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FROM MYSHKIN TO MARXISM: THE ROLE OF DOSTOEVSKY RECEPTION IN LUKÁCS'S REVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2017

RICHARD WESTERMAN
RICHARD WESTERMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

For European literati of the early twentieth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky represented a mythically Russian spirituality in contrast to a soulless, rationalized West. One such enthusiast was Georg Lukács, who in 1915 began a never-completed book about Dostoevsky's work, a model of spiritual community that could redeem a fallen world. Though framing his analysis in the language and themes of broader Dostoevsky reception, Lukács used this idiom innovatively to go beyond the reactionary implications this model might connote. Highlighting similarities with Max Weber's account of political ethics, I argue that Lukács developed an ethic derived from his reading of Dostoevsky, which focused on the idea of a hero defined by an ability to resolve the specific ethical dilemma of adherence to duty and moral law on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to restore spontaneous human community at a time when the social institutions embodying such laws had fallen into decay. Crucially, he deployed the same framework after his conversion to Marxism to justify revolutionary terror. However different his position from Dostoevsky's, it was through engagement with these novels that Lukács not only clarified his thought but also came to identify Lenin as a Dostoevskyan hero figure.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , November 2019 , pp. 927 - 960
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the staff of the Lukács Archive in Budapest for their assistance with the research underlying this article, and the support of Christ's College, Cambridge, whose Robert Owen Bishop Scholarship funded that research trip. I am indebted to Raymond Geuss and Martin Ruehl for their insightful comments on and assistance with a much earlier version of this paper. I am very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of the paper whose exceptionally detailed comments were of uncommon help in improving the argument, and to the editors of Modern Intellectual History for their careful guidance. Thanks also to Charles Stubblefield for his assistance with proofing and comments on the final version. The errors that undoubtedly remain are, of course, my own.

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