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Lukács, Dostoevsky, and the Politics of Art: Utopia in The Theory of the Novel and TheBrothers KaramazovAuthor(s): Zachary PriceReviewed work(s):Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 343-352Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3086333 .Accessed: 25/09/2012 13:48

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LUKACS, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE POLITICS OF ART: UTOPIA IN THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL AND THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

Zachary Price, Independent Scholar

In his old age, Georg Lukacs all but disowned The Theory of the Novel. The book, he wrote, was "founded on a highly naive and totally unfounded

utopianism," a "romantic anti-capitalism" on which we "have every right to smile" (Lukacs 1971, 12, 19-20).1

Today the utopian outlook of The Theory of the Novel is indeed out- moded, yet it is an outlook shared by many important East European figures of the past, including Dostoevsky, whom the Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel describes as the world's consummate writer. Both Lukacs and

Dostoevsky present utopia as an indispensable concept. Using The Broth- ers Karamazov and the 1861 essay on "Mr. - bov and the Question of Art" as examples, this essay will attempt to characterize the utopian world-view that Lukacs identifies and condones in his commentary on Dostoevsky in The Theory of the Novel.

This analysis will serve several purposes. The comparison of Lukacs and

Dostoevsky sheds light on Lukacs' enigmatic statements, substantiating his

interpretation of Dostoevsky as well as clarifying the social theory of The

Theory of the Novel and helping to distinguish it from Lukacs' later Marx- ism. The comparison also illuminates the complicated relationship between

Dostoevsky's avowed utopianism and the sordid realism of his fiction. I will

begin with an account of The Theory of the Novel's statements on Dostoev-

sky, then compare these statements with the "Mr. --bov" essay, and then

proceed with a brief reading of utopian elements in The Brothers Karama- zov before concluding with reflections on the merits of the utopian philoso- phy shared by young Lukacs and Dostoevsky.

I. Dostoevsky in The Theory of the Novel The Theory of the Novel mentions Dostoevsky only in its final paragraph

but attributes immense importance to his work. In the book's closing pages, Lukacs identifies in Tolstoy an ability to present isolated moments of

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utopian bliss--that is, "of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, pure and therefore abstract interiority" (152). He then lavishes praise on Dostoevsky's still greater accomplishments: It is in the words of Dostoevsky that this new world [of pure soul-reality], remote from any struggle against what actually exists, is drawn for the first time simply as a seen reality. That is why he, and the form he created, lie outside the scope of this book [The Theory of the Novel]. Dostoevsky did not write novels . .. He belongs to the new world. Only formal analysis of his works can show whether he is already the Homer or the Dante of that world or whether he merely supplies the songs which, together with the songs of other forerunners, later artists will one day weave into a great unity: whether he is merely a beginning or already a completion. It will then be the task of historico-philosophical interpretation to decide whether we are really about to leave the age of absolute sinfulness or whether the new has no other herald than our hopes: those hopes which are signs of a world to come, still so weak that it can easily be crushed under the sterile power of the merely existent (152-53).

Thus Lukacs argues that Dostoevsky's work is the prefiguration of a "new world" that realizes "our" hopes for an alternative reality. According to Lukacs, Dostoevsky enables us to "see" perfect community as a possibility for the future.

These assertions have baffled critics. Not only does Lukacs avoid the "formal analysis" that would justify his interpretation of Dostoevsky. He also fails to explain the relationship between his view of Dostoevsky and the rest of The Theory of the Novel. Earlier in the book, Lukacs defines modernity as the lack of any "existent and constitutive meaning" and there- fore concludes that no artist can discover utopian structures of perfectly meaningful community within the modern life described by novels (143). Similarly, Lukacs condemns attempts to remake social and political life according to the utopian fantasies of an art-work, arguing that such proj- ects must amount to "a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics . . . an attempt to forget that art is one sphere among many" (38). Russell Berman has usefully unpacked this statement:

[Lukics] rejects the alternative of ... appealing to the world of forms--aesthetics--as a model of coherence that might be projected onto the fragmentary world. Such a strategy would ascribe to art a priority that it cannot legitimately claim for itself as merely one among several competing spheres of differentiated social activity. That priority would entail an impo- sition of aesthetic rationality onto the heterogeneous domains of politics, economics, religion, etc. (33-34)

In short, Lukacs rejects art as a model for social transformation. Yet this view appears to contradict his account of Dostoevsky. If aesthetics is only "one sphere among many," how could Dostoevsky's art provide a vision of humanity's social future? Why would such a vision not amount to a "hy- postasy of aesthetics into metaphysics?" And if modern life is meaningless and fragmented, how could Dostoevsky make us believe in the possibility of a utopian community?

LUKACS, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE POLITICS OF ART 345

Clearly, the final paragraph on Dostoevsky may be consistent with the rest of The Theory of Novel only if Lukacs is attributing a very special sort of utopian vision to Dostoevsky, one which somehow avoids the "hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics." Dostoevsky's article on "Mr. - bov" offers insight on the sort of utopianism that could accomplish this feat.

II. The Utopia of Art in "Mr. -boy" Like The Theory of the Novel, Dostoevsky's article, as well as his aesthet-

ics in general, have presented critics with something of an enigma. As Robert Louis Jackson has formulated the problem,

while [Dostoevsky] adhered as a critic and thinker to a classical higher aesthetic, to a vision of ideal beauty, as a writer he turned himself over to the embodiment of what Schiller called the

shapeless matter of the moral world. (Jackson 1966, 3)

Just as Lukacs identifies utopian prospects in Dostoevsky's art while decry- ing the dystopian qualities of the modern world, so does the Dostoevsky of the "Mr. -bov" article and other writings describe and advocate art in terms of ideal "beauty" and "harmony" while simultaneously producing fiction that is brutally realistic in its depiction of modern life's uglinesses and flaws.

On close examination, Dostoevsky's "Mr. -bov" article provides a framework for explaining away this apparent contradiction. In the article, Dostoevsky valorizes artistic "beauty," but he does so only against the

backdrop of stark commentary on the problematic character of modern life and of political efforts to attain a better alternative. Indeed, this contrast forms the crux of his argument against the utilitarians (implicitly Dobrol-

yubov). Because no utopian politics is available, he argues, art should offer more than recommendations for daily life. It should give expression to the need for "beauty" and "harmony" that is so rarely met in the real state of affairs. Art has "become an object of worship [kumir]," he writes, because "the need for beauty is felt most strongly when men are at variance with

reality, in a state of disharmony, in conflict" (Dostoevsky 1963, 125; PSS 18: 94). Like Lukacs, Dostoevsky believed his age to be just such a period of disharmony and conflict. As a result, he felt it was imperative for the

well-being of humanity that the ideals of "harmony" and "beauty" be pre- served in art-works, if nowhere else.

In this view, the problem with the aesthetics of the utilitarians is that art

may best serve human progress not when it subordinates itself to immedi- ate purposes, but rather when it provides a compelling expression of the social unity which is presumably humanity's highest ideal but which is denied reality by the "disharmony" of the age. As Dostoevsky puts it, "how, indeed, is one to determine clearly and incontestably what one has to do in order to approach the ideal of all our desires and of all that mankind

346 Slavic and East European Journal

desires and stries for?" (1963, 126; PSS 18: 95). So long as the social order remains disharmonious and confused, so long as its future remains uncer- tain, no specific course of political action or propaganda can be sure of success in the effort to attain a more harmonious order. Thus artists, so the argument goes, should avoid attachment to any one program, devoting themselves instead to the fullest possible expression of "harmony" itself.

This understanding of art's function matches Lukacs' outlook in The Theory of the Novel. Like Lukacs, Dostoevsky implies that art is only one sphere of social activity and that it should therefore preserve its indepen- dence from other domains such as politics and economics. Also like Lu- kacs, he suggests that certain core ideals such as "beauty," "harmony," and utopia can only be expressed in art's imaginative sphere. Finally, just as Lukacs concludes his treatise on modern narrative fiction with a celebra- tion of utopian prospects in Dostoevsky's work, so does Dostoevsky derive an aesthetics of "beauty" and "harmony" from his analysis of art's social function. For both writers, the exemplary art work offers a counterpoint to the confused and vexing modern world.

This is not to say, of course, that either Dostoevsky or Lukacs would understand the artist's task to be the representation of an idyllic future life. To the contrary, Dostoevsky could not concede the disharmonious quality of the world and then expect a vision of social harmony to appear plausible to his audience. Nor could Lukacs condemn the "hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics" and then expect Dostoevsky's art to offer a model for utopian change. The point for both is that art should express the ideal of utopian harmony in a way such that it can be preserved for a modern world in which utopias appear unrealistic. In practical terms, this means that art- works should offer images of utopia, but should concede that they are imaginary; artists should bracket utopian images beyond immediate reality, just as the modern world brackets ideals within the sphere of art, beyond political and economic practice.

In characterizing the Dostoevskian artistic practice as they do, Lukacs and Dostoevsky are attributing to Dostoevsky's works just such a bracketed, indefinite depiction of the utopia.2 In the next section, I hope to show how Dostoevsky's masterwork The Brothers Karamazov fulfills this account.

III. Zosima's Utopia in The Brothers Karamazov The issue of utopia is raised at two points in The Brothers Karamazov: in

Ivan's "poem" on the Grand Inquisitor and in Elder Zosima's biographical narrative. Ivan describes a totalitarian religious state as the best possible approximation of social harmony, whereas Zosima's story raises the possi- bility that a more genuine utopia could be founded on Christian principles of charity and brotherly love.

The differences between these two visions match the contrasts laid out in

LUKACS, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE POLITICS OF ART 347

the "Mr. - bov" article. Like the utilitarians, Ivan attempts a prognosis of the flaws of contemporary reality and derives concrete recommendations for the future on this basis. He ends up with a disturbing theory that the best possible future for most people would be one in which their happiness is based on ignorance and ideological deception. Zosima offers a contrasting hope that human beings may accomplish a genuine utopia founded on uni- versal love and religious awareness. Zosima's hopes stand out as a positive alternative to Ivan's cynicism. Nevertheless, his story is not presented as a model for the future. Rather, it is bracketed outside the reality of the larger novel, just as Dostoevsky and Lukacs argued utopian visions should be.

Ivan's views illustrate the dangers of conceptualizing utopia in practical terms. His starting point is the presumption that "there is no virtue if there is no immortality" (Dostoevsky 1992, 70; PSS 14: 65), and his conclusion is that

only religious authority can maximize human happiness and social peace. Since people are fundamentally self-interested, he argues, there can be no

guarantee of morality without a myth of an afterlife; people will consider the needs of their fellows only if they believe in a punishment for cruelty.

The reader first encounters this argument when Peter Miusov summa- rizes it at the "Inappropriate Gathering" at the monastery:

there exists no law of nature that man should love mankind, and ... if there is and has been any love on earth up to now, it has come not from natural law but solely from people's belief in their immortality.... [W]ere mankind's belief in its immortality to be destroyed, ... then nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthro- pophagy. (69; 64-65)

According to this reading of history, humanity has averted "anthropo- phagy" only because a religious world-view has imposed intellectual re-

straint, allowing people to mistake social norms for "natural" truths. Ivan fears that the progress of scientific understanding now threatens to unravel

society's moral fabric by undermining the religious basis of bans on crime. Ivan follows this line of thinking to the conclusion that society's

integrity - let alone blissful harmony - can be preserved only by the reim-

position of religious dogma. In his article on justice, he looks to ecclesiasti- cal courts to enforce religious expectations of eternal life. In his "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," he expands this conclusion into a vision of the future in which a cynical religious government guarantees the happiness of the masses by quashing challenges to its dogma. The Grand Inquisitor in Ivan's

poem predicts that "freedom, free reason, and science," the faculties that enable moral doubt, will lead people into such a "maze" of violence and confusion that they will "crawl to [the] feet" of Church authorities," crying "save us from ourselves" (258; 235). Having anticipated this turn of events, the Grand Inquisitor's church will stand ready to "give them quiet, humble

happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures, such as they were created"

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(258-59; 236). His government will provide unambiguous moral guidance through religious authority, brainwashing its subjects into a blissful obliv- ion in which moral confusion is no longer possible.

The outcome of Ivan's thinking in this parody of utopia is predictable on the basis of The Theory of the Novel and the "Mr. -bov" essay. Both Lukacs and Dostoevsky suggest that modern society is too confused and complex for a utopian avenue of escape to be found. As the "Mr. - bov" essay's question about determining "what one has to do" implies, there is no way to determine a course of action that would lead to a utopian society; thus if certainty about outcomes is required, the result will not be utopia. The novel dramatizes this argument by showing how Ivan's approach leads to a dead end: his thinking leads to the Grand Inquisitor, not utopia; his philosophy inspires criminality, not benevolence, leading to his father's death, his half-brother's suicide, and his own madness. The reader is turned towards Zosima's philosophy as a better alternative.

Yet how seriously can we take Zosima's recommendations? The novel emphasizes the contrasts between Ivan and Zosima, pitting their ideas against each other in the "Inappropriate Gathering" and then juxtaposing Zosima's biographical narrative and Ivan's "Grand Inquisitor" in adjacent books. Some critics have therefore presumed that Zosima's narrative repre- sents Dostoevsky's ideal, intended to stand out by contrast with Ivan's opinions. Yet this interpretation may lead to the conclusion that The Broth- ers Karamazov is something of a failure, since Zosima's hopes appear too naive and implausible to be taken seriously. W. J. Leatherbarrow, for in- stance, has argued that Dostoevsky intended for Zosima's narrative to rebut Ivan's nihilism by providing a poetic "image of faith," but that his "professed desire to show his readers the way to the Church is shipwrecked on the inadequacy of the realistic novel as a vehicle for religious and moral persuasion" (Leatherbarrow 74). As The Theory of the Novel and the "Mr. -bov" article suggest, fantasies of universal harmony and love cannot appear "realistic." So Leatherbarrow concludes that, far from providing a convincing account of Dostoevsky's putative ideals, Zosima's narrative in- stead "appears to offer little more than several conventional, psychologi- cally unsubstantiated parables of spiritual rebirth" (Leatherbarrow 73).

Leatherbarrow's argument is correct if Zosima's narrative is taken liter- ally. Yet the novel does not present Zosima's story as a model for the reader's life, nor even for Alyosha's. As Leatherbarrow himself notes, Zosima's narrative departs stylistically from the rest of the novel, mimick- ing "the traditional hagiographic genre of the 'Spiritual Life,' or Zhitiye, as used in the Russian 'Lives of the Saints"' (75). A comment from The Theory of the Novel on Don Quixote's "parody of the chivalrous novels" indicates the sort of role available to such archaic genres in realistic modern fiction:

LUKACS, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE POLITICS OF ART 349

The chivalrous novel had succumbed to the fate of every epic that wants to maintain and perpetuate a form by purely formal means after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic. The chivalrous novel had lost its roots in transcendent being, and the forms, which no longer had any immanent function, withered away, became abstract . .. (Lukacs 1971, 101)

The progress of the "historico-philosophical dialectic," Lukacs suggests, stripped the chivalrous epic of significance for real life, reducing it to an object of quixotic satire. It became a "purely formal" genre, perpetuated by cultural inertia rather than self-evident validity. From a modern perspec- tive, the hagiographic saint's life has likewise lost contact with "its roots in transcendent being;" insofar as it presents a single, uncomplicated biogra- phy as a universal model, it cannot but appear naive and implausible to modern audiences.

By departing into this anachronistic form, Dostoevsky's novel separates Zosima's story from the more complicated modern life represented by its

larger narrative. That larger narrative fails to bear out the predictions and

assumptions of Zosima's Zhitiye. Valentina Vetlovskaya has claimed that the entire novel, as well as Zosima's narrative, reproduces the structure and

import of hagiography, presumably encouraging us through Aloysha to emu- late Zosima (Vetlovskaya 216). But Alyosha is not a saint in any traditional sense, and his Dostoevskian biography does not reinforce the utopian out- look of Zosima's story, let alone that of the hagiographic genre in general.

In Alyosha's transcription, Zosima speaks of a "magnificent communion of mankind [velikolepnoe edinenie liudei] in the future" when "man will find his joy in deeds of enlightenment and mercy [prosveshchenie i milo-

serdie] alone" (Dostoevsky 1992, 317; PSS 14: 288). He tells Alyosha and the monks that he has always felt a "mysterious sense [sokrovennoe oshchushchenie]" of divine participation in his experiences (320; 290). God has directed his life, he says, by means of an "unseen finger that pointed [his] way so clearly [iavno]" (312; 283). The contact of that finger has convinced Zosima that humanity is destined to bind itself into a perfect, utopian community. "The roots of our thoughts and feelings," he says, "are not here but in other worlds" (320; 290). If people will only recognize the divine purposes in their lives, Zosima argues, then they may remake them- selves into the instruments of utopian, otherworldly harmony.

Alyosha tries to act on these expectations, but he finds that reality is more

complicated than Zosima's hagiographic narrative. When Alyosha looks for divine guidance, expecting a prophetic sign following Zosima's death, he instead confronts an "odor of corruption," which Zosima's critics interpret as sign of God's dissatisfaction. "Clearly [znat']," they say, "God's judgment is not as man's" (332; 300). The rival monks thus interpret an earthly event as a rebuttal of Zosima's views - and they do so with the same confidence and

authority that Zosima expressed in asserting his own opinions. This experi-

350 Slavic and East European Journal

ence teaches Alyosha that earthly phenomena do not bear obvious transcen- dental meanings. His father's murder and Dmitry's miscarried trial provide further evidence against Zosima's utopian optimism, leading Alyosha to adopt a more sober outlook. By the novel's end, Alyosha has recognized the impossibility of anticipating the utopia that Zosima envisioned.

The "Speech by the Stone" gives expression to Alyosha's mature think- ing. While he continues to endorse Zosima's values of love and charity, he has lost the confidence that led him to expect confirmation of these princi- ples at Zosima's funeral. Alyosha urges the boys to remember the love and devotion that they experienced following Ilyusha's illness and death. "Let us never forget," he says, "how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the boy, perhaps better than we actually are" (774; PSS 15: 195). Yet Alyosha admits that the boys may "become wicked later on," despite their experience of love (774; 195). The novel reinforces his concerns by leaving it unclear whether the boys' final cheer -"Hurrah for Karamazov!" (776; 197) - represents a lasting commitment to Alyosha's ideals or only a tempo- rary infatuation with his charismatic leadership. Alyosha cannot determine the boys' future. Just as the best The Brothers Karamazov can do is to offer its readers an idealized "image of faith" through Zosima's narrative, so the best Alyosha can do for the boys is to offer them guidance through an idealized memory of themselves as "better than they are."

Thus as Alyosha develops over the course of the novel Zosima's bold hopes are reduced to a more plausible form. Though Alyosha embraces Zosima's utopian vision of universal love, he knows that this vision is unrealistic and he is unsure of how it may guide his actions. R.L. Jackson has characterized the approach to utopian ideals that Alyosha has adopted by the novel's end:

The final goal toward which Dostoevsky and his characters strive in light or darkness, con- sciously or unconsciously, may be previsioned, anticipated, even symbolized in memory, dream, or art, but it cannot be achieved in the novel, as it cannot be achieved in life. All that can be done is to seek. (Jackson 1993, 284)

It is just this sort of relationship with utopia that The Theory of the Novel and the "Mr. - bov" essay suggest is required by modern times. As Dosto- evsky's essay notes, modern people cannot expect to realize "the ideal of all our desires." Alyosha may, however, provide the boys with idealized memories that will offer a counterpoint to the frustrations of their day-to- day lives. Likewise, The Brothers Karamazov may provide a poetic "image of faith" as a counterpoint to the complexity of the reality represented by the larger novel. When he praises Dostoevsky at the close of The Theory of Novel, the young Lukacs is endorsing these efforts to preserve utopian hope amid a dystopian reality.

LUKACS, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE POLITICS OF ART 351

IV The Theory of the Novel in Lukacs' Career Shortly after The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs' thinking entered a new

period. Lukacs joined the Communist Party in 1918 and began the reflec- tions that would produce his essays on History and Class Consciousness. The remainder of his career was devoted to working around the problems identified in his earlier work. Whereas The Theory of the Novel limits utopia to images and art works, the older Lukacs wanted a social theory that could make utopia real.

Lukacs' deepening commitment to Marxism led him to describe his early work in sarcastic terms, as in the comments on The Theory of the Novel quoted at the start of this paper. In an interview close to his death Lukacs noted that the one enduring legacy of his study of Dostoevsky and "Russian Realism" was the recognition that "literature can be used to condemn an entire system root and branch." In the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he remarked, "there is no suggestion that capitalism has this or that defect; in their eyes that whole system is inhuman as it stands" (Lukacs 1983, 48). Lukacs explains in his 1964 preface to The Theory of the Novel that he had

initially seized upon this anti-capitalism while "in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world" provoked by World War I (Lukacs 1971, 12). The passion of this "mood" presumably clouded his thinking at the time, leading him to adopt a "romantic anti-capitalism" as opposed to the more rigorous Marxist utopia of his later work, which applies such

concepts as "reification," "class consciousness," and "imputed conscious- ness" to explain how the proletariat's social position could bring about an alternative to modern social institutions. Lukacs's students have generally followed this preference for his later work. Gyorgy Markus, for instance, has argued for the superiority of the later theory on the grounds that the

"utopias . . . of Lukacs' pre-Marxist period [were] not, in fact, based on a

fully worked-out social programme and a concrete historical perspective" (Markus 15).3

From a late twentieth-century perspective, infatuation with utopia and the sense that the whole system of modern society is "inhuman as it stands"

may seem strange. As Martin Jay has demonstrated, contemporary left-

wing theorists--let alone their mainstream peers--have generally recog- nized that utopia is "neither a coherent nor a viable goal" (Jay 12). Yet while Dostoevsky's goal of artistically envisioning social perfection seems

out-of-date, the older Lukacs's preference for a utopian social program appears downright sinister. Twentieth-century experience can make us ap- preciate how The Theory of the Novel and The Brothers Karamazov ac-

knowledge the complexity of utopian aspirations. Dostoevsky and the young Lukacs joined many East European intellec-

tuals of their period in objecting to modern capitalist institutions. But they also warned against facile attempts to create alternatives. Avoiding bold

352 Slavic and East European Journal

claims about the future, they urge the representation of utopia in aesthetic images that may preserve the longing for social progress without encourag- ing revolutionary excess. While the taste for this approach may have faded, it at least remains a superior alternative beside discredited efforts to develop a utopian "social program" based on "concrete historical perspective."

NOTES

1 These comments are from Lukacs' 1964 preface to The Theory of the Novel, which was written in 1915.

2 Cf. Morson 1981. Morson attributes a similar sort of utopianism to Dostoevsky's art when he notes in his preface that while "the principle concern of [Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer] appeared to be the possibility of a utopian society," the Diary forced this possibil- ity to "enter into an inconclusive dialogue" with "its parody" (ix-x). Morson's work, however, is focused on the Diary, whereas Lukacs was no doubt thinking of the major novels when he wrote the final paragraph of The Theory of the Novel.

3 Cf. Bernstein, 1984. Not all critics agree with Markus and Lukacs that The Theory of the Novel contains no sufficient theory of society. J. M. Bernstein argues that it coincides to a large extent with the later Marxist theory, and that its statements can be seen as impor- tant contributions to Lukacsian Marxism. Still, The Theory of the Novel does not offer a programmatic model for social change as the later work does.

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