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Solzhenitsyn
English, German (translation)
- GenresNonfictionPhilosophy
88 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 30, 2018
This small book was written in the late 1960s, during which Alexander Solzhenitsyn was enjoying a period of great literary acclaim in the Soviet Union after the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and his early novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward. This was after Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin had been made public and the injustices of the Stalinist era were the talk of the Communist world. This was also before Solzhenitsyn fled the Soviet Union after his secret project, The Gulag Archipelago, was discovered.
Georg Lukacs here tries to situate Solzhenitsyn’s work as the first wave in a rebirth of Socialist Realist literature as it flourished, according to Lukacs, under the revolutionary period of Lenin before stagnating under Stalinism. As a Hegelian Marxist, Lukacs views literature, like all else, as an attempt at the intelectual conquest of reality, to use the form of literature to present a total portrait of a given historical epoch. This book is ultimately characterized by Lukacs desire to see in literature a unity of art and science, in which social relations are understood like microbes under a microscope.
The primary work here dealt with is Ivan Denisovich. Lukacs first tries to develop a theory of the genre of the novella as it relates to that of the novel. For Lukacs, the novella represents a more fragmental form of the totality achieved by the epic form, the novel being the epic of the twentieth century. He claims that the high points for the novella as a form are during the period where the understanding of a historical epoch are still germinal or when an epoch is already in decline. In either case, the novella represents a historical becoming-either into or out of being-in-the-present.
Lukacs finds his own time a rich one for novellas. In the west, the form proves ideal for writers such as Conrad and Hemingway because, from Lukacs’ perspective at the time, those writers were living in and writing about a capitalist epoch that was in decline. The social totality of capitalism, Lukacs writes, no longer supports the subjectivity it engenders. Conrad’s and Hemingway’s characters were “alone against nature”, with nature standing in for all that was no longer intellectually conquered by the capitalist matrix. In the communist world, the novella was, as Lukacs wrote this work, leading the way for a new literature because Soviet literature was in the process of an initial digestion of the legacy of Stalinism.
The Stalinist period, argues Lukacs, had little to no authentic literature of its own. The characters in what passed for literature under Stalin had no past, and therefore no present. They were stick figures of a simplistic propaganda. In Ivan Denisovich, Lukacs sees the first work to transcend the Stalinist deformation of Soviet literature. Although we learn very little of its characters’ past, Soviet readers could feel this past, the soldiers sent to the front who defeated the Nazis and returned to official suspicion and the gulag. It is a book that spoke to the present but was about a (then recent) past that had not been overcome in part because the reality of that time had not been conquered by literature. Denisovich is a work that explores a previously untouched reality in the hope of finding a strategy of conquering that reality in the novel form. And, of course, it is also a book that points to the future. Post-Stalinist Soviet society was still shaped by the experience of Stalinism. The advent of a literature about Stalinism is also an overture to a future literature of the present.
In the book’s last pages, Lukacs declares that the central ideological task of fiction is to determine whether and to what degree the prevailing social conditions of an epoch enable or inhibit humanity from achieving it’s primary mission, which is “to achieve the social development of the humanization of man.” (pg. 78-9) Solzhenitsyn’s writings on the recent past dissect the inhibiting after-effects of Stalinism on the (then) present.
This is an interesting book that I think highlights all that is best about Solzhenitsyn’s writing. We of course do not get here any of the lionization of Solzhenitsyn as a hero of all things reactionary as we are force-fed in the capitalist world. Nonetheless, this work makes me a bit uncomfortable for the same reason that all of Lukacs’ s writings inevitably do. In his attempt to turn literary criticism into an exact, even quasi-“natural” science, he epitomizes the ethos of Marxism as the answer to all possible questions. It was such a mindset that paved the way for the Stalinism that Lukacs so despised.
Georg Lukacs here tries to situate Solzhenitsyn’s work as the first wave in a rebirth of Socialist Realist literature as it flourished, according to Lukacs, under the revolutionary period of Lenin before stagnating under Stalinism. As a Hegelian Marxist, Lukacs views literature, like all else, as an attempt at the intelectual conquest of reality, to use the form of literature to present a total portrait of a given historical epoch. This book is ultimately characterized by Lukacs desire to see in literature a unity of art and science, in which social relations are understood like microbes under a microscope.
The primary work here dealt with is Ivan Denisovich. Lukacs first tries to develop a theory of the genre of the novella as it relates to that of the novel. For Lukacs, the novella represents a more fragmental form of the totality achieved by the epic form, the novel being the epic of the twentieth century. He claims that the high points for the novella as a form are during the period where the understanding of a historical epoch are still germinal or when an epoch is already in decline. In either case, the novella represents a historical becoming-either into or out of being-in-the-present.
Lukacs finds his own time a rich one for novellas. In the west, the form proves ideal for writers such as Conrad and Hemingway because, from Lukacs’ perspective at the time, those writers were living in and writing about a capitalist epoch that was in decline. The social totality of capitalism, Lukacs writes, no longer supports the subjectivity it engenders. Conrad’s and Hemingway’s characters were “alone against nature”, with nature standing in for all that was no longer intellectually conquered by the capitalist matrix. In the communist world, the novella was, as Lukacs wrote this work, leading the way for a new literature because Soviet literature was in the process of an initial digestion of the legacy of Stalinism.
The Stalinist period, argues Lukacs, had little to no authentic literature of its own. The characters in what passed for literature under Stalin had no past, and therefore no present. They were stick figures of a simplistic propaganda. In Ivan Denisovich, Lukacs sees the first work to transcend the Stalinist deformation of Soviet literature. Although we learn very little of its characters’ past, Soviet readers could feel this past, the soldiers sent to the front who defeated the Nazis and returned to official suspicion and the gulag. It is a book that spoke to the present but was about a (then recent) past that had not been overcome in part because the reality of that time had not been conquered by literature. Denisovich is a work that explores a previously untouched reality in the hope of finding a strategy of conquering that reality in the novel form. And, of course, it is also a book that points to the future. Post-Stalinist Soviet society was still shaped by the experience of Stalinism. The advent of a literature about Stalinism is also an overture to a future literature of the present.
In the book’s last pages, Lukacs declares that the central ideological task of fiction is to determine whether and to what degree the prevailing social conditions of an epoch enable or inhibit humanity from achieving it’s primary mission, which is “to achieve the social development of the humanization of man.” (pg. 78-9) Solzhenitsyn’s writings on the recent past dissect the inhibiting after-effects of Stalinism on the (then) present.
This is an interesting book that I think highlights all that is best about Solzhenitsyn’s writing. We of course do not get here any of the lionization of Solzhenitsyn as a hero of all things reactionary as we are force-fed in the capitalist world. Nonetheless, this work makes me a bit uncomfortable for the same reason that all of Lukacs’ s writings inevitably do. In his attempt to turn literary criticism into an exact, even quasi-“natural” science, he epitomizes the ethos of Marxism as the answer to all possible questions. It was such a mindset that paved the way for the Stalinism that Lukacs so despised.
March 13, 2007
This little book by Lukacs does much to rescue Solzhenitsyn from the false fate he's recieved at the hands of the post-Soviet Russian right.
October 2, 2022
Worth it alone for Lukacs' critique of 'eccentricity': a form of personal dissent rendered comically futile by the overwhelming power of capital.
January 10, 2026
Absolutely amazing analysis of Solzhenitsyn as a critique of stalinist soviet russia
a great introductory text for anyone who wants to read contemporary soviet realism and wants to know the problems associated with the current requirements for valid Soviet fealism
a great introductory text for anyone who wants to read contemporary soviet realism and wants to know the problems associated with the current requirements for valid Soviet fealism
March 21, 2019
When reading Lukács I get this feeling that I'm reading Marxist propaganda, although it is somewhat subtle and hidden - because he writes like it's the norm. I again get reminded to never trust a Marxist, because the Marxist view of history is blatantly wrong and they would do anything to make it seems like the best thing and make their view seem like the most natural thing ever. So, when Solzhenitsyn writes critically against the Communist Soviet during Stalin, it is not Communism he writes against, no, it is just the biggest crisis in Socialism(because it was, of course, not real Marxism). Lukács himself not being a clear Stalinist(although, according to Wikipedia, he supported the regime he was seemingly more positive toward the pre-Stalinist period and Lenin), would take this to heart and is thus able to praise Solzhenitsyn and his works. Of course, writing a book about Solzhenitsyn before the release of The Gulag Archipelago could be a remedy for Lukács being wrong, but it also very clearly showcase his innate Marxist bias. I'm sure his literary analysis have something to it between all the critical theory humbug and intellectualism, but more than anything it just goes into the line of overcomplicating things with Marxist lenses. Read a normal book about Solzhenitsyn, not this.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews