ABSTRACT
In 1937, Georg Lukacs published The Historical Novel, a landmark study that, in addition to defining the distinctive features of the classical historical novel, also viciously criticizes the biographical novel. For Lukacs, the ultimate goal of the historical novel is to portray a “great historical truth” (319), which it does through “the poetic awakening of the people who figured in” momentous historical events (42). “What matters,” according to Lukacs, “is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (42), which is something that the classical historical novel is best suited to accomplish. Since the biographical novel centers the narrative on the life story of an actual heroic person, it necessarily distorts and misrepresents historical reality because “the character is inevitably exaggerated, made to stand on tiptoe, his historical calling unduly emphasized while the real objective causes and factors of the historical mission are inevitably omitted” (314). This is not something that has just randomly happened within particular biographical novels. It is the inevitable consequence of the aesthetic form. Thus, Lukacs concludes,
According to Lukacs, there is something intrinsic to the form of the biographical novel that necessarily leads it to distort and misrepresent the historical and the political. Therefore, it is an irredeemable aesthetic form.1
