The art of cunning: Georg Lukács,Mikhail Bakhtin and Soviet Socialist realism

Abstract

This article examines Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1937–8) and four works on the novel written by Mikhail Bakhtin between 1936 and 1941 in relation to the Great Terror and Soviet socialist realism. It argues that, to a large extent, Lukács’ and Bakhtin’s theories of the novel of the 1930s stemmed from a moral urgency felt and shared by the authors to salvage the novel – a category that has significant implications for history for both theorists – from the damages wrought by socialist realism. Focusing on the ways in which Bakhtin and Lukács encode their dissent into legitimate narratives, the article draws attention to the art of cunning – dissimulation, equivocation, doublespeak and coding – as a means of disrupting tyrannical discourse, registering difference and surviving. Both Lukács and Bakhtin held ambiguous views on socialist realism and both of them capitalized on the ambivalence inherent in official Soviet discourse.