In the autobiographical interviews which make up Record of a life, Lukács comments on the despair he felt, aged 23, when his first book won a Budapest literary prize. ‘I took the view,’ he says some 60 years later, apparently without any humour or self-insight, ‘that society was not competent to judge the matter.’ His subsequent attempt to make society more competent is the subject of these two fascinating books.

Lee Congdon’s The young Lukács sets out – quoting Dostoevsky – to do for Lukács what J.L. Talmon once tried to do for J.-J. Rousseau: ‘to show how a brilliant and sensitive man “started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and … arrived at unrestricted despotism”.’ Four pages later his book’s major theme is said to be Lukács’s search for a female companion to make up for his estrangement from his mother. Seldom does Congdon hint at the possible links between these two themes, on which he might have developed a potent though speculative argument. He is more interested in providing the facts for his two cases to speak for themselves, and in doing this has written an admirably clear account of Lukács’s first 40 or so years, up to History and class consciousness. His knowledge of the Hungarian sources – including rare novels by Lukács’s friends in which he features as characters – his access to the Lukács archives and his interviews with Lukács’s former colleagues, students and family make it an even more authoritative book than Michel Löwy’s perhaps more brilliant Georg Lukács: from Romanticism to Bolshevism.

Congdon’s book is structured around Lukács’s three major female relationships, showing how neatly they coincide with three distinct phases of his development. The painter Irma Seidler came into his life in 1908, his ‘Tragic’ period of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, when he modelled himself on Walter Pater. Art for Lukács and the elitist circle around him was bound up with suffering. Men and women symbolized incompatible worlds – ‘work’ and ‘life’ respectively – so that he perceived marriage to Irma as an impermissible threat to his work. The consequences were suitably tragic. After marrying someone else, and an unhappy affair, Irma Seidler drowned herself in 1911, a sacrifice to Lukács’s ‘work’, in this case his book of essays Soul and form.

Congdon is outstandingly good at painting in the Austro- and particularly the little-known Hungarian cultural background of this period, and at portraits of secondary characters, like the Polanyi brothers, the extraordinary Béla Balázs and Karl Mannheim. Because he portrays Lukács as a typical if outstanding member of a whole culture, his study is as much intellectual history as biography and enables him to elucidate Lukács’s early work and make it more readable than ever before.

The author handles what he calls Lukács’s ‘Utopian’ and ‘Dialectic’ phases with equal thoroughness and clarity. Lukács’s immersion in Dostoevsky as the opposing pole to a soulless Western positivism is related to his unlikely marriage in 1914 to the Russian Social Revolutionary Ljena Grabenko, which crowned his ‘Utopian’ period, leading to his isolated total opposition to the world war and his acclamation of the Russian Revolution (which he saw as a spiritual Slav uprising against the West), which in turn led him to leftwing, inevitably then Communist, politics.

This book gives the most detailed account yet of Lukács’s activity in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic as Commissar for Education. Lukács’s role here seems to have been balanced and exemplary, as it was later when he was sent to the front. His ‘Utopian’ period was over. The marriage to Grabenko had broken down. Realism, a sense of his own and the political world’s limits (however much he might sometimes misjudge them), was now his leitmotiv, and it was symbolized by the relationship with Gertrud Borstieber who remained his wife until her death in 1963.

If Congdon’s accusation that Lukács supported ‘unrestricted despotism’ seems at odds with this more balanced last phase, the interviews in Record of a life unfortunately appear to make it more valid. These conversations date partly from 1969 when Lukács was 84, and partly arose from questions about his autobiographical notes (also included in the book) in 1971, the year of his death.

The old Lukács shows an astonishing memory and power of expression, even if his own notes do often meander oddly. He also manifests an undiminished sense of self-importance to which his Hungarian interviewer now and then panders unnecessarily.

If the charge of ‘unrestricted despotism’ seems more valid after these interviews, it is Lukács’s attitude to Stalin’s trials and executions which make it so. Not so much his insistence that they seemed necessary at the time (the Stalin’s-enemies-must-be-Hitler’s-friends argument) – a position Lukács maintained to the end – as his utter inability to talk about them as a crime and a tragedy for those involved and for the movement. Here his antinomian reflex, dating from his messianic period, that the just are guiltless whatever they do, seems to have been still alive. His interviewer lets him off the hook at this point and allows him to shift his ground at will.

This volume will be a disappointment to some because much of it concerns the strictly Hungarian aspect of Lukács’s life and work. It is important to remember that Lukács died before the Brecht/Lukács debate was revived and before his role in the literary politics of the Comintern had been much discussed. Nevertheless it is difficult not to feel that someone more aware of Lukács’s wider role could have got more out of him. What a pity he was not asked, for instance, about his complete silence on, and absence from, the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, some of whose positions, superficially close to his own, he is often wrongly seen to have promulgated. The anonymously conducted, undated New Left Review interview printed as an appendix only reinforces this point as it contains some of the best material in the volume. However, this unusual book is of great importance in presenting us with the only self-portrait we have of one of the great Marxist thinkers of the century.

Lee Congdon, The young Lukács, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983
Istvan Eörsi (editor), Georg Lukács: record of a life, London: Verso, 1984

[ New Statesman, 16 March 1984, p. 24 ]