Aesthetics and Political Leitmotiv: analyzing the young Lukács from by Thomas Mann and Henrik Ibsen

• Main Author: Sandro de Mello Justo
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2017-06-01
• Series: Outra Travessia
• Subjects: györgy lukács; thomas mann; henrik ibsen; anticapitalismo romântico
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/Outra/article/view/56044
• ISSN: 1807-5002; 2176-8552

In this article we intend to analyze the political leitmotiv of the young Lukács through the central problems raised by Thomas Mann and Henrik Ibsen in his works Tönio Kroger (1903) and When we woke from the dead (1899). The justification for this path is due to the fact that the Hungarian philosopher himself announced in his maturity that the problems of those works exerted strong influences on his youthful state of mind. It is possible to be said that in this period of youth György Lukács was characterized by a deep refusal of the bourgeois world translated into a kind of romantic anti-capitalism. In this way, we understand that the reading of Mann and Ibsen can be elucidative to the understanding of the singularities of this political leitmotiv of the young Lukács. The present article was divided into three substantial moments: first, preceded by introductory remarks about György Lukács, we analyze an unreachable synthesis present in Tönio Kroger: the synthesis between art and everyday life. In a second, we turn our eyes to the guiding thread of When we wake up from the dead: the conflict between art and life as an illustration of a meaningless existence under the bourgeois world. And in a third and last moment, we analyze the romantic anti-capitalism of the young Lukács in dialogue with the dramas lived by Kroger and Rubek.