The distinction of Lukács's Studies in European Realism—despite certain passages of obeisance to the Lenin-Stalin cult and some mechanical flattery of the Russian literary tradition itself (the book was written in Russia during the terrible purges of the 1930's)—is that it brings an essentially philosophic and moral vision of man's necessary destiny to bear on the great age of the novel; the book puts into a new and dramatic focus the sources of realism in the nineteenth century. Lukács's studies in realism bring home to us certain sources of the imaginative power of such towering figures as Balzac and Tolstoy. Lukács is exceptional among students of nineteenth-century realism because he is both a philosopher with great gifts of critical analysis and a critic who can marshal his points with logical rigor. He always writes in the perspective of a philosophical system. He is...