Georg Lukacs The Struggle of Humanism and Barbarism. 1943
Note: The topic of this article is the influence of Tolstoy on German culture. The author examines the main problems of Tolstoy’s work in detail in the work Leo Tolstoy and the Development of Realism, published in his 1950 book Studies on European Realism.
The civilized world learned with disgust and anger about how Hitler’s bandits desecrated, defiled and destroyed Yasnaya Polyana.
Barbaric devastation, cynical cruelty, perverted digging in the mud, desecration of all cultural values of human progress – all this has ceased to amaze in the war waged by Hitler against freedom and civilization. Unimaginable sacrileges, to which the most unbridled imagination could not have reached, became an everyday occurrence for Hitler’s bandits. But despite all this heap of atrocities, the desecration of Tolstoy’s home and place of creativity is an extraordinary event in this war as well. It shines with a gloomy light on the disfigured face of a once cultured people; like lightning, it illuminates the enormous danger that would threaten all mankind in the event of even a temporary victory of Hitler. It shows what colossal tasks of cultural and moral reconstruction will inevitably arise after the war for many peoples and, first of all, for the Germans, a reconstruction necessary so that the cultural level of mankind does not fall to barbarism, so that it becomes possible to preserve and further develop culture.
Yasnaya Polyana is more than a place of memories of the famous writer, it is much more, because Leo Tolstoy was not just a significant figure in literature. He was one of the few greats who resurrected timeless art forms and at the same time renewed literature at a time when it was threatened by alienation from society and by decadent influences.
The broad and invigoratingly deep form of the great epic was happily created at the dawn of our history by the work of Homer. His unsurpassed imagery, his enchantingly clear plasticity, his simple and yet infinitely deep humanity determined the entire development of European art and led it to ever new and new heights. This first and highest peak in the development of art is based on the fact that the epos of Homer, precisely in the completeness of its forms, goes beyond the limits of art in the narrow sense of the word. It directly awakens, captures and mobilizes those forces of a person, from which, under happy circumstances, high art can arise at the same time amazing, exciting and uplifting, leading to an understanding of the laws of life, to a strong and vigorous solution of its problems.
What are these forces awakening thanks to high art?
Humanity, by its own efforts, by its own labor, has risen from a primitive semi-animal state to modern culture. Through its own efforts, that is, through internal rebirth, through taming and transforming its initial instincts, it has risen to the level of setting such tasks that primitive man never dreamed of.
Humanity has completed this process of rebirth without even realizing its inner mechanics and dynamics. Therefore, the forces of harmony and progress seem to the majority of people of pre-socialist social formations as otherworldly, unearthly. In reality, these are forces inherent in man himself. But only modern history, philosophy and economics (Hegel and indeed Marx) discovered these connections and thereby brought down the true forces of humanism from heaven to earth, made them the true property of man.
But genuine art here anticipated the development of human knowledge. Transferring in images the process of human perfection, it managed to rise above many false ideas about the essence of this process. Due to the fact that real art shows life in all its complexity, in all its breadth and depth, its movement forward in the struggle against all obstructing and inhibiting tendencies, a true and dynamic reflection of the formation of a person arises in these works.
So, the highest perfection of art lies in the ability to show the driving forces of history both as “supermundane” (that is, they cannot be deduced from the everyday experience of our instincts) and as immanent to man (that is, arising from his inner being, from his activity in the outside world, from his work on himself), as the forces that actually make him a person as such. While high art makes the mysterious cognizable, while it gives the hidden laws of life an unexpected tangibility and concreteness, it creates an atmosphere of that inimitable cheerfulness that we admire and love in Homer’s epic.
Art – and first of all at its dawn in Homer – recreates the most important life process of a person – his becoming himself. Thus, it expresses man’s unshakable faith in the inevitability of this process of progressive humanistic development. This belief does not oppose, as an abstract feeling, an alien and soulless external world, it acts as a principle for constructing a multilateral and complete world of images; it illuminates the darkest depths of human passions. Affirming faith in progress, art destroys everything that is ugly, base, animal, but not through naked, abstract negation; through the inner dialectic of events, it shows that the desire for self-determination, for self-assertion of a person, despite all obstacles, is irresistible. And since this belief of great art is its leading, formative principle, in the process of creativity it grows into a higher reality, into actual fulfillment.
This belief, in one form or another, is at the heart of every great work. In Homer, it appears with particular freshness and naivety, with the primitive strength of a newly matured family, which perceives the victory of light over darkness with joy and self-confidence, almost like a half-childish game, like a youthful training in mastering weapons; therefore, the forms of its manifestation are pure, easily visible and, with all their inexhaustible wealth, are transparent and simple. Therefore, the impact of the Homeric epos on people – even when it describes dark events – is light, cheerful, inspiring.
The unattainable beauty of the great epic of our ancestors makes it impossible to simply imitate it. No study of Homer’s form can bring people of another era closer to this vigorous and immediate perfection. And yet, in the course of the development of mankind, the Homeric epos had worthy followers. But they were based on completely different aspects, both external, formal and internal; their kinship to Homer lies only in the basic human principles of the completeness of form, in the ideological and artistic appeal to the actual principles of the formation of the human personality, the humanization of mankind.
Becoming a human was not an easy process. Humanity has gone through many stages of development; it overcame many animal traits in itself and converted them to human ones. And yet the great struggle between the higher and the lower, man and beast, was always waged anew in almost every individual, was waged in every generation, in every society. And true art perpetuated every given stage of this struggle. Art is always relevant in the highest sense of the word, for both in content and in form it comes from the concepts of “today,” “here,” “now” and by mirroring these, perpetuates the danger that threatens every time and its overcoming, reflects the activity of the deepest forces of humanity, and thereby, thickening and consolidating them in images, ensures a long life. So the great writer is not the one who possesses the perfection of form in the external technical sense, but the one who, with the greatest depth of analysis, reveals the danger threatening people, who with the greatest clairvoyance finds the salutary forces, who with the greatest harmonious confidence cognizes the human character, pointing out to each person the path available to them to participation in struggle and victory.
Therefore, only great people, if they are great artists at the same time, can renew literature in this way and at the same time return it to its origins. Only they can experience the problems of their time in such a way and so deeply that the picture they create acquires vigorous grandeur, bright and plastic depth; only such artists create – and even then very rarely – works in which the clear sky of the Homeric world shines again, painted in the colors of their days, the changing colors of historical relevance.
Such a world was created by Leo Tolstoy, and because of this he became – and not only in artistic terms – a model and educator for the best writers of the world, a liberator of cultural forces of the last three quarters of a century. Every thinking and moral modern person feels that without Tolstoy we would be different – we would be lesser, poorer. The gratitude of millions for this beneficially transforming art made Yasnaya Polyana a shrine for all cultured humanity, our Stratford-upon-Avon, the new Weimar – the same symbol of greatness, the same altar of worship as the place of Shakespeare’s birth and the place of Goethe’s activity.
This renewing power of Tolstoy’s poetry, perhaps, nowhere in the West was felt so strongly as in Germany, and perhaps there is no country where the best and most advanced people would be so aware of this influence of Tolstoy’s work as they were there.
The beginning of Tolstoy’s world influence found German culture and literature in the period of deepest decline. After the victory over France in 1870-1871, Germany found herself in a state of agitated, boastful degeneration, which manifested itself in literature in the form of grandiose or sentimental, but in any case soulless and worthless epigonism. When, in the eighties of the last century, the conscious part of the youth began to rebel against this decline, Tolstoy’s influence on German literature became decisive.
Zola, Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy –
A whole world lies in these names.
One that hasn’t rotted yet
One that is still very healthy! [1]
this is what the talented young poet of that time Arno Holz wrote.
It is no coincidence that one of the first performances of the Berlin-based Freie Bühne, a theater that confirmed the victory of the new direction in wide circles, was Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness.
In the first work of Gerhart Hauptmann, the greatest talent of German naturalism, Before Sunrise, both the dimensions and the limits of Tolstoy’s influence on German literature of this period are best seen. The younger generation of German naturalists learned from Tolstoy the fearless love of truth in depicting everyday life, the courageous ability not to retreat before depicting the most terrible events. But the “literary revolution” in Germany did not notice either the depth of Tolstoy’s worldview or its classically finished form.
In Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, Tolstoy, along with Zola and Ibsen, was perceived and revered as a teacher in the renewal of German literature, as a champion of the principle of the truthfulness of art. But the literary fate of this constellation was very different. As naturalism was overcome and tendencies for a more in-depth depiction of personality grew, the glory and influence of Zola in Germany began to fade. And at the beginning of the 20th century, Ibsen, too, was far from enjoying the same love as he had ten years before. But Tolstoy’s popularity grew rapidly among the succession of various literary “isms.” The understanding of the depth of the human world he recreated and the epic perfection of his images grew.
Gerhart Hauptmann, whose subsequent betrayal of his own ideas and the work of his life cannot erase the literary-historical significance of the first period of his work, again becomes a barometer of this change in the literary atmosphere. We have already briefly mentioned the influence of Tolstoy on his first literary work. Later, this influence was less direct, both in essence and philologically more difficult to prove.
But there is no doubt that in his best works – from Hannele to Michael Kramer or Rose Bernd – with unexpected force there is a broad, ardent sympathy for the victims of modern civilization. So Gerhart Hauptmann overcomes the narrowness of naturalism and follows the paths intended for modern literature by Leo Tolstoy.
Hauptmann draws in these works the “outcasts” of the capitalist civilization. Let it be the bastard child of Hannele, beaten to death, let it be the orphan girl Rose Bernd, ruined by the lust of unscrupulous men, or the outwardly crippled, internally unstable, self-destructive artist son of Michael Kramer: everywhere Hauptmann depicts rudeness with sharp realism, the cruelty and inhumanity of the capitalist world, and everywhere there is shown the grain of real humanity that exists even in dead people, sometimes hidden, often outwardly distorted.
Here we cannot set ourselves the task of even briefly characterizing the historical development of Tolstoy’s influence on German literature. On the one hand, it is enough to establish that the departure from naturalism, the growing struggle for a psychologically correct, in-depth image of a person, for epic forms of art, went largely under the influence of Tolstoy. While in the eighties, as we have seen, German writers put Tolstoy and Zola side by side, a few decades later Thomas Mann emphasizes the contrast between the non-worthy animated epic and naturalism in both, contrasting Nana and Anna Karenina.
But Tolstoy’s influence in Germany was far from just literary. The impetus for development that Tolstoy gave to the spiritual culture of Germany was more direct, broader, deeper. Just as young Goethe and his sister read Klopstock on the sly, just as several decades later young people around the world (including the young lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte) swallowed Werther, so at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries all gifted young men read Tolstoy’s works under their desk. Wherever German literature strove for new greatness and perfection, the spiritual-moral and spiritual-artistic influence of Tolstoy was felt far beyond the bounds of artistic imitation. Even if this influence sometimes manifested itself in a somewhat distorted form, as, for example, in the theory of non-resistance among some German expressionists, yet it was one of the sources of the awakening of militant humanism in Germany.
This humanism is the pride and hope of those who, even under Hitler’s tyranny, with the current terrible devastation and self-torture of Germany, still believe in the possibility of a future for the German people, a future which for internal reasons and in its immediate form may not be very visibly connected with Tolstoy. But looking all the more closely the links really go deeper. This applies primarily to the Tolstoyan spirit of poetic democracy, inseparably linking truly high art with real nationality – a democracy which seeks and finds sources of genuine high art in the spiritual needs, moral suffering and joy of the people and therefore sharply opposes the arrogant self-confidence of decadent bourgeois artists.
Already Thomas Mann recognized that this is where the sources of great art lie, which go beyond the limits of modern imperialist problems. In the short story Tonio Kröger he self-critically portrayed the attitude of the modern bourgeois writer to life (that is, to society and the people). Acutely sensing the tragic dichotomy, the tragic opposition of art and life in the West, Tonio Kröger and with him Thomas Mann speak with deep respect of the “holy literature” of Russia – a country where writers have retained a connection with the people.
The creativity of Thomas Mann’s entire life testifies to the fact that, first of all, he had Tolstoy in mind. But here there is a completely different connection, a qualitatively different influence than that on Gerhart Hauptmann. Thomas Mann is not influenced by individual particulars or emotional peaks of Tolstoy’s work. He continues the line of Tolstoy (and along with him the line of the best writers of the new Russian and Scandinavian literature), proceeding from that “dialectic of the soul,” that is, the dialectical depiction of the process of human becoming, which Chernyshevsky noted and admired already in the first works of Tolstoy, in the 1850s.
Chernyshevsky found that in comparison with the dynamic excitement of the spiritual life of Tolstoy’s heroes, the creations of the best writers of the past generation seem to be frozen, motionless. The later development of European literature has confirmed this analysis. But while the desire to record the every-minute spiritual movements of people caused the disintegration of the epic form in the majority of modern writers, Tolstoy managed on this basis to achieve a new simple and monumental greatness. The desire to poetically unite these two seemingly contradictory but actually predetermined for harmony tendencies is the main feature of the epic works of Thomas Mann from Buddenbrooks to Lotte in Weimar. This unification – and with it the pinnacle of the new German narrative art – would have been impossible without Tolstoy.
But Thomas Mann studied not only Tolstoy the writer. He knew well that such high art could not be created by a writer in the narrow sense of the word. He clearly saw that Tolstoy is an all-embracing human figure, whose artistic perfection flows from social and human universality. Comparing Tolstoy and Goethe in a detailed essay in order to simultaneously reveal their kinship and differences, Thomas Mann created for Germany a basis on which Tolstoy’s universal human significance can be understood.
In his epic works, Thomas Mann, following Tolstoy, exposes all the bleeding ulcers of the era. And yet – again in a new and original form – his epic possesses that old-new vigor that we have already spoken about. This cheerfulness has nothing to do with self-alienation from the problems of modernity, which makes the pseudo-harmony of epigonous writers so repulsive. This vigor marks the final triumph of humanity over all eternally threatening dark forces of socially conditioned brutal principles. This cheerfulness is based on a sense of confidence that in the end the principles of humanity must prevail; and it figuratively conveys this feeling of confidence to the reader.
Therefore, it is the source of real art and therefore its influence extends far beyond the realm of art. While in such works the victory of the principles of humanity over the dark forces is achieved by a developing person’s own forces, even with a gloomy theme, a really substantiated belief in the development of humanity arises in them, which is creatively reflected in the cheerful and plastic lines of the epic narrative.
This triumph of humanity is expressed in the elevation of thought over everything petty, low, bestial. The poet Johannes Becher, who titled his latest collection of poems, as well as one of the best poems of this collection The High Sky Above the Battle Zero, thus in a peculiar way paid a debt of gratitude from German literature to Leo Tolstoy. Andrei Bolkonsky’s experience on the battlefield near Austerlitz, the sudden rise of a lost soul from horror and death to an understanding of true human relationships, reflected the originality of Tolstoy’s art, its place in the development of modern literature.
This attitude of the fighting German anti-fascists to the personality and work of Leo Tolstoy expresses the deep feeling of gratitude experienced by the best part of the German people. It explains why Yasnaya Polyana for every thinking German has the same symbolic value as Stratford-upon-Avon or Weimar.
The monstrous crimes of Hitler’s bandits in Yasnaya Polyana were committed by beings from a completely different world. Anyone who appreciates the past German culture understands that these atrocities are deeply alien to the spirit of the best people of the German intelligentsia.
And yet, these atrocities are not an accident, but a terrible albeit inevitable consequence of the path that Germany has followed in the last decade.
We would underestimate the danger of fascism if we direct our indignant gaze only on individual particulars, not seeing that all its dark horror is a single and in all its inhumanity a consistent system. This is the destruction of all values that have been created by human culture so far. The whole nightmare of fascism is not that it condemns millions of people to death, not that it physically destroys individual great cultural achievements, works, monuments, etc.; it is, first of all, that any ethics with which man has tamed himself for thousands of years and thanks to which he has transformed himself from an animal and a semi-animal to a human being, is systematically destroyed in modern Germany in order to create a new semi-animal that does not know moral bonds, one who, possessing modern technology, will throw humanity back to a new state of general barbarism and primitivism.
This is the direction not only of the military practice of fascism, but also of its entire policy, its “philosophy,” its “worldview.” The so-called thinkers who helped prepare fascism, Alfred Baeumler, Ludwig Klages and others [2] tried to process history, psychology, anthropology and morality in the spirit of the thesis that the dark subconscious instincts left over from the primitive state (“chthonic principles” as they say, using elements borrowed from Bachofen but in a distorted terminology), constitute the real essence of man and that the victory of clear harmony and humanism in Greece (in their language, the victory of the “Apollonian principle”) was a misfortune for people. This “philosophy” Hitler applies in political practice, when he openly declares that conscience should be removed from public practice as a humiliating and inhibiting principle.
All the great leading people in human history fought for a worldview that calls on a person to suppress everything evil and animal in himself by his own strength, and in this struggle to develop in himself forces that strive upward, to organized activity. Leo Tolstoy is in the ranks of the great people who walked in this direction, in the ranks of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven.
It is not so significant that in old age Tolstoy sometimes incorrectly criticized Shakespeare and Goethe. In the cardinal issues of life, he is deeply related to them. As the author of these lines tried to show in one of his works about Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s critical remarks about art, his new, modern, plebeian humanism is expressed, making him an equal brother of these great men. For Tolstoy’s criticism of the cultural development of Europe since the Renaissance – even if its argumentation is often one-sided and incorrect – is nothing more than a violently impatient striving for a state of society in which the modern gap between the people and culture, between the people and the highest achievements of art will completely disappear.
Hitlerite fascism, by its very nature, is the mortal enemy of such aspirations. It can exist only insofar as brutal instincts are unleashed in man: it turns this unleashing into an all-encompassing principle of all its politics and pedagogy. When at the beginning of Hitler’s reign Alfred Baeumler, a professor of “political pedagogy” specially appointed to the University of Berlin, declared that his main task was to fight against German humanism, that stinking smoke that later enveloped Yasnaya Polyana was already visible in this speech. When the fascist literary historians began to delete Lessing and Heine from German literature, they had already painted the outlines of the stable into which the Nazis later turned Tolstoy’s working room. When the so-called scientists of fascism, reckoning with “political realism” that a simple order of the Führer cannot destroy Schiller, Hölderlin or Gottfried Keller, they tried to turn these literary heroes of human progress into unsuccessful forerunners of fascism, then in such articles and books, the pornographic inscriptions which subsequently desecrated the walls of Yasnaya Polyana, had already appeared.
Yes, fascism is a system, and the “scientific” articles of the Nazis are the same anti-cultural outrage, born from the same source of bestial anti-humanity, as their outrage against culture at the front and in the rear of the current war.
Yes, fascism is a system. Field Marshal Renchenau issued an order to the army on October 10, 1941, which says: “The main goal of the campaign ... is ... the eradication of Asian influence on European culture ... Everything ... that is a symbol of the former domination of the Bolsheviks, including buildings must be destroyed. No historical or artistic value in the East matters.” [3]
So the fascist “scientists,” “politicians” and “commanders” are working together to create a single kingdom of complete barbarism.
Yasnaya Polyana has always been a symbol of the greatness that the human spirit is capable of. The desecrated Yasnaya Polyana is a signal of the danger that threatens to destroy all the achievements of human civilization and at the same time is a call addressed to all friends of culture: to offer merciless resistance to the fascist thugs, to rid the Earth of them – once and for all!
1. Holz’s poem in German reads: “Zola, Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy / Eine Welt liegt in den Worten, / Eine die noch nicht verfault / Eine die noch kerngesund ist!”
2. Alfred Baeumler (1887-1968) and Ludwig Klages (1872-1956); German ultra-reactionary philosophers of the trend of irrationalist Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life). Both prepared the way for the Nazi worldview, but while Klages did not collaborate with the Nazis after 1933, Baeumler was an fanatical Hitlerite and was given the chair of political pedagogy at the University of Berlin in 1933.
3. The infamous “Severity Order” was issued by the Wehrmacht’s Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau (1884-1942) on 10 October 1942, calling more or less for the extermination of the population of the Soviet Union, and was also approved by a lot of other German generals including Gerd von Rundstedt, Friedrich Paulus and Erich von Manstein. The full text of the order translated in English can be found here.