Lukacs and Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn, by George Lukacs. Translated by William David Graf. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 88 pages.

For most of his life Georg Lukacs, the intellectual heresiarch of Communism, was unable to write freely. During the years he spent under Stalin in Russia and Rakosi in Hungary he had no freedom at all; more recently, under Kadar in Hungary, he was granted a measure of intellectual independence but only in a cautious, limited way. Lukacs made one major bolt from the bounds of political orthodoxy by joining the Nagy government of 1956, but once the Russian troops destroyed it he gradually came back into the fold. He had always to keep looking over his shoulder, sometimes literally and more often figuratively, so as to measure the latitude allowed him by the Party. Long ago he had chosen the role of the (at times) semi-dissident Communist, but never an openly oppositionist Communist and certainly not a public opponent of the party-state dictatorship.

Lukacs’s reasons for this choice were clear: the locomotive of history had gone badly astray, the best passengers had been killed, the engineer had turned out to be a homicidal maniac, yet somehow that locomotive chugged in the direction of progress. T...