They may even throw the actual poetic problem into confusion. The concrete answers that naturally are given by poetic works frequently have – seen from this distance – an arbitrary character in bourgeois literature. For this was and is the mission of poetry and fiction: to put questions, to raise problems in the form of new men and new fates of men. The word question must be underscored and must be supplemented by the assertion that it is a poetic, creative question and not a question put in philosophical terms. Their effect is not touched in the slightest by a craving for the exotic, “Suddenly” there appeared from an underdeveloped country, where the troubles and conflicts of contemporary civilization could not yet have been fully unfolded, works that stated – imaginatively – all the problems of human culture at its highest point, stirred up ultimate depths, and presented a totality hitherto never achieved and never since surpassed, embracing the spiritual, moral, and philosophical questions of that age. Works of art that have influenced the entire world originated in the remotest countries and ages: from Negro sculpture to Chinese woodcuts, from the Kalevala to Rabindranath Tagore.īut the cases of Werther and Raskolnikov are very different. The historical sense developed in the nineteenth century has accustomed us to enjoy the literature and art of the whole globe and the whole past. There is nothing unusual in the fact that a backward country produces powerful works. Thus in the eighteenth century Werther came from Germany and prevailed in England and France: thus in the second half of the nineteenth century Raskolnikov came from far-off, unknown, almost legendary Russia to speak for the whole civilized West. It is a strange, but often repeated fact that the literary embodiment of a new human type with all its problems comes to the civilized world from a young nation. Transcribed: Harrison Fluss for, February 2008. Source: Marxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution by Georg Lukacs Dell Publishing Co., 1973

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