Abstrakt
In the work of Georg Lukács, the theme of utopia recurs ambivalently. Lukács' theory of realism is often associated with an anti-utopian perspective that prioritizes reconciliation with reality over utopian daydreams. While Lukács sometimes uses the term pejoratively, connecting utopian tendencies in literature and politics to subjective and idealist outlook, the utopian dimension is a crucial element of his theory of art and realism. This paper aims to achieve two interconnected objectives: (1) examine the changing relationship between realist literature and utopia in Lukács' work, (2) assess whether Lukács' theory of realism could be fruitful in understanding the realism of literary utopias.
In The Theory of the Novel (1916), Lukács distinguishes literary utopias from classical novels and emphasizes the subjective nature of their relationship to the world. The separation between utopia and reality is a symptom of the divide between individuals, their values, and the modern world. While in the era of fairy tales, transcendence intertwined with the everyday lives of entire communities, in modernity, we encounter it solely in subjective fantasies. However, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1956), Lukács' approach takes a different turn. Contrasting his normative model of realism with its decadent version, he praises the utopian aspects present in the works of Balzac and Tolstoy and criticizes the "ascetic defiance" of the utopian features of reality in Flaubert.
We can attribute this shift to Lukács' adoption of Marxism and the strong emphasis on the historical dimension of realism in his theory after the 1930s. In The Historical Novel (1936-1937), he famously argues against differentiating classical historical novels and realist novels as two distinct genres. The convergence of these two forms is made possible by his understanding of "reality" as inherently dynamic. To capture social reality, the novel must establish a living connection between the past and present, thereby depicting it as open to future change. Lukács sadly did not write a parallel study of "the futuristic novel". Building on Fredric Jameson's creative dialogue with Lukács' theory in Archaeologies of the Future, I will outline the possibilities of Lukácsian theory of realist utopias.