A Unique Life

 "Georg Lukacs – Record of a Life,” edited and interviewed by Istvan Eorsi, 1983

This small volume is a series of interviews based on jotted biographical notes by Lukacs, the Hungarian revolutionary whose zig-zag politics extended from the 1919 Hungarian Soviet to the 1968 Soviet intervention into Czechoslovakia. Lukacs was the culture commissar under the Hungarian Council Republic, joining the Communist Party in Dec. 1919. He gave back his party card in 1967, and in 1968 voiced pessimism as to the failure of the 1917 revolution. In between he was a member of 3 other European CPs, detained in the USSR, then a member of the Hungarian Workers Party, then jailed and exiled after backing the insurrectionary 1956 Nagy government, then returned to the Party fold after a number of years. He died in 1971. At that point he was working for a reform of 'actually existing' Marxism re democratic communism.

Lukacs charted an independent path that put himself at times outside Stalinism and always outside what he understood as Trotskyism. He supported Stalin on several small matters, on the Hitler/Stalin pact and the Poplar Front, with a 'dodgy' position on the Moscow trials. He was helped by Bukharin at a critical time, which he claims probably saved his life during the purge trials. He was arrested in 1941 as a 'Trotskyist' and Hungarian police agent, but only detained for several months, getting help from Dimitrov. He sums himself up as being 'lucky' – though perhaps being a soft Stalinist at the time helped. In Hungary he made obsequious self-criticisms for his 'errors' in order to maintain his standing in the Hungarian CP, so he was all his political life an 'in/out' player in traditional CP politics.

Lukacs wrote a famous theses - the Blum Theses - supporting “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” and a 'people's democracy' - and was roundly criticized. Regarding the first notion, a similar phrasing was used by Lenin for a short time but then abandoned. Lukac's take on philosophy was as a battle between rationalism and irrationalism, not materialism versus idealism. He supported the 'high' bourgeois novels as the highest forms of literature so far, no matter their variable politics.

The PERSONAL

Lukacs came from a wealthy atheist Jewish family in Budapest. His father was a banker. He 'fell' into the 1919 revolutionary Commune in Hungary after being a left bourgeois culture critic, and was recruited by Bela Kun to be the Culture Commissar. He put artists in charge of the arts, while trying to provide a living to everyone on the Artists' List, even if they sold no art. He also served in the Hungarian Red Army for 6 weeks, attempting to stem retreats while getting good food and letters to the troops, and ordering the execution of 6 deserters. He got out of being drafted in the First World War due to his father's influence, while escaping Hungary after the rightist dictator Horthy took over because of bribes.

In his fascinating remembrances, Lukacs discusses his personal relationships with many people, mostly Hungarians little known in the West. But also well-known Hungarians and Europeans - Max Weber, Karl Polyani, Bela Kun, Bertold Brecht, Bela Bartok, Thomas Mann, Matras Rakosi, Imre Nagy and various Soviets. He discusses many of the faction fights long forgotten, individuals he liked or disliked, his life in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Tashkent, Romania, his lectures and various writings. He rejects two of his best-known books – “History and Class Consciousness” and “Theory of the Novel.”

He returned to Hungary after the World War II and describes the factional struggles among the CP'ers, the concurrent Hungarian purge trials and his lectures and role supporting the 1956 Hungarian insurrection and later support for Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The book contains Lukac's own bio-notes, as well as an interview in New Left Review. All told certain snapshots of the Left in Europe during and after the two World Wars, remembered by a man who led a curious and opinionated political life.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive: “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukacs); “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “Hungary Heads Into the Horthyite Past,” “Latest Developments in Hungary,” “The Structural Crisis of Capitalism”(Meszaros); “Hungary Continues on Horthyite Path,” “Hungary Today,” “The Ghost of Stalin”(Sartre); “The Red Atlantis,” “A Statue of Limitations,” “The Queen's Gambit,” “Demonstration for Democratic Rights,” “Prague – A Novel.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 2, 2021