HUNGARIAN STUDIES 4. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1988]
Ian Fairley: On "Soul and Form"
1* ON "SOUL AND FORM" IAN FAIRLEY The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.' Oscar Wilde In the first part of my essay I shall offer an historical and philological account of the writing of György Lukács' Soul and Form: my purpose here is to detail the revision of Lukács' text between its Hungarian and German editions. I shall then discuss the function of this critical 'revisionism', focusing on Lukács' attempt to establish the authority of 'judgement* by appeal to some higher, aesthetic court. I would like to place Soul and Form within the context of Lukács' work from 1902 to 1918, and to propose that the book, first published in Hungarian in 1910, marks a transition in the concerns of its author, from literary criticism to philosophical critique. This reading is borne out by an inventory of the projects undertaken by Lukács during these years. His early drama criticism (1902-1903), and his involvement with Budapest's Thália theatre group (1904-1907), founded on the model of the Freie Bühne, provided a practical grounding for his first major work, The Evolution of Modern Drama, which was written between 1906 and 1907, and reworked by late 1909, although only published, in Hungarian, in 1911. The essays collected in Soul and Form were written between 1907 and 1910, and the book itself, conceived in early 1909, was revised and enlarged for its second German edition of 1911. Behind this project, and unelaborated except in noteform, is an unwritten book on Romanticism, planned between 1907 and 1911. Lukács also published a large number of articles, studies and reviews, most of which are described by the category of 'cultural criticism'. Ten of these articles, written between 1908 and 1911, were collected in Aesthetic Culture (1912); many of the others are, in effect, satellites of the drama book. Eight studies of the poet and dramatist Béla Balázs, dating from 1910 to 1918, were published in 1918 as Béla Balázs and his critics. Lukács left Budapest for Heidelberg in May 1912, a physical and intellectual departure which announced his endeavour to develop a properly philosophical account of literature and art. During his five years in Germany, Lukács wrote the two unfinished (and posthumously published) aesthetics, known as the Heidelberg Philosophy of Art (1912— 14), and Heidelberg Aesthetics (1916—18), which were intended to qualify him for his university habilitation. The best-known work of this period is The Theory of the Novel, the prolegomena to an unwritten study of Dostoevsky, which first appeared in the Zeitschrift ßr Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916. All three works were written in German, as were most of the occasional articles which Lukács published during Hungarian Studies 4jl (1988) Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest