Georg Lukach and Maxim Gorky: At the Origins of the Theory of Socialist Realism

Abstract

The article contains an analysis of the reception of Maxim Gorky's creativity in the philosophical aesthetics of Georg Lukacs, the largest representative of neo-Marxism in the culture of the 20^th century. The theory of socialist realism, created by Lukacs in the 1930s, was largely based on his interpretation of Gorky's works. In the articles “The Liberator” and “The Human Comedy of Pre-Revolutionary Russia” Lukacs emphasized Gorky's key role in the history of modern art, seeing him, on the one hand, as the heir of classical realism of the 19^th century, on the other — the fina-lizer of the avant-garde project. From Lukacs' point of view, Gorky's poetics marked a dialectical transition from artistic cognition of reality to its creative transformation, from a bourgeois novel to a renewed epic. Although Lukacs had not yet mentioned Gorky in his early Hegelian book The Theory of the Novel, it largely anticipated his later conception of socialist realism, which, according to Lukacs, was not a revision of the revolutionary utopia of the avant-garde, but a new, artistically more perfect form of its assertion. A notable point of contact between the German philosopher and the Russian writer was the Marxist utopia of God-building.