The Master and The Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (review)

Galin Tihanov has written a splendidly researched and immensely informed intellectual history of two of the twentieth century's major theorists of the novel. His focus, as he explains early in his book, is "not Lukács as such, but the Lukács who emerges when placed next to Bakhtin; not Bakhtin on his own, but rather the Bakhtin who becomes visible only in the light of Lukács" (11). Tihanov has warrant for this focus: Although Lukács did not know the work of Bakhtin, Bakhtin knew Theory of the Novel and fourteen articles written by Lukács between 1935-38. Tihanov's metaphoric title is drawn from Hegel, and suggests Tihanov's view of Bakhtin's embrace of Lukács as "master," as well as his "efforts to emancipate himself from Lukács' often officially sanctioned thought and [. . . to bring] to the fore the originality of his own ideas despite the inclemency of the social climate and his personal life" (15). Tihanov draws upon post-structuralist readings of Hegel to suggest the fluidity and reversals in the master-slave relationship — after all, in the last twenty years, Bakhtin's critical stock has risen while Lukács' has fallen. Tihanov would like to see renewed attention to Lukács: his title suggests his deep appreciation of Hegel and the Marxist thinkers who followed him, and his oft-expressed preference for criticism with an historical and social viewpoint. Given this preference, the ethical, phenomenological, and personalist dimensions of Bakhtin's work are often criticized as "domesticating" (215), "utopian" (238), and "reductionist" (286). Despite the limitations of this focus, each chapter of Tihanov's thoughtful book offers valuable insights into both of these vital thinkers.

The first three chapters focus upon the early writings of both thinkers, and the overarching concepts important to each. The first of these is "culture." Tihanov ably and knowledgably demonstrates the way both Lukács and Bakhtin draw from a neo-Kantian and Hegelian "philosophy of life" tradition which sees in art a rendering of the totality and essence of life as opposed to the monstrously reifying "expert" or the blinkered aesthete (27-28). In 1918—the year in which Lukács' German academic career was foiled and he joined the Hungarian Communist Party (183-84)—Lukács decisively broke and "de-personalized" [. . .] "the link between aesthetics and ethics" (30-31). From Tihanov's perspective, this is all to the good, as he makes clear when he critiques both thinkers for their early writings on "form": "[Their] discourses on life and form meet only on the ground of ethics which proves, however, insufficient for their thorough and organic interpenetration." Their early ethical emphasis "impedes the study of literature in the unity of its social and artistic dimensions" and remains "impervious to the historical dynamics of art" (47-48). Tihanov sees the concept of "genre" as assisting both theorists out of this impasse. Lukács' "central juxtaposition of epic and novel" (51) influences Bakhtin, but Bakhtin's understanding of genre proves richer. Here Bakhtinappears to be the master as he posits that "Genres no longer reflect the world, [but] rather [. . .] represent and model it. This idea of the active nature of literary genre is based on a new understanding of language [in which . . . W]e only come to know the world by articulating it, and the the words we use to do so are not entirely our own" (59).

When Tihanov turns to the concepts of "reification and dialogue," he attends especially to Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Bakhtin's writings from the late 1920's into the mid 1930's. For Lukács, the foe of the proletariat is the ubiquitous presence of reification—the reduction of a person or interpersonal relations to the status of a thing—an idea which, as Tihanov ably shows, he inherits and develops from a plethora of sources...