Georg Lukács and Leo Tolstoy

Lukács in the time of The Theory of the Novel

The liberal atmosphere of the late 19th century led to rising contributions made by Budapest Jewry to the development of Hungarian culture, science and industry, and played a particularly outstanding role in intellectual pursuits in Hungary, in which Georg Lukács found his belonging. Apart from Budapest, Lukács also took an active part in intellectual circles in Berlin, where he came to be influenced by Georg Simmel, who he studied with through 1906–7, for the purpose of advancing his comprehension of sociology and growing sense of tragedy, in Florence as well as in Heidelberg. He also founded an avant-garde journal, A Szellem (The Spirit), with Lajos Fülep that did not last long. However, the death of his close friend Leo Popper and the suicide of his lover Irma Seidler deeply disturbed Lukács’ life, and Seidler’s death distressed Lukács so deeply that one could literally sense the trauma reading his essay On Poverty of Spirit in 1911, collected in the book Soul and Form. When the loss of love continued, society offered no consolation. The Theory of the Novel was written during 1914–15, when Europe was permeated with the mania of war, redolent of a crisis of decay and decadency. This was also a moment in which his eyes set on a dazzling array of minds, including Lenin, who reprimanded imperialism for being the summit of capitalism; Oswald Spengler, who maintained ‘Kulturzyklentheorie’ and the decline of the West, as well as Ernst Bloch, who advocated the spirit of utopia (Geist der Utopie). The Theory of the Novel bears witness to Lukács’ steps towards the philosophy of history that set out to elucidate the correlation of historical changes and aesthetic forms. For him, the novel ‘is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’, which unveils ‘that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that without meaning reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality’ (Lukács, 1971: 88). And there is such irony in modern life ‘within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself’ (Lukács, 1971: 74). Any work of art, without exception, that gives an expression to a subjective world view would be spurned by Lukács, since he considered reality as a dialectical bridging of the historical and social which constitutes us all. Lukács claimed that such works of art as Homeric epic poetry and the modern novel must always express the objective reality of social and individual life as it is. In his words:

great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life…this indestructible bond with reality as it is, the crucial difference between the epic and the drama, is a necessary consequence of the object of the epic being life itself. (Lukács, 1971: 46–7)

Behind Lukács’ encounters with Tolstoy

So what happened during Lukács’ dual encounters with Tolstoy, spanning almost 20 years? In a broader sense, the social-historical background must have played a role in forming Lukács’ ideas on Tolstoy. It was during the First World War that he first started to look into Tolstoy, and the second time was during his time in the Soviet Union. From a more personal viewpoint, his first-hand experience and world view also changed accordingly. In December 1918, Jewish-born Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party. During the short-lived Hungarian Communist regime of Kun Béla in 1919, Lukács became Commissar for Culture and Education, after which he moved to Vienna, where he stayed for 10 years and married his second wife, Gertrud Bortstieber, before he left Germany for the Soviet Union in 1933. When he was in Vienna he was responsible for editing the review Kommunismus, and was involved with a Hungarian underground movement. And it was within this span of time that he produced History and Class Consciousness (1923) in line with Marxist philosophy of history for his forthcoming critical literary principles, which relate changes in the form of the work of art to the history of class struggle.

It can be said that from 1919 till 1929, Georg Lukács was far more directly entangled with political issues as a revolutionary figure. Noticeably, even before the completion of Theory of the Novel, Dostoevsky was a constant point of reference in every possible way and Tolstoy seemed to be an alien name. However, later in his life, Lukács distanced himself from Dostoevsky, while Tolstoy became a frequent figure even in many of his theoretical papers. Such a switch from one figure to another could be interpreted simply as a matter of taste, varying with seasons of life. But when it comes to Lukács, not to mention in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the changing reasons speak to his philosophy of history without hesitation.

A closer look at The Theory of the Novel will show Lukács’ arbitrary selection of works, in that he invested no effort on referring to any English novels even though they are the popular sources for the stage of world literature. The reason behind his choice lies not in his aesthetic consideration of works, but in his view of philosophy of history, so that periodization of novels synchronizes with progress of history, a kind of a grand narrative, so to speak. After he finished discussion of the different historical conditions that called forth the epic and the novel, Lukács took one step further on novels in view of the connection of the soul and the world. In a logical manner, three openings are offered. The soul is narrower than the world or the soul broader than the world, or the two reconcile that the soul is equal to the world. As a result, a theoretical dilemma arises. Works written by Tolstoy satisfactorily fit none of the three scenarios mentioned above, leaving Tolstoy a principle-less outlier. Therefore, Lukács came up with the fourth possibility, which transcends social forms of life, and is appropriate for Tolstoy and him alone. As Lukács introduced the fourth type to help him out of this awkward situation, the theoretical structure of the novel to discuss the relation between the soul and the world was deconstructed, thus inviting another embarrassment. It is highly possible that the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, till an infinite number of types may also come into being when new great works are produced.

It is worth mentioning here that Lukács remained a central actor in some significant debates around classical Marxism, including the ever-changing nature of class consciousness under different modes of production, the type of political organization appropriate to the era of imperialism and suchlike. He was, indeed, one of the few Marxists outside Russia that attempted to integrate and develop Leninist principles. Despite his capitulation to Stalin after 1929, Lukács tacitly gave consent to the authorities with reserved denunciations, both in Russia or Hungary, regardless of the danger and attack threatening him. So only his first two books of the pre-Marxist period were written in his native Hungarian, while the rest were created in German:

By concentrating on 19th century literature and stubbornly retaining German as the language in which he writes, Lukács has continued to propose, as a Communist, European and humanist – as opposed to nationalist and doctrinaire – values; living as he does in a Communist and provincial country, he has remained a genuinely European intellectual figure. (Sontag, 1994: 86)

So is there any underlying link between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the eyes of Lukács? As a gifted psychologist of literature worldwide, Dostoevsky strove to give evidence of the compatibility of Christianity with the immaterial part of humanity in its inmost essence. When it comes to Tolstoy, he has been far more widely lauded as the greatest novelist in world literature, and his mastery of literary technique echoes his conviction that the world of sophistication overthrows all theory that attempts to give simple and comprehensible explanations. It seems to Tolstoy that there is no such thing as historical laws. He is convinced by the idea that ethics is equal to the utmost sensitivity to the particular rather than any general rule. And he maintains that a real life, a true life, rests upon an infinite number of unexceptional moments lacking imagination, that are constantly ignored by human beings, rather than on the great crisis. Such concepts can find their best expression in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The former is set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, and the latter transfers his prosaic view of life to marriage and family, as well as work. On the strength of moments burning with passion, Anna Karenina is also a counterpoint to romantic love, which is based on an intense moment of passion that give rises to adultery in contrast to the prosaic love of family, which is, however, first and last, based on intimacy. It is known to all that Tolstoy was plagued with a religious crisis after finishing Anna Karenina, which had a great bearing on his later attitude toward his own works and religion.

Tolstoy was led to turn down his two great novels and take on a different religion, that was regarded in his eyes as true Christianity. He also formulated a new genre of art. In a series of works he projected his new perspectives, including tracts and novellas such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) and What Is Art? (1898). Father Sergius (1898), for example, seems to be a parallel to his own quest for sainthood, and in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), which is usually deemed as the greatest novella throughout the history of Russian literature, there is a crystal-clear display of the existential horror of sickness and mortality. Meanwhile, The Death of Ivan Ilyich reeks of despair of the falsehood and disillusion, that civilization is depicted as nothing but a labyrinth of lies to divert humans’ attention from the inevitability of death. As for Lukács, he described the modern world not just as the world of decadence and decay, but also as the world of ultimate sinfulness awaiting redemption. Dostoevsky promised a redemption of an entirely different world, where humans have to be redeemed from the world of absolute sinfulness, and such redemption is the direct source for Russia as well as the world. For Lukács, Dostoevsky is a novelist with a touch of mysticism, a kind of religious mysticism that also infected Lukács himself. Dostoevsky said every man may know and love and is responsible for every other man, but if all men knew that, it would immediately be a paradise on earth, which is also one of Lukács’ famous sentences. As realism rises to the peak with Scott, Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy and then declines with the naturalism of Zola, for Lukács, from 1914 to 1915, Russia seemed to embody the prelude to a better new world, to the promise of redemption. And in his religious or messianic hope, he decided to end The Theory of the Novel with an appeal to Dostoevsky.

What can be read between Dostoevsky’s lines indicates that the new world, far away from the struggle against what in actual fact happens or is present, is crystallized into a visible reality for the first time. As the form that he created lies outside the reach of what he wrote, Dostoevsky revealed his creative vision pertinent to none of the European Romanticism of the 19th century. In other words, he is better seen as the final expression of European Romanticism. Indeed, in Lukács’ eyes, Dostoevsky does not fight against the existing world since he has already been part of the new world. And it is open to discussion whether humans are leaving behind for good the world of absolute sinfulness, or only hoping to leave it behind.

Lukács held persistently to the belief that realism on the whole had served as a leading literary trend ever since Shakespeare and Cervantes, which could give the fullest play to the bourgeois world view as it elbowed all the way against the feudal nobility as well as the state advocating absolutism. Since the French Revolution witnessed for the first time the mass of the population as a historical force, ‘hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them’ (Lukács, 1969: 22). Such unprecedented historical consciousness was detected in the novels by Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Balzac, and went beyond great historical events. In Lukács’ words, ‘the central aesthetic problem in realism is the adequate presentation of the complete human personality’ (Lukács, 1950: 7). Singular concern with men and women as individuals proved incapable of solving this problem, ‘for the inner life of man, its essential traits and essential conflicts, can be truly portrayed only in organic connection with social and historical factors’ (Lukács, 1950: 8). And critical realism means that the most ardent Marxist Lukács maintained that the great works of art, particularly in literature, were created before 1848 and that no work of art could be produced after the revolution of 1848.

But there is an exception, the exception of critical realism, first and foremost of Balzac, which was modern and created great modern critical realism, as Engels said. And writers of critical realism wrote critiques against their own persuasion, against their world view, and even against what they believed. For example, Balzac was pro-monarchy but he wrote in his novel as a kind of critic of monarchy. ‘We are concerned here, of course, with the intention realized in the work; it need not coincide with the writer’s conscious intention’ (Lukács, 1963: 19). In this way, no matter how Balzac felt about the French aristocracy, he was driven in his art to make the point that this body was nothing else than obstruction to the rolling wheels of capitalism and its final destiny was sealed by such development. Therefore, what is needed is some aesthetic system so that ‘the true artistic totality of a literary work depends on the completeness of the picture it presents of the essential social factors that determine the world depicted’ (Lukács, 1950: 147). Lukács picked up Hegel’s definition of epic genres as the literary world of the totality of objects. Tolstoy’s novels live up to this requirement in a way worthy of the grand style. It was admitted by Lukács that the totality of objects is also portrayed by Tolstoy’s Western contemporaries, such as the naturalist Zola, not to mention the master of details, Flaubert. But the difference between naturalists and realists such as Tolstoy rests not simply in the presentation of the totality of objects, but in the way it is presented. Naturalists describe the objects of the portrayed world and give expression to details with artistic perfection at times. But such world-objects serve merely as a milieu for the benefit of the action of the characters, which are no longer grand art, as explained by Nietzsche yearning for the grand style. Tolstoy, however, presents the totality of objects in narration, while the form viewed fails to show due appreciation to what matters most in his vision or in his created world. As for Tolstoy, it remained an unswerving belief in the grand narrative. As the realist novel descended after 1848,

the evolution of bourgeois society after 1848 destroyed the subjective conditions which made a great realism possible…the old writers were participants in the social struggle and their activities as writers were either part of this struggle or a reflection, an ideological and literary solution, of the great problems of the time. (Lukács, 1950: 140)

There is more to connect Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In Theory of the Novel, particularly in the notes attached to it, Lukács said that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy shared a certain pathos and that they both employed the term ‘convention’ when expressing disapproval. And such use of the term falls into two opposite categories, narrow and broad. In its narrow interpretation, ‘convention’ resembles Hegel’s definition of ‘positivism’, referring to institutions the soul of which was already gone and where there dwell gods no more. This means institutions after the loss of substance, so to speak. In a broad sense, ‘convention’ is everything that belongs to the world of objective spirit, such as state, religion, justice, family, everyday ethics, which is another term borrowed from Hegel. The Tolstoy chapter centered upon the argument of War and Peace and its genre. Even though Tolstoy compared it once to Homer and in many aspects this is so, Lukács remained unswayed in his view that the novel still remains the portrayal of social life, which makes War and Peace a novel after all. It did not come to an ending that has disagreement with the individuals and the external world, while it proves to be a novel of disillusion that found its likeness in his Western contemporaries, Flaubert for instance. Yet Tolstoy remains close to an organic and substantial life, a life of the ‘muzhik’ (peasant) that follows the rhythm of nature. And referring to the death of a tree was interpreted into the most human, as love and marriage mediate between nature and culture. Greatness in this mediating sphere appears, however, only in death or rather in dying. Lukács mentioned here for the first, yet not the last time, the near death experience of Count Bolonsky on the battlefield, and Karenin’s personal elevation before the absent death bed of Anna.

Between Lukács’ two encounters with Tolstoy

Among the various figures of Dostoevsky, such as Sonia in Crime and Punishment, Meshkin in The Idiot, and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, all chose to move on regardless of their pessimistic views on life and make choices on their own volition, always practicing some religious goodness. As Lukács proposed to completely transform the whole society, from Irma Seidler whose suicide evoked a profound religiosity in a moral sense, to Jelena Grabenko, who became his first wife even though a Russian political activist and convicted terrorist. This marked the transition of Lukács from the nihilism of modernity to utopian messianism. Later on, for all the marginalization and danger threatening him, Lukács did not make concessions to Stalinism even though he showed support for socialism in one country, and popular front and anti-monopoly alliances. As Michael Löwy writes: ‘Disorientated by the disappearance of the revolutionary upsurge, Lukács clung to the only two pieces of “solid” evidence which seemed to him to remain: the USSR and traditional culture’ (Löwy, 1977: 74). It was his conviction that Marxism is a highly scientific system based on the penetrating analysis of social and economic conditions and corresponding changes, and even if Marx foresaw the future in an inaccurate way, Marxism would continue to hold within its innate cogency in approaching culture as well as life. It can be said that Lukács lived up to his regret-free choice of Marxism as a vindication of overcoming the tragic existence as a modern man himself. With such an unflinching willingness and undying commitment, in 1914 and in 1935 particularly, Lukács was dedicated to the mission of changing the world by means of political revolution, which also justified his fervent criticism of Tolstoy’s belief in redeeming goodness on earth.

To understand Lukács’ view of Tolstoy at this stage requires attention to his discussion of temporality in Tolstoy. And it needs mentioning that the concept of time and the representation of temporality is a central topic of the book, especially in speaking of Flaubert. The first idea of time in Tolstoy is about the time of conventions, which refers to some constant uniformity, constant returning to the same and repetition without advancing, irrespective of the inexorability of change, for no one is of substance. The second notion of time signifies natural rhythm. And it is this perpetual circle that the individual destiny is emerging from and disappearing into. The third conceptualizes the experience of the great moments where the insignificance of seeking a meaningful and essential life drops away. For Lukács in the year 1914, however, this view was rather polemical and thus abstract.

When it comes to Lukács’ discussion of Tolstoy’s religiosity, Lukács maintained that Tolstoy’s mysticism remains in the sphere of immanence. Lukács fought against Tolstoy’s Christianity because he fought against transcendence. Given his personal struggle with existential despair after finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy could hard gain happiness or fulfillment from activities of any kind in the face of mortality. Afterwards, he was struck by what the ordinary men and women believed and take to religion, by the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. But he soon came to realize that Christian churches were none other than crooked institutions obfuscating true Christianity. Later on, as Tolstoy managed to conquer his dread of death and persisted in what he discovered and believed to be Christ’s message, he spared no efforts to advance his new faith. In a manner of speaking, for Tolstoy, Christianity is like a lamp carried along by humankind. And in its constant moves, Christianity illuminates brand new moral realms, and brings out higher ideals in the wake of spiritual advancement of human beings. With goodness being the very savior, all sins uniformly could be forgiven without anyone or anything intervening on earth, and such earthly salvation leads to asceticism. Whatever Lukács discovered in Tolstoy could be counted in Tolstoy’s favor inversely, while such contrast gave rise to the approval of transcendent religiosity from Dostoevsky. Still, Lukács felt compelled to go back to rehearse all the defects of capitalism, whether it was relevant in the context or not.

Tolstoy’s early novels were praised for the beauty of their characters, for the richness of their action, for the harmony between internal and external, for the portrayal of extreme passions, the complexity of the human soul. The works of the late Tolstoy, however, get closer, at least in certain ways, to the works of his Western modern contemporaries, for example, Maupassant, whom Tolstoy especially liked. His characters get closer to the average. Lukács’ examples are mainly The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata, where the portrayal of institutions turns into biting satire to the extent that the increasing hatred against his own class transforms Tolstoy’s character sometimes into fossilized and static caricatures. This is, however, counterbalanced with the greater understanding of revolutionaries, as in Resurrection. The portrayal of the ‘idyll’, even if only transitory, one of the most sensually beautiful pages in War and Peace, faded away without a trace. Later, Lukács merely skated over the old Tolstoy with a brief reference to his own religiosity, a vital topic for him in 1914, without even touching upon the old Tolstoy’s obsession with sexuality in the manner of debauchery or bedroom tragedy. While Lukács remembered to watch changes in Tolstoy’s world vision and artistic approach, he also went to great lengths to discuss how Tolstoy portrayed his grand style.

There are many cases illustrating such changes in Tolstoy’s works in Lukács. For instance, the bent bare oak tree in War and Peace was far more than a tree. It bore witness to the desperate gaze of Andrey Bolonsky, and displayed a tree of fresh leaves almost beyond recognition when Bolonsky returned from the Rostov estate. In like manner, Tolstoy portrayed a horse race as a symbolic milieu in Anna Karenina as Zola did in Nana. But Tolstoy turned the horse race into a watershed in the romantic relation between Anna and Vronsky. It needs mentioning here that the accident of Vronsky when horse riding did not precipitate the crisis but did act as a catalyst to expose their respective personalities. By means of the presentation of the change of their commitment, emotion, as well as interpersonal relationships, Tolstoy also well portrayed their characters. The moment Anna attempted to escape her love for Vronsky, she noticed for the first time the ugliness of her husband Karenin at the railway station. And the tea-drinking detail at the end of the Anna–Vronsky romance also played a part in her ultimate decision. The replacement of description with narration weaved objects into the carpet of a story. This was, indeed, a conscious literary strategy by Tolstoy. Lukács also quoted his reference to the story of Joseph from the Bible, an immortal story, which shows a world on the strength of a simple narrative. And Tolstoy’s taste for simplicity, and his rejection of so-called refinement, was attractive to Lukács, who wrote in his youth a devastating critical essay against the so called ‘aesthetic culture’. The aesthetic value of Tolstoy’s works transcends this. As shown by Lukács, Tolstoy is a master of portraying situations and characters of extremity.

Without consideration for Lukács’ dialectical bent and binary inclination, so to speak, in his argumentation for the epic or novel, narrow soul or wide soul, naturalist or formalist, and realist or modernist, Lukács’ general aesthetic theory circled around the model of grand art that he called realism. For Lukács, a realist writer will get the better of his angst, which is an unavoidable part of modern life. In his words, in his later days:

It is easy to understand that the experience of the contemporary capitalist world does produce, especially among intellectuals, angst, nausea, a sense of isolation, and despair. Indeed, a view of the world which excluded these emotions would prevent the present-day artist from depicting the world truthfully. (Lukács, 1962: 76)

Lukács held that realism is about the presentation of typical characters amid typical circumstances that mirror the essence of social relations. In the case of works produced by Tolstoy, such essence is displayed in a crystal-clear manner, and the author himself often could not help but spell out straightforward images such as Nekhlyudov while dressing in Resurrection. Since the typical does not mean the average, extremity can be typical. And sometimes extreme characters have to cope with an extreme situation that they create on their own. As frequently mentioned by Lukács, Anna Karenina had created her own extreme passion and the average man, Vronsky, was put through some extreme situations. Tolstoy in his old age plunged his average, even bureaucratic and faceless, characters into extreme situations but did not create conditions for extreme characters. The best case to this point is The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where everyone is average. Moreover, they are men and women of mere convention, knowing no love, no care, no other interest than to perform their role in society and to climb to a higher social level. However, the average Ivan Ilyich was thrown by Tolstoy into the most extreme situation of dying. Here the semblance vanishes, together with the disappearing of the inauthentic and alienated society. The dying man found himself, at last, on the island of Robinson Crusoe, facing nothingness alone (or almost alone).

In the year 1914 Lukács had already accentuated the significance of death as the moment of approaching existential authenticity in Tolstoy. In his early work Lukács attributed a special temporality to the moment of facing death that the potential of a character may finally become visible in the face of the grand moment, in the case of Bolonsky and of Karenin in spite of their respective characters and milieus, for instance. Likewise, similar explanations could also be found in stories by the old Tolstoy. As for Lukács, he was still convinced that even if his ideological vision was changed, the earthly redemption by mere goodness is phony, and great moments could not last forever. Afterwards, based on his own comprehension, he brought in the category of catharsis in his aesthetics, although he was led to think of earthly redemption by dint of mere goodness as some benevolent lie.

As for The Death of Ivan Ilyich, however, it had nothing to do with the redemption, nor the transforming of a decent man from a bureaucrat, nor sudden enlightenment of a hidden potential. It can be best seen in the human condition in its most naked form, confronted by every ordinary person together with Ivan Ilyich. The more average the person is, the more authentic the absurdity of the human condition becomes, for an inauthentic person never looks forward to death. What is important in this story for Lukács is not what humans all are, but what humankind has been and what men and women become.

For all the skeptical attitude towards the redemptive power of goodness, Lukács was never swayed from the premise that goodness matters, and that he remained committed to some ethics of goodness in his younger days. As Tolstoy reflected in Resurrection, he maintained that Maslova is not redeemed by Nekhlyudov’s repentance and even by his goodness, but rather by the revolutionaries with whom she shares the train trip to Siberia. For those who become good people, goodness is a matter of relevance for them. And the whole issue of goodness is subject to Lukács’ interpretation of typical characters created by Tolstoy, which are in constant change engaged with force. Since these characters are always evolving, their separate traits play the decisive role in the face of various situations. Furthermore, characters in Tolstoy’s novels seems to have no clue as to their own potential, so that they tend to surprise themselves as if they find it impossible to identify with their own selves. Still, even the dynamic characters cannot overcome their social status in the long haul. In the case of Darya Oblonskaya, for example, Lukács regarded Darya as a betrayed yet faithful wife and mother. As such she is herself surprised that she cannot entirely disapprove of Anna leaving her husband and son for a passionate love. Besides, as it was described by Tolstoy, Darya even showed admiration for Anna’s bravery and freedom on her trip to visit Anna, while she instantly came to recognize her slavery as wife and mother as a better choice. Such changes of emotions were authentic and vividly depicted as they spoke to her character within the limits of her personality. At the same time, there is ubiquitous disillusionment amidst class ethics, ways of life, tradition and heritage as well as love and marriage perceived by Lukács. For instance, he believed that he noticed Levin’s disappointment with his love and marriage as the novel Anna Karenina was about to end. Likewise, Bezuhkov was also thought to become despondent at the end of War and Peace.

Illusions and disillusionment

In addition to his troublesome experiences around 1930s, previously mentioned, Lukács was also called by the Soviet party leadership to Moscow to serve at the Marx-Engels Institute where he stayed from 1930 onward. And it was during this period of time that Lukács came into touch with Marx’s early works for the first time, and knuckled under the Stalinist orthodoxy while initiating an attempt at a new Marxist aesthetics in The Historical Novel. Given such, Dostoevsky is no more in urgent need as the prophet of the new world, while Tolstoy is hailed as the mirror of the transformation of Russian society from the liberation of serfs to the revolution of 1905, together with Lenin’s understanding. Thus, in The Theory of the Novel, Lukács steered himself into the philosophy of history for the purpose of identifying the linkage between historical changes of transcendental outlook and the ‘pure forms’ of aesthetic categories. In this modern ghost-like desert of alienation where the world of ultimate sinfulness is transformed by him into dying capitalism, the inner life of the individual has to go through a constant search for the sake of meaning no matter how great the disappointment will be. Yet, there is relief in Tolstoy somehow. With the above-mentioned disillusionment of Tolstoy’s characters by Lukács in mind, it is possible to link up Lukács with some other French novels of shared disillusionment, as in Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert. Yet, these French novelists tend to portray a devastating picture that their characters lose their hopes or life perspectives or even lose interest in life. This is not always the case in Tolstoy. For protagonists created by Tolstoy, although the essential life that heroes yearned for was incompatible with the conventional life, they believed the best way to approach the essence of life lies in returning to the natural and genuine way of living in the mind. And ‘it is a factual assurance that an essential life really does exist beyond conventionality – a life which can be reached through the lived experiences of a full and genuine selfhood, the self-experience of the soul, but from which one must irremediably fall back into the world of convention’ (Lukács, 1962: 147).

Furthermore, to go beyond the social life of forms is to go beyond convention where spiritual alienation and mental vacancy surges, as the lasting appeal of traditional refinement withers. Lukács remarked that ‘the rejection of convention is not aimed at conventionality itself but, in part, at its divorce from the soul and, in part, at its lack of refinement. Its character, which is that of civilization but not of culture, and its dry and arid lack of spirituality are both rejected’ (Lukács, 1971: 145). And it is exactly in the realm of Tolstoy’s novels that a voice of defiance against and transcendence of convention is heard, loud and clear, in a manner of returning to the epic form. True, Rousseau claimed to own a utopia in his Émile where humankind is blessed with an unsophisticated world of liberty and brightness far from conventional contamination. Yet, Western Europe could only question convention in eloquence, given its historical structure, while the Russia of Tolstoy was prepared for such transcendence with its organic naturalism of greater proximity:

Tolstoy’s great and truly epic mentality, which has little to do with the novel form, aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature, a life which is intimately adapted to the great rhythm of nature, which moves according to nature’s cycle of birth and death and excludes all structures which are not natural, which are petty and disruptive, causing disintegration and stagnation. (Lukács, 1971: 145–6)

Lukács never abandoned the typical longing for grand style. And it is in the spirit of such craving that he remained committed to the so-called grand realism, rejecting not just naturalism, which he already dismissed in his youth, but also all projects and works of the avant-garde. Tolstoy, together with Balzac, to whom Lukács always compared him, fitted well into this yearning mood and the genre of grand style, since he had portrayed tragedies, and his heroes were still in grand format full of actions and stories. And in the light of a growing loathing of pettiness, bureaucracy, institutions and exploitation in all forms, Lukács combined his discussion on the different aspects of temporality in Tolstoy’s works for the sake of aesthetic analyses, and Tolstoy was finally qualified as a grand realist by Lukács in 1935.