One of the last photographs of Lukács shows him at eighty-six years old, standing beside his desk which is covered with books and papers, and in the background the huge library of his home on the fifth floor of 2 Belgrád Rakpart in Budapest. His shoulders are slightly hunched, and in his right hand he is holding his famous cigar, half-hidden against his side: a cigar that makes a fit companion and comforter to a long lifetime spent as a protagonist in the major events of our century; more so and more faithfully than the Weltgeist or the core-thread of world history.
The photographs, then of very recent date, show a forceful, battling old man; and the papers cramming his work-table – the lecture he is preparing or the debate – still seem to represent gestures full of significance for him, concrete expressions of something essential, in which he believes. At eighty-six, he was suffering not only from cancer but from a sclerosis which progressively deprived him of his capacity for intellectual concentration; and yet in 1971 he was still the man who declared that he was “no longer competent to judge the Ontology of Social Being”, the philosophical work to the writing and revision of which he had devoted his last years; he was hoping to complete it while still in full command of his faculties, running a step ahead of the disease. Calmly taking stock of his own physical decline, and of no longer being able to dominate and evaluate his work, he entrusted it to his pupils, in the humble yet self-confident certainty that he was entrusting it to history. He was certain of the fact that history would not be able to ignore the book, to let it fall into oblivion.
Lukács recorded his own biological decline and retired from the scene with a gesture similar to that of the Eskimo who feels that his end is near and his existence is useless to his community: he leaves the igloo and goes away to die. That symbolic gesture with which Lukács handed in his resignation to lucidity and vitality was also a victory over his own incapacity, the extreme intelligence of one able to realize that his logical clarity is occasionally becoming clouded. Lukács’s last months were not months of inertia, but of activity, stripped of any sentimental pathos and of the melancholy of those who see their sands running out.
But in that last portrait the face seems changed. The expression is tired, ironic; it looks beyond that order of things which the philosopher had made the principle of his existence and his activity. Lukács gazes in benevolent perplexity at a territory which is no longer his and which he can no longer dominate, almost as if he were watching some insane comedy on stage and were surprised by this revelation and scornful at his own surprise. That expression is one of farewell; it is the expression of one who discovers the mystery, the sorrow and the ridiculous misunderstanding of every farewell, which laughs to scorn our longing for eternity. In that last expression of the aged Lukács, the philosopher who has sought for unity between reality and reason, we seem to glimpse the yearning of the youthful Lukács, who in his early essays – from Soul and Form to The Theory of the Novel – brilliantly described the gulf between existence and its meaning, between the soul and the word, between essence and phenomena.
But while he was posing for the photograph, that ironical, enigmatic look which Lukács turned towards the photographer took in the opposite wall of the library. There he saw, not the image of Irma Seidler, the woman for whom he had written his youthful essays, but the three portraits of his beloved wife Gertrud, with whom he had lived for more than forty years in the purest of harmony and happiness. Irma had represented his yearning to live, the figure which symbolized the impossibility of reconciling existence with the work of art, genuine living with everyday banality. Above all she had been the symbolic figure for male egoism, which loves not so much the woman but its own fantasies about the woman, and sacrifices the actual person to the literary phantom, so as to give birth to the work of art. In a draft of a letter never sent, and found many years later, Lukács told Irma that he was thinking of committing suicide. But, after breaking with him, and an unhappy marriage, it was Irma who killed herself, in 1911, while he survived her, as healthy as could be, for sixty years.
Those books written by Lukács as a young man are his masterpieces, and speak more clearly to us than the polished orthodoxy of Studies in European Realism, or other woodenly didactic books, which betray signs of the compromises he made with Stalinism. But Lukács is great not only because when he was young he put to himself the question as to whether there is not a melody which composes an individual’s life into a unity illuminated by a meaning; he also sought the answer to this question, and accepted the limitations implied in any answer given to a vague, indefinable nostalgia, in any concrete social and historical reality, without which life is empty rhetoric.
On the wall opposite the bookshelves, and before the eyes of Lukács in the photograph, were the three portraits of Gertrud; and they are still there today, before the eyes of the visitor. Following his egocentric but lyrical love for Irma, and his short, unsuccessful marriage to Jelena Grabenko (an anarchic revolutionary with Messianic, Dostoyevskian notions similar to those of the young Lukács himself), it was Gertrud Bortstrieber he married, and with her he was to live for forty years, until her death in 1963.
Gertrud represented love and marriage in epic form; she was the woman whose approval Lukács needed at all costs, and with whom he could not bear to be out of harmony. Even with her, he said, there were obviously moments of estrangement, but – unlike what occurred in his previous emotional attachments – now “they were unbearable to me”. Perhaps he placed even too much confidence in his Hegelian harmony with the Weltgeist and was rather too readily inclined to portray his own most original intuitions in the name of that Weltgeist (and maybe for this very reason he was uncertain of his own innermost spiritual substance); but Lukács declared that his highest sense of self came from realizing that for Gertrud, too, their shared life had been formative and plentiful.
Gertrud, with her unspoken stringency, was probably what led Lukács to become a Communist. From that moment on his biography is inextricable from that of Communism: it becomes a history lesson, crammed with facts and lucidly inspired by severe dedication to an objective cause. This on occasion involves an arrogant measure of self-identification with the necessity of events. Remembering his own youthful passion for Dostoyevsky, which he later kept quiet about, Lukács (like a great sinning mystic, as Strada put it) agreed to sacrifice his own soul to the Cause, taking upon himself the blemishes which such an act implied. For Lukács even autobiography takes on an objective and supra-personal value, as evidence of the connections between the history of the individual and the general processes of the world and of society.
Lukács is chiefly concerned with stressing the unity and consistency of his biography, the ordered and organic formation of his personality. “In me, everything is the continuation of something. I believe that there are no inorganic elements in my evolution,” he claims, with that peremptory ingenuousness which one forgives in grand old men who come to stand for the great processes of history. Lukács is the great example of a tenacious effort to make sense of life and events, and a forceful confidence in his ability to do so: “I interpreted 1956 as a great spontaneous movement. This movement required a certain ideology. In a number of public lectures I attempted to take this task on myself.” His thought is a grandiose attempt to reduce the chaotic many-sidedness of the world to a unity and to rational laws, even if we too clearly perceive the effort and the cost of this operation, marked as it was with Stalinism.
For Lukács, Gertrud was life, and her mystery was no lesser than the unexpressed longing for life. Of those three portraits two show her as an old woman, and the third as a young, luminous girl, with a clear, enchantingly pure face beneath a surge of hair over her brow. The history, and the length of time, which flowed between those portraits is no less moving than the hours which marked the unhappiness of Irma. Even Bloch, as he tells the story of his friendship and disagreement with Lukács, says that something in their story must have been lost.
The greatness of the mature Lukács consists in the force with which he fought against this leaking away of life into indistinct nothingness, wrenching from it with rigorous discipline the moments of meaning – such as the famous daily hour after lunch spent, at all costs, alone with Gertrud – which otherwise, if entrusted to the spontaneity of the minute, disintegrate before the assaults of worries.
In that room Lukács lived his life, devoting himself to meditation and knowing that that does not lose its life. In front of his dark, heavy wooden desk is a bust of Endre Ady, the Hungarian poète maudit, reminding him of his youthful, and repudiated, love of the avant-garde. From the window he could see the great Danube, but he probably had little appreciation of it, insensitive as he was to nature, which in his eyes was blemished by not having read Kant or Hegel. Bloch reproved him for his lack of understanding for nature, for the “tears in things”; and certainly to derive comfort from the pages of Lukács we need to be in good health and not afflicted by too much suffering, while in Bloch there is also room for darkness, for the moments when one feels like the refuse and wreckage of the world.
Behind the weary, elusive old man who presents himself, perhaps for the last time, to the photographer, rises the library of the great German Kultur, which has not just given a description of the world, but has insisted on it giving an account of itself, and a meaning. From those books I pick out Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Some of the propositions have marginal notes by Lukács. We wonder whether that gaze, with so little time left to look upon the world, was considering the possibility that the most profound philosophical problems – as is stated in Proposition No. 4003, which he had underlined – were not really and truly meaningless and bereft of any hope of an answer, other than the recognition of their meaninglessness.