Lukács and the USSR emigration (1933-45):

realism and fortune in catastrophic times1

Juarez Torres Duayer2

1 Original published: DUAYER, Juarez Torres. Lukács e a emigração na URSS (1933-45):

realismo e sorte em tempos de catástrofes. Verinotio—Revista on-line de Filosofia e
Ciências Humanas, Rio das Ostras, v. 26, n. 1, pp. 96-105, jan./jun. 2020. Translated by V. S.
Conttren, August 2021. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/52U4N.
2 Doctorate in Social Sciences from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). Tenured
Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). E-
mail: juarez_duayer@uol.com.br.
 huebunkers.wordpress.com V. S. Conttren

It is possible to consider Lukács' aesthetic writings from the period of

emigration to the USSR—from 1933, the year of Hitler's rise, to 1945, the date of

the end of World War II and of his return to Hungary after a 26-year exile—as a

summary of his position in a dispute carried out simultaneously on two fronts: on

the one hand against the literary sectarianism of the RAPP, 3 and, on the other,

against the “avant-garde” and “bourgeois modernism” of the aesthetic avant-

garde of the 1930s,4 within what later became known as the “debate on

expressionism” (LUKÁCS, 1966, p. 8.)

For reasons which shall be explained later on, even if at the political level, on

several occasions during the Soviet exile, his manifestations were expressed

through not always well understood “protocol self-criticisms,” 5 there is no doubt

that they shape the nature and extent of the interdiction imposed by Stalinist

orthodoxy and dogmatism upon the arts and cultural policies of the period. 6

However, although years later, almost at the end of his life, Lukács will say that

his position “already at that time” was one of “universal opposition to Stalinist

ideology, not restricted to aesthetics” (LUKÁCS, 1999, p. 166), it was through “true

realism”7—we have the epigraph used in this work—that he positioned himself

3 The official Stalinist organisation of revolutionary writers in the USSR.

4 This is how Lukács, in the 1965 Preface, refers to these texts collected in Problemas del
realismo (1966); most of them were written between 1934 and 1940 and published in the
journal Literaturnyj Kritik.
5 For an examination of the problem of 'self-criticisms' and their distinctions, see Tertulian
(2002).
6 Regarding the cultural policies of the period, see Netto (1979).
7 For Tertulian, realism in Lukács “has always been a congenital feature of all art and not a
simple matter of choice between styles” (1980, p. 255).

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 “Lukács and the emigration in the USSR…” Juarez T. Duayer

against the “gross manipulation”8 of the fetishization and mystification of the

period:

There is precisely—within art, towards art—no such possibility of

absolute manipulation; not the purpose, the intention of the
writers (which can be regulated) is the determining datum, but the
configuration, which remains subject to the “Victory of realism.” (…)
[Through it] the genesis of mimesis, the “victory of realism” loses
any irrationalist nuance: therein erupts precisely the truth of
history. (1999, p. 167).

Notwithstanding, nonetheless, all the difficulties during his emigration to

the USSR, Lukács' intellectual production in the period is remarkable. Lukács then

consolidated a good part of his intellectual production and the changes in his

relationship with Marxism. These are the years of collaboration with Michail

Lifschitz at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow (1930-4) and of the elaboration

of his conception of realism amidst the “debate on expressionism” 9 with the

aesthetic vanguards of the 1930s and the sectarianism of the cultural policies of

the Proletkult.10 According to Oldrini (1996), this is the moment of the "ontological

turn" responsible for the radical change in Lukács' previous relationship with

Marxism and of the transformation of the philosophical perspective embodied in

8 In “Towards an Ontology of Social Being,” after referring to the theories of the Second
International as a “mixture of mechanistic materialism and subjective voluntarism,” for
Lukács, after Lenin's death, “under Stalin Marxism was again deformed into an inorganic
mixture of mechanistic necessity and voluntarism (gross manipulation)” (LUKÁCS, 2013, p.
629; emphasis mine).
9 Although critical of Lukács' positions, a good approximation to the debate is contained in
Machado (1998); for a defence of the actuality of realism for Marxist aesthetics, see
Duayer (2015).
10 Proletkult, the Russian movement for a “proletarian culture,” advocated a break between
socialist art and the past (the cultural tradition) in defence of a workers' literature as the
authentic revolutionary literature.

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History and Class Consciousness.11 Finally, and perhaps most decisively: from the

experiences of this period of emigration, Lukács' commitment to the project of

the renewal and rebirth of Marxism takes shape and is born. For Tertulian (1980,

p. 287), after “the long Stalinist night,” the philosopher believed that the

fundamental categories of Marxist thought should be subjected to a radical re-

examination. This was the sense of Lukács' later concern that his mature works—

the Aesthetics and Towards an Ontology of Social Being—be considered as

pioneering contributions to the construction of that project on which he would

work until the end of his life.

It is not surprising therefore that after almost three decades of his return to

Hungary, in the script of the autobiographical sketch he prepared in early 1971

(Lukács died on June 4) for the interviews he conceived between March and May

of the same year to István Eörsi and Erzsébet Vezér 12 (Lived Thought/Pensamento

Vivido), the author refers to the Soviet emigration as a period of “luck in a time of

catastrophes.”13

On the edition of the draft prepared by Lukács, those responsible for the

Lived Thought interviews referred to the time of emigration as a period of

“widening of the field of conflict” (1999, p. 166); Netto (183, p. 50) referred to it as

11 Oldrini considers this “turn” is due to “Lukács' contact with Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and
Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks” and is “founded on Marx's (and Lenin's) brilliant critiques
of Hegel, through which Lukács sees for the first time the consequences that derive from
Hegelian idealist contortionisms” (2002, p. 53).
12 “Pensamento Vivido” (Gelebtes Denken) was first published in German in 1980 (in
Portuguese, cf. LUKÁCS, 1999).
13 Lukács referred to “luck” in three situations: when he refused a meeting with Radek and
Bukharin in 1930—“had I met them I would have been liquidated;” his withdrawal from
the Hungarian movement after the “fiasco” of the “Blum Theses” and, the third, the little
attraction exerted by the house in which he lived by the staff of the NKVD, the political
police of the period.

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“the tough times” and the Hungarian Szabô (2016, p. 135), as the “dangerous

years in the Soviet Union where he [Lukács] saw up close the Stalinist despotic

practice” and recalled that “not coincidentally,” Daniel Bell referred to the Magyar

philosopher as “the great survivor of the time” (2016, p. 136). It is quite likely that

the US sociologist, author of the bestseller “The End of Ideology,” referred in his

commentary to the following passage from Lukács' statements: “Unfortunately I

must say that, in my opinion, apart from myself there is no Hungarian writer who

has escaped the Stalin era” (1999, p. 91). In the latter, the philosopher recalls his

aversions during the great trials of 1936 and 1937—“I went through one of the

largest prison campaigns in the world" and the period when he was imprisoned

for two months in 1941 on Trotskyist charges14—“at a time when all executions

had ceased”—, once again saying that he was “very lucky” and that he could not

“help to remember Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn's hero who was also always very

lucky” (1999, p. 99).15

Regarding the relationship between his aesthetic writings during the period

of emigration and one of the two fronts to which we referred above—the

aesthetic front in defence of 'true realism' against “gross manipulation”—, it is

possible to assess the importance of these texts for the Lukácsian project of the

rebirth of Marxism.

The necessity of this project can be put to the test by the author himself in

at least three moments.

The first, already without the “protocol self-criticisms,” on the occasion of

the 1957 Post-script to his My Way to Marx of 1933 when addressing the

14 In his consistent introduction to “Literatura y revolución,” Isidoro Cruz Bernal comments

that the “Proletkult was Trotsky's main opponent” (2004, p. 11).
15 Reference to “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

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“inheritance question” against the literary orientations of the Proletkult, he

admitted that:

It was necessary to recognize that the root of the confrontation

between progressive currents, which enriched Marxist culture,
with the dogmatic oppression of a tyrannical bureaucracy on all
autonomous thought, had to be sought in Stalin himself and,
therefore, also in his person. (LUKÁCS, 1983, p. 90).16

The second, in 1971, appeared in the interviews of Lived Thought. When

referring to the period of emigration, Lukács drew attention, within the texts in

defence of realism, published in the journal Literatunyj Kritik, in his open polemic

against the Proletkult and the RAPP, to “the emergence at the foreground, with

ever-increasing intensity, of Engels's 'Victory of realism' against the regulation of

ideology from 'above',” (1999, p. 167).17

Lastly, the third moment concerns the autonomy of art in relation to the

state—to ideological regulation from “above”—and refers us directly to Lukács'

participation as People's Commissar in the Hungarian Commune of 1919 (Republic

of Hungarian Councils).

There is no difficulty in tracing through the aesthetic writings and political

positions of the years of emigration to the USSR the repercussions and the way in

which Lukács assimilated the experiences of the Hungarian Commune.

16 The text published in 1933 in the Muscovite journal Internationale Literatur, no. 2.
corresponds to Lukács' statement in the series “Writers on Karl Marx” on the occasion of an
international writers' congress in Moscow.
17 In a letter to the novelist Margaret Harkness, dated April 1888, Engels cites the example of
Balzac who although “politically legitimist” found himself “compelled to act against his
own class sympathies and political prejudices”—as one of “the greatest triumphs of
realism” (1979, p. 70).

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In yet another notation from “Lived Thought,” the author refers to the 133-

day duration of the Commune as the beginning of the years of “forced learning:”

The real years of forced learning began with the dictatorship and
after its fall when a part of the communists strove to know and
assimilate Marxism in the communist sense of the word (1999, p.
57).

A brief remembrance of his participation in the political and cultural

formulation of the Hungarian Commune allows us to assess the significance of

this “forced learning,” especially in the context of the confrontation with the

cultural policies of Stalinism and, later, in the very project of renewing Marxism in

“Aesthetics” and “Towards an ontology of social being.”

In the Commune, Lukács was the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party

and was Deputy Minister of Public Education (vice-commissar of the people).

Then, he argued that the cultural task that fell to the Commune was the

“revolutionizing of souls” through a program that considered “politics only a

means; the end, culture” (apud NETTO, 1983, p. 32).

The cultural programme of the Hungarian communists as articulated in a

document of the Ministry of Public Education entitled Taking a Stand, made a

distinction only “between good and bad literature (…). Everything that has real

literary value, wherever it comes from, will find support from the Commissariat"

(apud NETTO, 1983, p. 32). By valuing the “cultural tradition,” the Ministry

sponsored the representation by groups of workers of pieces by Lessing, Ibsen,

Bernard Shaw, Molière and, following the example of Gustave Courbet 18 in the

18 Painter and main representative of the French realist school, Courbet, presided at the
Paris Commune over the commission for the preservation of cultural heritage and reform
of the Beaux-Arts (ROUGERIE, 2011, p. 33).

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Paris Commune (1871), the museums were opened to the people. Courbet, for

whom art “that advances the world” could not be left behind the revolution

(CLAYSON, 2011, p. 37), created and directed with other artists the Federation of

Artists that defended the total freedom of art in relation to the state, and the

control of its production by its own craftsmen. The actions of the Republic of

Councils shows that, most likely, Lukács was aware of the cultural and artistic

policies of the Paris Commune.

I draw attention to the presence, already on the occasion of the Hungarian

Commune of 1919, of Lukács' treatment of the “cultural tradition,” the “inheritance

question.” Inspired by the classics of Marxism (Marx and Engels) and attacked as

we have seen by the Proletkult, the cultural “inheritance question” will constitute

one of the pillars of Lukácsian aesthetic thought on the “artistic way of figuring

the world” (Marx, “Introduction of 1857”), alongside the freedom and autonomy of

art and the refusal of all forms of its instrumentalization.

Regarding the Hungarian Commune's relations towards art and artists,

Lukács wrote in the Red Journal, in a formulation very close to Courbet's, that “The

Commissariat does not want an official art, much less the dictatorship of the

Party's art” (apud NETTO, 1983, p. 33). Referring to Lukács' “experience of power”

from the period of the Commune, Konder (1996, p. 28), even considering that in

the texts of the thirties the author “walked on glowing embers,” considers that

despite some “sectarian positions,” the People's Commissar adopted in the

direction of cultural policy an unequivocally “democratic and pluralist” orientation

and, at no point, his deep and sincere concern with the authentic values of

culture left him room for any vacillation: the ultimate priority of culture repelled

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procedures aimed at instrumentalizing it (KONDER, 1980, p. 38; author’s

emphasis).

After the massacre of the Commune by the Horty government, Lukács is

sentenced to death. He escapes, disguised as a chauffeur, to Vienna, where he is

arrested and deported. With the argument that Lukács "as a philosopher, is one

of the great ones, who only appear once in each generation", a broad

mobilization of European intellectuals (Paul Ernest, Franz Ferdinand Baumgarten,

Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Ernest Bloch, among others) prevents his extradition

(KONDER, 1980, p. 42). The numbers of the Hungarian counter-revolution are

impressive: 5,000 executions, 75,000 imprisoned, 100,000 escaped into exile,

among them Lukács, who remained in Vienna until the end of the 1920s.

The defeat of the Commune and the “years of forced learning” therefore

occupy a prominent place in the “Lived Thought” interviews and resonated, as we

are seeking to show, in the clashes waged against the RAPP, the Proletkult and the

cultural policies of Stalinism, in particular against the regulation of ideology from

“above.” The passage we reproduce below is significant for the characterisation of

the disputes during the “time of catastrophes” and of the “widening of the

conflict.” Therein Lukács refers to the texts in defence of realism that he

published in Literaturnyj Kritik and speaks of the importance of the (anti-Rapp,

anti-modernist) journal for the revolutionary-democratic transformation of

Russian literature between 1934 until its banning in 1940 by Stalin:19

19 The texts published in Literatunyj Kritik were edited by Fondo de Cultura Económica
(Mexico, 1966) from the original edition “Probleme des Realismus” (LUKÁCS, 1955); some of
them were selected and translated by Carlos Nelson Coutinho (LUKÁCS,1968). A new
edition with the same title and with another selection, presentation and translation by
Carlos Nelson Coutinho was published by Expressão Popular in 2010 with the inclusion of
the important “Narrate or describe?” by Lukács, written in 1936 during his emigration.

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We attacked, through the journal, the naturalist orthodoxy of

Stalin. One must not forget that at that time Engels' letter on the
Balzac question was published, and, in extremely sharp contrast to
Stalinism, we posed the problem—without this having serious
consequences—that ideology is no criterion for evaluating the
aesthetic quality of a work and that good literature can exist
despite a detestable ideology like Balzac's monarchism. We then
gave this idea its second form: a good ideology can generate bad
literature (1999, p. 102).

The expectations of Lukács and the group of contributors to Literatunyj Kritik

“of a resumption, without bureaucratic obstacles, of socialist literature,

methodology and Marxist literary criticism,” however, were soon dashed after the

dissolution of RAPP in 1932 (LUKÁCS, 1983, p. 90). Later on, he and others, from

the group that opposed the adherents of the official Stalinist organization of

revolutionary writers of the USSR, understood that all these trends contrary to

the progress of thought had solid bureaucratic support and “that any idea

distancing itself from the imposed model ran into deaf and aggressive

resistance” (LUKÁCS, 1983, p. 90).

After the centenary of the Russian Revolution, it is worth comparing the

cultural policies of the “time of catastrophes” with the experiences of the Paris

Commune and the Hungarian Commune as founding references against all forms

of curtailment of artistic expression and of an energetic defence of the autonomy

of art from the state.

For this reason, the remembrance of the artistic and cultural experiences of

both Communes remain unavoidable contributions to a debate which, within the

field of Marxism, is attended, as a rule, by ignorance or by erroneous forms of

appreciation of the heritage inspired by the classics of Marxism on the freedom,

autonomy and independence of art in relation to the state.

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The references dealing with these relations are not few. The question of the

cultural heritage of humanity in art and literature referred to above is, for

example, to be found in the admiration of Marx and Engels for the legacy of

classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the great realist writers in

nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Engels' reference to the “triumph of

realism” and against what he called “tendentious literature,” anticipating in

decades Lukács' criticism of the Stalinist counterfeit of “socialist realism.”

Similarly, in Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg's rejection of the idea of a

'proletarian literature and culture' in favour of a 'truly human culture' and an

independent revolutionary art.20 In the same way, in the manner in which Victor

Serge (1989, p. 97) denounced the dangers of 'literary utilitarianism' when he

insisted on the distinction between art and politics. 21 This distinction is all the

more important, as Chasin (1989, p. 12) reminds us, “the more we are warned

that it is already a writing of pro-evolutionary resistance within the very heart of

the revolution” (CHASIN, 1989).

Notwithstanding the importance of this heritage there still persist

contemporary re-editions of “regrettable previous mistakes” that remind us

closely of the period of the “tough years” and the “time of catastrophes,” such as

those of the “grey era” of cultural policies in the 1960s and 1970s in Cuba.22

20 On the position of Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg against the “proletarian culture” of
Stalinism see Isidoro Cruz Bernal's presentation of Leon Trotsky's “Literatura y revolución”
(2004).
21 For Serge, “When the struggle is over, the division of society into classes is abolished,
there will be no more proletariat. The nascent new culture will be truly human. Only in a
narrow sense, therefore, can one speak of proletarian culture and literature” (1989, p. 97).
22 The “regrettable errors” and the “grey era” are in Silvia Miskulin's “Cuban intellectuals and
the cultural politics of the 1961-1975 Revolution” (2009). On the presence of “Stalinist
barbarism” in the “tragic fate” of Cuban literature (Lezama Lima) and the Chinese
revolution see Bernal's presentation (TROTSKY, 2014, p. 13).

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Thus, it is worth recalling from the classics of Marxism the best traditions

involved in the relations between human emancipation, art and revolution and

remember that for the communards of 1871 and 1919, art and revolution should

indeed walk together, but in total freedom regarding the state.

To reclaim, yes, the enormous heritage of the Russian Revolution of 1917,

but without forgetting with Netto, that “no Marxist thinker can eschew an

examination of Stalinism, one of the results of the failure of the Revolution in the

West” (1979, p. 17).23

As a concluding remark, I recall that in Lukács “the remembrance of the past

has always been an ideal vehicle of historical continuity” (1968, p. 4) but, for that,

we must take the past in an ontological sense, not in a cognitive-

theoretical sense. If I take the past in the sense of the theory of
knowledge, the past is passed. From the ontological point of view,
the past is not always passed, but exerts its influence up to the
present (LUKÁCS, 1971, p. 41).

Hence, the past is on the one hand the past and humanity's self-

experimentation; on the other, it provides us with a ground for adopting a

determined attitude towards the present. This is the ontological meaning of

Lukács' remembrance of the "time of catastrophes" for his project of the rebirth

of Marxism. Within the aesthetic sphere, in the face of all the forms of

fetishisation and gross mystification in our "times of catastrophes," it is

incumbent upon us, in the face of the present, to fence off the heritage and the

unavoidable actuality of true realism.

23 In the Preface to “Lived Thought” Eösi wrote: “Only once in the autumn of 1968, not long
after the Warsaw Pact troops marched on Prague, did I hear from his [Lukács'] mouth the
following statement: «It seems that the whole experiment begun in 1917 has failed and
everything must be started again somewhere else».” (1999, p. 13).

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