| Abstrakt: |
The article discusses the novel The Devils, by Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The Devils is the most politically controversial of all Dostoevsky's novels. It contains a vicious caricature of Russian liberalism, and open condemnation of the revolutionary ideas of its epoch. Most Marxist literary critics have preferred to ignore it, rather than face the daunting task of condemning it in terms of their own theory. Georg Luk´cs, perhaps the most celebrated Marxist aesthetician, has discussed Dostoevsky's early work at great length and ignored the later novels almost completely. The greater the political content of Dostoevsky's work, the less time Luk´cs finds to discuss it. For a theorist who emphasises the important relation of literature to politics, this might seem remarkable. As it shall be seen, there are very important reasons for Luk´cs's sin of omission, one of them being that Dostoevsky's novel fits into his genre of critical realism remarkably well, and cannot be dismissed in terms of naturalism or modernism, the two categories which Luk´cs applies to decadent bourgeois literature. |
