Germanophone Contributions to Stalinist Literary Theory: The Case of Georgy Lukacs and Michail Lifšic, and Their Roles in Literaturnyj kritik and IFLI

This article argues that Germanophone literary theorists played a significant role in the formulation of socialist realist literary theory. It focuses on the work during the 1930s of two prominent theorists, Georgy Lukacs and his Russian associate Mikhail Lifshits, and their Moscow coterie. It discusses their role in the early 1930s in establishing Marx, Engels and Lenin's ideas about literature, their later contributions to the theory of socialist realism and to a crucial debate of the late 1930s between those who advocated an “epic” literature and those who called for a restoration of the “lyric”. The article also looks at the role played in the literary debates of the 1930s by three institutions in which Lukacs and Lifshits were prominent, the Institute for Literature and the Arts of the Communist Academy (later incorporated in the Institute of Philosophy), the journal Literaturnyi kritik, and the “Institute for Philosophy, Literature and History” (IFLI).