Nietzsche by Georg Lukacs 1934
Written: 1933-34
First Published: 1934 in Literary Encyclopedia, volume 8, pg. 91-108 (in Russian)
Source: Literary Encyclopedia
Translated: by Anton P.
Famous German philosopher and writer. Born in the family of a priest. Studied classical philology in Bonn and Leipzig under Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. In his student years in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner. Having received a professorship in Basel in 1869, Nietzsche remained there until 1879. In the Franco-Prussian War he took part as a voluntary medical orderly. Nietzsche spent the following years mainly in Switzerland and Italy. In 1889, in Turin, he fell ill with a mental disorder, from which he did not recover until the end of his life.
Three periods of Nietzsche’s work can be distinguished. The first period is characterized by a fascination with Schopenhauer and with Wagner’s musical drama as an expression of the essence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Nietzsche then strives to build a worldview that is both pessimistic and heroic, that is, one that courageously faces and accepts suffering. These attitudes of idealistic pessimism were expressed in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Untimely Meditations [1873], where Nietzsche opposes the culture of his time, mainly bourgeois, and against the “philistines of education”, to whom he contrasts the heroic figures of Schopenhauer and Wagner. . The second period, from the mid-70s to the early 80s, is the period of influence of bourgeois positivism and evolutionism, decomposing the idealistic worldview of the young Nietzsche. By this time include: Human, All Too Human (1878-1880), The Dawn of Day (1881), The Gay Science (1882). On the basis of Darwin’s teaching, metaphysically understood by Nietzsche, with his theory of selection and of the struggle for existence, Nietzsche’s teaching of the third period arises: the myth of the superman, the theory of “will to power” as the highest law of nature, replacing Schopenhauer’s “will to live”. Nietzsche’s works of the third period include Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), etc.
Nietzsche is the first major harbinger of imperialist ideology in Germany. Nietzsche has already outlined almost all those ideological motives that gradually develop in the era of imperialism and ideologically prepare the imperialist war, and after it, with the general crisis of the capitalist system, the fascization of bourgeois ideology. Of course, Nietzsche’s imperialist ideology is only in its infancy, since those objective socio-economic trends that led to imperialism had not yet developed in Nietzsche’s time. But since it is precisely these tendencies that stand at the center of Nietzsche’s thinking, he becomes the leading ideological spokesman for all reactionary aspirations throughout the entire period of imperialism.
Nietzsche is now experiencing his third “revival” in fascist Germany. Recognized during his lifetime by only a very few “chosen minds,” Nietzsche began to exert influence only when the German radical bourgeois intelligentsia in the pre-imperialist period began to experience a kind of intellectual crisis. At its first stage, it approached social democracy, in the field of literature it created naturalism.
A Nietzschean “renewal” of a different sort took place during the period of pre-war imperialism. He was influential as a “critic of culture” and above all as a “philosopher of life”. In Simmel, in the school of Stefan George, etc., the philosophy of Nietzsche was the banner of the struggle against the “mechanization” of life, the struggle for the awakening of the “living” forces of the “soul”, for an aristocratic, fate-accepting individualism, which, although it proudly despises the base, hostile cultural reality of imperialism, however, wants to quietly enjoy its fruits. In a word, Nietzsche becomes the patron of rentier parasitism.
The third – fascist – period of Nietzsche’s intense influence is, on the one hand, a further organic continuation of the second period, on the other hand, in many respects goes far beyond its limits. Now the philosophy of Nietzsche is looking for support for the petty bourgeois of the era of the crisis of the capitalist system. He seeks in it a justification for his instinctive protest against the economic and ideological consequences of capitalism, the true causes of which he is not aware of, a justification for his vague longing for a “strong personality”, which will “immediately” pull him out of chaos.
In connection with this change of mindset, Nietzsche is now mostly viewed as a critic of decadence. And since this criticism for Nietzsche is the central point of his aesthetics, it is precisely the aesthetic, literary, and generally artistic-critical elements of his philosophy that have now become especially effective, especially since this aesthetics is based on the same insoluble contradictions with which the fascist “philosophers” and their ideological predecessors cannot cope. In his pamphlet on Wagner, Nietzsche, characterizing the decadent style, writes that “the word becomes sovereign in the sentence, the sentence in the page and obscures its meaning, the page lives off the whole; the whole is no longer a whole ... And this symbolizes every decadent style: always anarchy of atoms, unfocused will, from the point of view of morality, “freedom of the individual”, in the expanded sense of political theory, “equal rights for all”. The equal power of life, its awe, its abundance in each of its smallest forms, everything else is poor in life ... The whole ... is composed, calculated, it is not a natural, but an artificial product.”
The political content of this theory of decadence is quite clear: decadence means the freedom of democracy. Nietzsche’s struggle against the Bismarckian form of the “Bonaparte monarchy” in Germany is a struggle from the right; he fights along that line, which is very close to the modern demagogic theories of National Socialism. Alfred Baeumler, the official philosopher of German fascism, also quite clearly expresses the political content of the Nietzschean theory of decadence: “The superman is the opposite of the “last man”, i.e., the “functionary” of a democratic socialist society” (Nietzsche as a philosopher and politician). Of course, there are also quite significant differences. Nietzsche himself still lacks the forms of social demagogy that are especially characteristic of Hitlerian fascism.
Nietzsche glorified capitalist exploitation openly, without phrase-mongering. His apology consisted in the fact that he dressed the glorification of capitalism in the form of criticism of modernity, in the fact that, accordingly, his apology was indirect, not direct. Such a “critical” form, however, exposes a deep contradiction in Nietzschean philosophy: his critique of modernity is ambivalent. Nietzsche, on the one hand, is not satisfied with the society and state of his day, since the domination of the capitalist elite is not sufficiently manifested in them. “He was given,” writes Nietzsche about the worker, “the right to coalition, the political right to vote: what is surprising if the worker now already feels his existence as disastrous (from a moral point of view, as unfair)? ... If he strives for goals, then he should also strive for means.” On the other hand, and inseparably from this critique, Nietzsche criticized the culture of his time, taking as his starting point the romantically idealized backward forms of capitalism. Therefore, Nietzsche, like all romantic anti-capitalist ideologists, fought against the machine. The machine increases productivity, “but work with it is monotonous, this causes opposition, namely desperate spiritual boredom, which teaches you to strive for changeable impressions of idleness ... The machine is impersonal, it takes away from the work of its pride everything individually good or bad, which is associated with any work without a machine: therefore it deprives it of humanity ... Do not buy the relief of labor at too high a price.” And so on in a number of passages that would be just as appropriate in Sismondi, Carlyle, Ruskin, etc.
These two tendencies are, of course, mutually exclusive; it is clear that thanks to them, in the philosophy of Nietzsche – and especially in his aesthetics – a tangle of contradictions arises, which cannot be unraveled. Arising like this. the double-facedness of Nietzschean philosophy, at the same time turned to the past and the future, precisely because of its contradictory character, has become a model for the current apologetics of modernity. In Nietzsche these contradictions are much less hidden than in his fascist followers. One of the last biographers of Nietzsche, Ernst Bertram, a student of George, correctly points out that the above assessment of the decadent style is borrowed almost verbatim from Paul Bourget’s essay on Baudelaire. Nietzsche himself never made a secret of the fact that the decadent Parisian literature (literature of the asphalt, as his goofy fascist fans call it) has consistently been his favorite reading. Nietzsche speaks with enthusiasm of such curious and subtle Parisian psychologists as Bourget, Loti and others. He regarded the reading of Dostoevsky as a “happy accident” of his life, etc., and in his intellectual biography Esce Homo a confession broke out from him: “Except for the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the opposite of decadence.” But since Nietzsche, for reasons that are already clear from the previous paragraphs, could in no way realize the objective foundations of his predilection for the decadent ideology, his criticism naturally remained a criticism of decadence from within decadence. The decadent Nietzsche, the faithful son of descending capitalism, who at the same time rebelled against the cultural, against the aesthetic symptoms of this decline, in passionate anguish, he turns his eyes to the past and future of capitalism, trying to get an aesthetic ideal from there in order to save the present from the decadent-democratic decline. Nietzsche is a late fruit of Romanticism, a harbinger of the imperialist, reactionary revival of Romanticism.
This revival of Romanticism is prepared by Nietzsche primarily epistemologically. The originality of Nietzschean philosophy lies in the new combination of radical agnosticism and equally radical voluntaristic mysticism, imbued with the “philosophy of life”. Nietzsche in the most energetic way rejects any kind of cognizability of objective reality and preaches the relativity of all cognition, in which the only criterion for cognition is only subjective well-being, a subjective feeling of increasing the value of life. “Delusion has made man so deep, tender, inventive that such flowers as religion and art could grow. He who would expose the essence of the world to us would bring us all the most unpleasant disappointment. Not the world as a thing in itself, but the world as a representation (as a delusion) so full of meaning, so wonderful, fraught with happiness and misfortune in its depths.” Here Nietzsche is a harbinger of the “philosophy of life” of the imperialist epoch imbued with agnosticism – on an international scale – from Simmel to William James.
This agnosticism forms for Nietzsche at the same time the philosophical basis for myth-making. Nietzsche saw himself as “the reevaluator of all values”; this means that for him the “world-historical” duty of the philosopher consists not in cognition, but in changing the assessment of the (unknowable) external world, his task is to put in place of a fruitless, dangerous for “life” delusion, a delusion “favorable to life”. In all his myths created for this purpose (Apollo and Dionysus, the principle of world struggle, superman, blond beast, etc.), Nietzsche mystically translates his concept of capitalism, his idea of what it should be. Such myths are not subject to scientific discussion, but their very arbitrariness and contradictory nature do not detract from their influence in the imperialist epoch: quite the contrary. Since the objective class grounds for a philosophical escape from the cognition of objective reality, for the apologetics of capitalism through myth-making only increased with the entry of capitalism into the imperialist stage, the influence of the Nietzscheans theory of knowledge at various stages, as we have seen, could only increase.
Corresponding to this theory of knowledge in the field of aesthetics is a consistent struggle against realism. Artistic creativity for Nietzsche is an invention and correction (in fiction, of course) of the world, to which we ourselves assert ourselves, thereby satisfying our deep need: “a highly interested correction of things” in the poet’s imagination, essentially a falsification of reality, it just excludes “stating, knowing objective consciousness”. Art is like that, essentially violence: suggestion, intoxication. In a later draft of the preface to his early work The Origin of Tragedy, Nietzsche denotes Apollonian (conscious, plastic) and Dionysian (instinctive, musical) began as two forms of intoxication and expresses, as its essential early comprehension, the idea that “it is impossible to live with the truth, that the ‘will to truth’ is already a symptom of degeneration.” All elements of modern decadent-bourgeois literature and the theory of literature are involved to deepen and substantiate this theory.
The contradiction, which Nietzsche himself establishes as the basis of his aesthetics, is the contradiction of his own position, constantly felt by him, sometimes even clearly expressed by him, but never known to him. He believes that the symptoms of decadence in the ideology of modernity are known to him, he criticizes them with the greatest sharpness and force. But since the soil of Nietzsche and the decadents is the same, he could borrow the scale of his criticism only from the same decadence, could criticize it only on its own basis. Here, the duality of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy that we have indicated was revealed: he overcame (capitalist) modernity as much from the point of view of the (capitalist) past as from the point of view of the (capitalist) future. This means that decadence should be evaluated by Nietzsche as much positively as is evaluated negatively. And arguments – of course always in an ideological-mythical form – are given for both positive and negative judgments: partly from the point of view of undeveloped, partly developed capitalism.
So, in decadence Nietzsche sees, first of all, a reflection of the “democratic, plebeian” spirit of the era; translated into the language of aesthetic decadence, for him the “theatrical” essentially means democratic. Nietzsche distinguishes three types of art: 1. monologue art (or talking with God); 2. public art, suggesting society (societe), a more refined kind of person; 3. demagogic art, for example. Wagner (for the Germans), Victor Hugo.
Basically, the struggle of Nietzsche, especially in the later period, is directed against “demagogic” art. The main sign of this “vulgar” art he considered to be suggestion at all costs. This art renounces strict construction, from the means of logic, from the beauty of clear and solid lines. It is forced to renounce this, since it wants to influence the masses, the “rabble”. “The masses have always been deaf to the three good things in art: aristocracy, logic and beauty – not to mention what is even better – namely the great style ... Depraved and heroically boastful is just the opposite of the great style, as well as gently seductive, diversely restless, indefinite, tense, instantaneous, secretly exaggerated, all “supersensual” masquerade of sick souls ... First and foremost – a breathtaking pose! Something that amazes and makes you shiver! A kind of ... intoxication and sleepy dreams, which can no longer reason and gives vent to a blind inclination to submission and compliance.” If here Nietzsche overcomes Wagner, then at the same time – and inevitably – overcomes his own aesthetics. In the years of his youth, Nietzsche, essentially for the purpose of aesthetic justification of Wagner, invented his own Dionysian principle and opposed it to Apollonian art. Departure from Wagner, overcoming him, however, could not be connected with a real revision of his own aesthetic principles; they were rooted too deeply in his social being. He could only construct an opposite aesthetic ad hoc (in this case) as a means of combating the “vulgar” decadence; however, next to it, the old aesthetics of Nietzsche remained in force and unchanged: Dionysian, emanating from intoxication, based on suggestion, undoubtedly decadent.
Such are the sharp, insurmountable contradictions that form the basic backbone of the entire philosophy and aesthetics of Nietzsche. He knows only the immobile, frozen polarity of the insoluble contradictions existing next to each other. The inability to understand the real contradictions of real social development in their true connections leads the bourgeois thinkers of the imperialist period partly to an apologetic denial of these contradictions, partly to their recognition – in a distorted ideological form of reflection – an irrational, mystical “last” fact. This mystical “fact” does not lend itself to any mental processing and is on the other side of any regularity. It is this doctrine of “polarity” as a mystical and apologetic surrogate for dialectics in the reactionary philosophy of the imperialist era, that first appears in a pronounced form in Nietzsche. For him, it is most closely connected with a special form of apologetics: with apologetics in the form of criticism.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian were the first manifestations of this philosophy of the polarity in Nietzsche. Later development enriches this system with a number of such polar opposites, among which the opposites of demagogic and aristocratic, decadent and healthy play a decisive role. And for the duality of the entire aesthetics of Nietzsche it is extremely characteristic that he takes the scale for the aristocratic, for the “healthy” from the past, from the history of not yet developed capitalism. This is Goethe, moreover, the late Goethe, this is the Renaissance and, above all, the France of the ancien regime, the 17th-18th centuries. The consequence of this is the intercession of Nietzsche for Moliere, Corneille and Racine against such a “wild” genius as Shakespeare. For a great style, as we have seen, Nietzsche requires logic, rigidity, the rejection of intoxication and suggestion associated with the “theatrical-demagogic”. But here immediately arises a tangle of insoluble contradictions. It would seem that in this way the Apollonian principle should triumph over the Dionysian one. But, firstly, Nietzsche, in his later period, in The Twilight of the Idols, reproaches Goethe for not understanding the ancient Greeks: his understanding of them is due to the fact that the Dionysian principle remained unknown to a Goethe who was devoid of masculinity. Secondly, Nietzsche comes to a high assessment of the relaxed-idyllic late German Romanticism (Der Nachsommer by Adalbert Stifter, 1857), a direction that he himself, criticizing the music of Brahms, characterizes as “melancholy impotence”. Thirdly, and most importantly, his struggle against decadence in its theatrical and demagogic form brings Nietzsche close to the glorification of French decadence. The defense of Corneille and Racine is immediately followed by the previously cited laudatory review of Loti, Bourget, Maupassant and other representatives of the Parisian asphalt literature. All these contradictions, breaking through in the apotheosis of the Greeks and the Renaissance, in the preference for Bizet (opera Carmen) over Wagner, clearly show that Nietzsche vacillated, like an eclecticist, from side to side, between romantic epigonism and imperialist neo-classicism, imbued with romantic elements. This instability in Nietzsche’s attitude had the most dramatic effect in his stance towards Richard Wagner. At first, Nietzsche regards – and rightly so – Wagner as a representative of the art of his generation. But since Nietzsche could not recognize the nature of this time, precisely the rise of German capitalism in the specific forms of Bismarckian Grunderism, the development of capitalism into imperialism, then in place of clear criticism we have the duality of impotent and hopeless hatred-love. First, Nietzsche sees in Wagner’s work the joyful news of a new great art, the revival – in the form appropriate to his time – of Greek tragedy, the combination of “great style” and the formulation of urgent world-historical tasks of the present. That is why this art is directed against the “instincts of the (liberal-democratic) masses.” His recognition can only be achieved through a struggle (this struggle also includes Nietzsche’s polemic with David Friedrich Strauss). However, in the historical-philosophical, aesthetic, theoretical substantiation of this new great art, directed, according to Nietzsche, precisely because of its importance against the “instincts of the (liberal-democratic) mass”, Nietzsche has romantic features from the very beginning. At the same time, Wagner’s work acts as a combination of Apollonian and Dionysian principles, educating to a new heroism with the help of Schopenhauer’s sense of merging all living beings together in the spirit.
This romantically exalted apology should have been untenable when the Wagnerian reunion of the arts appeared before Nietzsche on the stage of the Bayreuth Theater in its completion – all the more so since at the same time Nietzsche’s initial, although also not alien to internal discord, enthusiasm for the newly founded empire gave way place for sobering, Romantic criticism with the duality outlined above. From now on, Wagner becomes for Nietzsche the representative of all the bad tendencies of the modernity he denies. But this criticism, too, had to become ambivalent thanks to the principles that Nietzsche adhered to. On the one hand, he fought against Wagner as a capitulator to the new empire, as a capitulator to Christianity (Parsifal). Nietzsche reproaches Wagner for that he fell away from Feuerbach and from the ideas of the revolution of 1848 (Siegfried as a fighter against the gods) and went over to Schopenhauer, to Christian mysticism. On the other hand, Nietzsche criticizes Wagner as a “actor”, as a “demagogue”, as a “non-aristocratic” artist who makes too much concession to the masses and their bad instincts. What exactly politically means the reproach of hypocrisy, Nietzsche expresses quite clearly in the Twilight of the Idols (Gotzendammerung, 1889), where he speaks of “revolution as a spectacle” that seduced the minds. On the one hand, Nietzsche sees in Wagner a decadent whose heroes, if you take the romantic halo off from them, will turn out to be only Flaubert’s heroes; on the other hand, Nietzsche contrasts Wagner with his crude “theatrical-demagogic” effects to the “refined” outspokenness of French decadents.
On this central problem of Nietzschean aesthetics, a contradiction is revealed that determines his entire position: an attempt to overcome decadence on the basis of decadence itself. The Nietzschean concept of decadence, which is full of contradictions – the basic concept of his aesthetics and philosophy – is only a reflection of the fact that Nietzsche wants to replace the contradictory “bad” capitalism of his time with the “good” capitalism in the myth-creating anticipation of imperialism. Therefore, decadentism must have both “bad” and “good” sides: “After all, this is a matter of strength: all this Romantic art could be completely “overdone” by an artist who is truly rich and endowed with a strong will into anti-romantic or – using my formula – into Dionysian; but this decay can be justified ideologically, lyrically extolled as the basis for a better future.” The historical mission of Nietzsche was to create a fundamental scheme for the bourgeois philosophy of the imperialist era. Fascism – in accordance with the further process of decay – more and more crudely, demagogically vulgarizing, uses this scheme of Nietzsche as a basis. The aesthetics of Nietzsche were only the application of this scheme to the field of literature and art.
Of course, this also applies to Nietzsche’s own writings. As a writer, he stands on the threshold of German imperialism. At a time when the German bourgeoisie, which was enriching itself with incredible rapidity and quickly elevating by the rapid rise of capitalism, scornfully turned away from the literary and artistic past in order to create a handicraft-superficial literature suitable for it, Nietzsche, as a writer, once again unites the traditions of all German classics (the legacy of the Greek classics through Goethe and Hölderlin to Heine). This sharp opposition of Nietzsche to vulgar modernity is a consistent application of his general philosophical principles in the field of literature. It means that the development of the German literary tradition in Nietzsche is, in essence, its adaptation to the ideological needs of capitalism growing into imperialism. Nietzsche cruelly castigates his literary contemporaries in Germany with the most caustic mockery for their superficiality and banality, for their slovenly style. But if he raises old traditions against them, then this means the first broadly conceived attempt to adapt classical German literature to the ideology of the descending reactionary parasitic bourgeoisie, which, with all its shortcomings and half-heartedness, was the ideological expression of bourgeois-progressive, often even bourgeois-revolutionary tendencies. This adaptation, carried out partly with the help of crude imitations, partly by exclusively highlighting the weak sides of the classics while hushing up their revolutionary features, increases throughout the entire imperialist period and reaches its highest point in the literal theory and practice of fascism.
Nietzsche as a writer reveals in his style the same duality that we find out in his worldview. On the one hand, Nietzsche adjoins the newest, most decadent literature of France. He borrows from there the feuilleton manner of developing theoretical questions, follows its tendency to deny the systematic construction of thought and the means of its expression: a correctly constructed sentence. Like the French decadents, instead of a clear logical development of thoughts, Nietzsche gives hints, vague images, comparisons, witticisms, puns, etc., and the French impressionistic style more and more influences the very content and form of his images. (The veneration of Heine in Nietzsche refers exclusively to form: Nietzsche turns Heine’s revolutionary polemic against “Germany” into a formalist struggle of French artistic “lightness” with German “heaviness”). On the other hand, Nietzsche tries in his prose to combine this style with the old-fashioned precision of the late Goethe and some late Romantics, in his poetry, with classical and romantic pathos. This is how a motley, full of diversity, excitement, pictorial and pointed style arises, which, however – in its very stylistic principles – reveals the same eclectic character as the thinking of Nietzsche. The criticism, which Nietzsche subjects Richard Wagner to, is also a stylistic self-criticism of Nietzsche in the broad sense of the word. If Nietzsche speaks of empty pathos, of idealism, of Wagnerian works devoid of unity of construction, then he – unconsciously – characterizes his own pathos, his own idealism, his own eclecticism. His characterization of pompous mysticism, full of priestly falsehood in Wagner is at the same time an unconscious, but all the more destructive criticism of his Zarathustra, about which recently Andre Gide, who in his youth was strongly influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche, wrote in his Pages from the Diary, that “the tone of this book is downright unbearable to me.” The positive characteristic of Wagner in Nietzsche is even more self-characteristic of Nietzsche, for, rejecting Wagner’s claims to genuine monumentality, Nietzsche calls him “our greatest miniaturist”, as well as “the greatest melancholic in music, full of insights, tenderness and words of consolation, not anticipated by anyone, a maestro who gives us sad, drowsy happiness in sounds” (The Case of Wagner).
Of course, Nietzsche’s analogy with Wagner needs some limitations. Wagner represented the ideology of those people in 1848 who went over to the side of the “Bonapartist monarchy,” while for Nietzsche, bourgeois-democratic ideals were no longer in question: he, acting as an opponent of Bismarck’s Germany, was already expressing the tendencies of imperialism. However, one cannot fail to take into account the deep kinship between Wagner and Nietzsche, which is also reflected in the style. Both of them, as representatives of the period of a great upsurge of capitalism in Germany, are the harbingers of impressionism, only Wagner stands at the beginning, and Nietzsche at the end of the transition period. Just as the music of Richard Strauss organically grew out of Wagner’s magnificently passionate music, so Nietzsche’s poetry paved the way for “free verse.” From poems by Nietzsche the disintegration of the old connecting forms in German lyrics begins, for now it seeks to consolidate fleeting, instantaneous moods. And again, it is very characteristic how Nietzsche, perceiving the early traditions of style (Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine), completely deprives these traditions of their revolutionary character. Free rhythm, which e.g. in the young Goethe, in the field of form, was also expressed a protest against rococo – this style so characteristic of the absolutism of German petty rulers – becomes in Nietzsche a poetic substratum of the parasitic enjoyment of impressions and feelings, a formal means of expressing ideological decay. That is why the “revolution in lyrics” started by Nietzsche has nothing to do with Whitman’s rebellious free rhythms.
Despite this, the lyrics, like Nietzsche’s prose, are an important milestone in German literature. Nietzsche is in Germany the first representative of those stylistic tendencies, which in France, with its earlier developed capitalism, were already expressed by Baudelaire, Goncourt, and others. The lyrics of the naturalistic movement of the 80s (primarily Hermann Conradi) were very strongly influenced by the style of Nietzsche, no less than later, Mombert, Dehmel, Gille. And when in the 90s under the influence of naturalism and the impressionism that overcomes it, a systematic decomposition of the canonical forms of lyrics begins, the influence of Nietzsche grows even more (Johann Schlaf, Arno Holz, Paul Ernst). At the same time, the passionate side of Nietzsche is not perceived at all (Dehmel is an exception), but it again acquires significance in the lyrics when the second of the phases of Nietzsche’s influence we have indicated begins, precisely when his philosophy of life becomes the center of attention. Stefan George and his school, in their literary theory and practice, reproduce Nietzsche’s attitude to the German classics at a higher level of development. In their lyrics, they include the impressionistic elements of Nietzsche’s poetry again in a passionately strict and closed form. And in prose, these two periods of N’s influence are also quite sharply different. First, the influence of Nietzsche is felt (most clearly among critics such as Herman Bahr and Alfred Kerr), on the one hand, in the decomposition of prose, in the tendency to replace strictly constructed sentences with exclamations, interjections, images, etc. On the other hand, the philosophy of Nietzsche, which opposed the superman and blond beast to the herd animal of socialism, gave the young writers of their time the ideological support to fight against the always very weak and obscure motives of petty-bourgeois social criticism, characteristic of the initial period of naturalism. Here it is impossible, and indeed unnecessary, to enumerate the names: their series begins with Hartleben and Holz and ends with Sudermann and Fulda. In the second period, Nietzsche’s direct stylistic and thematic influence on fiction and criticism weakened. The ideological influence of Nietzschean philosophy of life becomes deeper. Thomas Mann may be the best example of Nietzsche’s influence on fiction. Let us briefly point out the criticism of culture by Simmel, Rathenau, the group of Stefan George and others.
On an international scale, Nietzsche attracted writers more with his ideology than directly with his style. This is understandable, since what was stylistically new in Germany was not so in France, England or the United States. Nietzsche’s ideological influence was extremely broad and stable. In France, in particular, Nietzsche found numerous adherents, admirers, and commentators (we point only to Charles Andler’s great monograph). Beginning with André Gide, almost none of the young French writers remained unaffected by Nietzsche (for example, the group Nouvelle revue francaise). Equally great is the enthusiasm for Nietzsche in the Scandinavian countries (Strindberg, Hamsun and others). In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the direct influence of Nietzsche may be somewhat less strong. But it is noteworthy that Nietzsche as one of the leading ideologists of the imperialist generation, subordinated to himself the writers of the left direction, who recognized themselves as socialists. Let us point at least to Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, etc.), to Upton Sinclair. In the third – fascist – period of Nietzsche’s influence, his ideas merge with the general ideological, international-imperialist trend. From Spengler through Klages, Baeumler, Bertram to Rosenberg and Goebbels, Nietzsche for fascist theorists is a harbinger, an outstanding predecessor, a “classic”, sometimes respectfully criticized. And Nietzsche’s theories of malice, contempt for the masses, purity of blood, high cult of race, myth, etc., having undergone processing in the general process of the ideological development of imperialism, are included in the practice of fascist writers, although now there can no longer be talk on a broader scale about the concrete and direct stylistic influence of Nietzsche on fiction.
The influence of Nietzsche on Russian literature begins in the 1890s, when the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia departs from the revolutionary movement, it changes its milestones under the sign of Nietzscheanism. Nikolai Minsky (With the Light of Conscience, as well as poems) and Lev Shestov (Good in the Teachings of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche) are characteristic in this respect. Both set as their goal an apologia for apoliticality and renegacy. The main things that they take from Nietzsche is amoralism, devaluation of self-sacrifice, agnosticism, skepticism.
In a similar aspect – as a preacher of anti-social individualism, a protester against the leveling mechanization of modern life – Nietzsche is mastered in the petty-bourgeois revolt of Leonid Andreev, limited by the framework of bourgeois thinking. The comprehension of Nietzsche in the theorizing of Shestov is answered by the artistic practice of vulgar Nietzscheanism, which reaches down to tabloid literature and boils down to a declaration of the rights of an insanely enjoying personality, to criticism of the outdated shy prejudices of bourgeois morality and life (the heroes of Artsybashev, A. Kamensky and others, the nihilist of the reaction era).
The most significant was the influence of Nietzsche on the literature of the aristocratic intelligentsia, which experienced in the 1890s a phase of greatest depression and ideological decay. The Nietzschean stream in this decadent literature marked a certain rise in activity: pessimism, motives of despair, death, “lunar” lyrics, etc. are supplanted by the “tragic affirmation” of life, the asocial self-affirmation of the individual, “solar” lyrics. Nietzschean amoralism, combined with the influences of Baudelaire and Wilde, and others, takes on the features of admiring the flowers of evil, Nietzschean “Dionysianism” is perceived as the emancipation of passions and dark instincts, as the liberation of the flesh, the cult of joy (Balmont, Merezhkovsky’s lyrics, etc.).
In the 1900s, during a period of sharp activation of all classes, in response to the requests posed by the impending revolution, for the circles of the aristocratic intelligentsia, to which a group of symbolists adjoined (Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, Ellis, Zinaida Gippius, S. Solovyov and others), the ideology of the “religious community”, “sobornost”, theocracy, etc. served; the aspirations of this “third kingdom” were given a “revolutionary-apocalyptic” coloring. This ideology, which expressed the claims of the noble intelligentsia to a leading role in the social movement and the desire to expand their social base, absorbed elements of the reactionary noble opposition against the bureaucracy and reflected the factional struggle of the local nobility against industrial capital within the bourgeois-aristocratic bloc, in essence, it was a “Junker” version in the process of formation of the ideology of monopoly capitalism. During this period, the slogan of overcoming Nietzsche – exit from the vicious circle of individualism into the arena of the public – became topical for the noble grouping of the Symbolists. On the other hand, Nietzsche is rethought: he is no longer perceived as a psychologist and moralist, but as a philosopher and religious preacher. The first (The Birth of Tragedy) and the last (Zarathustra) periods of his work are mastered. The secret disciple of Christ is exposed in the obvious apostate of Christianity, and the God-man is revealed in the superman. Nietzschean amoralism and agnosticism are interpreted as the principles of mystical freedom and religious faith, the Nietzschean motto amor fati is interpreted as Christian obedience to God, the idea of eternal recurrence is rethought as a shell of the messianic doctrine of the “second coming”, etc. Merezhkovsky, revising the dogmas of “historical Christianity” in the sense of reconciling them with secular civilization, sees the center of gravity of Nietzscheanism precisely in the religious pathos of “holy flesh” (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Religion and Revolution). Merezhkovsky embodies the image of the Nietzschean man in Julian, in Leonardo da Vinci (Death of the Gods, Resurrected Gods). Merezhkovsky’s method of thinking with polarities and their predetermined coincidences is similar to the methods of Nietzsche’s quasi-dialectic. In Andrei Bely’s Gold in Azure motifs and images of Zarathustra and of Nietzsche’s lyrics are found in abundance; the symphony Return is dedicated to rethinking the themes of Nietzsche (eternal recurrence). Bely especially valued Nietzsche’s aphoristic form of thinking, which is born “from the musical pathos of the soul, bypassing the theory of knowledge altogether.” The form of Bely’s literary-critical and philosophical articles, with its saturation with images, replacing terms with symbols, with its deployment of mythology, a combination of elements of philosophical reasoning, lyrics, journalistic and religious sermons, reveals similarities with the form of Nietzsche (Arabesques). In the lyrics of Vyacheslav Ivanov, the transformed themes of Nietzsche constantly arise, mainly the theme of Dionysus (cf. also his critical articles and studies on the history of religion). If for Nietzsche the main thing in Dionysus is the voice of will, then for Ivanov it is death and rebirth, a concept that in mythological form reproduces the dreams of reviving the culture of his class on a new basis. The ideas of “catholicity”, of overcoming individualism, are set aside as a myth about the Dionysian dissolution of the individual in the universal.
In the development of Nietzscheanism by the Russian bourgeois-noble intelligentsia of the early 20th century. there was also a contradiction that arose later in the camp of German fascism. On the one hand, the philosophy of Nietzsche is a tonic for raising the activity of declining classes, is an expression of imperialist aspirations, serves to combat materialism, with liberal democratic remnants, on the other hand, it is not suitable as an ideological platform for expanding the social base of the dictatorship of the ruling classes. Hence the “overcoming” of Nietzsche in the concepts of the “third kingdom”, “cathedralism”, etc., which are the prototype of the fascist slogan of the Third Reich.
Nietzsche’s influence on the development of imperialist motives in the work of Bryusov and Gumilyov was significant. The motives of extreme individualism are resolved in Bryusov not only into amoralistic aestheticism, as in Balmont, but also into the pathos of the “will to power”, into the rapture of power, into the cult of the grandiose. The pathos of mastering the world is fixed in the images of the heroes of world history, leaders, conquerors, standing “beyond good and evil.” Amor fati is given not as Christian obedience to God, but as the acceptance of a tragic fate by a strong person. These themes of Bryusov’s poetry are answered by his preaching of imperialism in political articles (the journal New Way). Bryusov is closer not to the Dionysianism, not to the myth-making of Nietzsche, but to Nietzsche as an apologist for the Renaissance, ancient and French classicism, to Nietzsche’s Apollo. This line of development of Nietzsche continues in Gumilyov’s lyrics, in which the military-feudal heroism merges with the ideology of imperialist capitalism. Gumilyov develops Nietzschean motives of contempt for liberalism and democracy, opposition of lower and higher races, aristocracy versus mob, glorification of strong personalities. In the person of Gumilyov, the Nietzschean wave of Russian literature spills over to fascism, being an indicator of the activation of counter-revolutionary social groups.
Bourgeois literary criticism, in an effort to neutralize the work of Maxim Gorky, created a legend about the Nietzscheanism of the young Gorky, supported by the Mensheviks and refuted by Vorovsky, as well as by Gorky himself. The Romantic coloring of the revolutionary nature of early Gorky, the abstractness and fantastic nature of his images, which had the source of the immaturity of the proletarian masses, the vagueness of their ideas about their position, about the future society, were equated with the reactionary neo-romanticism of the decadents. Gorky’s struggle for the rights of the human person, trampled underfoot by capitalism, the struggle against philistinism was presented as Nietzschean individualism, as aesthetic amoralism, and was misunderstood for Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois reality. In fact, Nietzscheanism has always remained only a form of “self-criticism” of the ruling and falling classes, or criticism of capitalist society from the positions of its most reactionary groups.