„Ein Wort für junge Dichter“ by I.W. Goethe: On the History of One Interpretation

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of I.V. Goethe’s “The Word to Young Poets” („Ein Wort für junge Dichter,“ 1833) and the article written in connection with A.M. Gorky death by the theorist of Marxist aesthetics D. (G.) Lukács “The Liberator” („Der Befreier,“ 1936). The subject of the analysis is Lukách’s interpretation of the ‛liberator’ concept used by Goethe in relation to his own work. Lukács, who chose this keyword from Goethe’s paper as the title of his own article, tries within the framework of the theme set by Goethe about the liberating mission of the writer to prove the validity of applying the theses of the German classic in the era of proletarian art. In the course of the undertaken analysis, the author of the article comes to the conclusion about the selectivity of Lukács’s approaches to research material. That was dictated by the specificities of the functional-target settings the author of “The Liberator,” dedicated not just to a great writer per se, but to the classic of socialist realism, was guided by. Therefore, Lukács’s interpretation of Goethe’s text isn’t based on a comprehensive analysis of the German classic and the Soviet writer views on a given topic, but is limited to the juxtaposition of iconic semantic constants that are embedded in the word “liberator,” important for Lukács in terms of their relevance to Gorky’s personality and work.