Synopses & Reviews
You know why these essays were written: because Icannot write poems -- and you know, too, to whom these 'poems' are addressed and who awakened them within me. (Georg Lukacs to Irma Seidler, 1911)
Soul and Form, first published in 1910, is the great critic Georg Lukacs's first book. For readers of Lukacs, these essays on Novalis, Sterne, Theodor Storm, Stefan George, and other writers give insight into the pre-Marxist roots of both Lukacs's aesthetic theory and his prose style: dialectics that surge with life, and a passionate engagement with what in other hands would be abstractions.
But Soul and Form is also deeply personal: the product of Lukacs's tragic, unconsummated love affair with Irma Seidler--resisted by Lukacs, broken off by Seidler in1908, and followed by her unhappy marriage and suicide in 1911. In these essays on longing and evasion, tragedy and destiny, and what must be sacrificed of the soul to give a life form, Lukacs sublimates and explores his decision to reject Seidler and choose an intellectual career as his true bride. The centerpiece of the book is an extraordinary essay on Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen, the fiancee Kierkegaard rejected and deceived, arguing that all of Kierkegaard's writings are a gesture for her sake. Soul and Form is another such gesture: criticism as art, and as Lukacs argues in his introduction, while science offers us facts, art offers us souls and destinies.
Synopsis
Gy?rgy Luk?cs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Luk?cs laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text.
For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled On Poverty of Spirit, which Luk?cs wrote at the time of Soul and Form, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Luk?cs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Luk?csian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience.