[A] consideration of Lukacs' actual present-day views on contemporary literature shows that he is indeed a good Leninist—hence incapable of making those critical distinctions which have enabled Marxist writers in Western Europe (and the genuine "revisionists" in Poland) to say something sensible about the quite real problems of intellectual sterility and pointless literary artifice which confront European and American literature at the present time.

Ideally it ought to be the critic's task to demonstrate all this in detail, taking as one's text both the essay on Contemporary Realism and the earlier volume entitled The Historical Novel. Although (or because) twenty years lie between their writing, the two books complement one another. The Historical Novel was composed in the winter of 1936–7: at the very height of the Great Purge, and some two years after Lukacs—in an address to the philosophical section of the Communist Academy in Moscow...