Georg Lukacs already appears as one of the most influential figures in the intellectual life of the 20th Century. (p. 165) In 1910, 13 years after having clarified in History and Class Consciousness the concept of significant dynamic structure, Lukacs, after having published in Hungarian a work which to our knowledge has never been translated in any western-European language, became known to the German public through a book, The Soul and Forms [also translated as Soul and Form], which seems to us for severa...

At a time when Shklovsky in Russia and Lubbock in Great Britain were successfully banning metaphysics from literary criticism, Lukács' Theory of the Novel appeared as a late and stubborn attempt to reconstruct the most characteristic genre of modern literature from pure thought. To young Lukács, the theory of any genre coincides with its history, which, in true German fashion, he believes begins with the inimitable art of Greece…. Lukács does not tolerate any history of th...

Lukács' main writing as a Marxist critic of literature falls largely within [the] period in which it was most difficult, or even dangerous, to air venturesome thoughts that might not quite fit in with the canon of rigid and fixed rulings about what one should or should not think. (p. 173) To recall these facts of history and to append to them these conjectures is not to exculpate the philosopher, let alone to applaud him. But Lukács' critical activities did not happen in a void, ...

[In Georg Lukács'] works two beliefs are incarnate. First, that literary criticism is not a luxury, that it is not what the subtlest of American critics has called "a discourse for amateurs." But that it is, on the contrary, a central and militant force toward shaping men's lives. Secondly, Lukács affirms that the work of the critic is neither subjective nor uncertain. Criticism is a science with its own rigor and precision. The truth of judgment can be verified. Ge...

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 ninet...

The motto of the late Georg Lukács' Ästhetik, 'Sie wissen es nicht, aber sic tun es', a quotation from Marx, bears strange resemblance to the thesis of T. S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent. Both suggest that artists may not be aware of what they artistically do, that they represent a medium through which transindividual forces become manifest. Of course here the analogy ends: Eliot's 'tradition' is in no way comparable to the social...

[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 cri...

The Theory of the Novel is by no means easy reading. One is particularly put off by the strange point of view that prevails throughout the essay: the book is written from the point of view of a mind that claims to have reached such an advanced degree of generality that it can speak, as it were, for the novelistic consciousness itself; it is the Novel itself that tells us the history of its own development, very much as, in Hegel's Phenomenology, it is the Spirit who narrates its own voyage. With this...

Lukacs is, in Dr. Thomas Mann's view "perhaps the most important critic of literature to-day"; a judgment which, com-Georg Lukács 1885–1971 Photograph by MTI Budapest; courtesy of ARTISJUSing from such a source, must carry weight. Fortunately, the republication of many of his papers and the appearance of the first English translation of any of his books [Studies in European Realism] make it possible conveni...

[Solzhenitsyn] is a remarkable book, far more so than the theoretical writings of Lukacs's earlier years, which in their recent translations have given rise to a wavelet of Marxist scholasticism. Perhaps because he found it easier or more prudent to express his deepest convictions through the mediated discourse of literary criticism than through direct political speech, Lukacs releases, with a fervor he had never before shown in print, the disgust he felt for Stalinism, at least Stalinism as the terr...

As a philosopher, Georg Lukacs demanded totality; as a personality, he seems to defy it. If his reputation—on both sides of the Danube—has fluctuated over the years, it may be because no one quite knows which Lukacs to assimilate. Is he the revolutionary of 1919? The "romantic anti-capitalist" of 1923 (a current Western favorite)? The Stalinist "hack" of the 1930s? The vitriolic Cold Warrior? The Freedom Fighter of 1956? Or the "mellow" Marxist-Humanis...

[To] understand Lukács' concept of totality, we should start from the Ästhetik [Aesthetics], where its general principles are elaborated incomparably more fully and clearly than in his earlier writings, and largely in agreement with his earlier usage of the term. Art is for Lukács one of the great instruments by which man grapples with reality. Reality is man's dialectical being in nature, his self-preservation and self-evolution through work. Science and art are continuin...

[George Lukács's] importance as a critic was first made clear to me by the late Karl Mannheim, who had known him well in Hungary, and who … did not agree with the Marxist basis of Lukács's criticism. What one was made to realize after the reading of a single essay by this critic (and to envy), was the formidable superiority of any polemicist who combines dogma with sensibility. It is the same kind of formidability that one finds in certain Catholic writers (such as Jacques...