Economic subjectivism: a society should always be understood through objective truth and
not subjective desire
- A literature without conflict doesn’t change the status quo. Literature should only be
propaganda – crisis of the literature of the bourgeois
- He also recommends round characters over flat characters (since it becomes a singular idea)
since characters should be dynamic and never static
- The aim of a socialist should be to view life as it is
- No authentic literature character who is not typical (round and represents soundness)
- Revolutionary romanticism: critiques this variety pf social realism since it does not produce
round characters and selling out SR to capitalistic forces
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