SOURCE: "Balzac and Stendhal," in Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others, translated by Edith Bone, Hillway Publishing Co., 1950, pp. 65-84.

Lukdcs, a Hungarian literary critic and philosopher, is acknowledged as a leading proponent of Marxist thought. His development of Marxist ideology was part of a broader system of thought in which he sought to further the values of rationalism (peace and progress), humanism (socialist politics), and traditionalism (Realist literature) over the counter-values of irrationalism (war), totalitarianism (reactionary politics), and modernism (post-Realist literature). The subjects of his literary criticism are primarily the nineteenth-century Realists and their twentieth-century counterparts. In major works such as Studies in European Realism (1950) and The Historical Novel (1955), Lukdcs explicated his belief that "unless art can be made creatively consonant with history and human needs, it will always offer a counterworld of escape and...