Lukács, Georg

Lukács, Georg, (1885–1971), Hungarian critic and philosopher, was born in Budapest, the son of a Jewish banker, and studied at Berlin and Heidelberg, where he wrote The Theory of the Novel (1916) under the philosophical influence of Hegel. After years in Hungary, Vienna (where he wrote his major work of Marxist political philosophy, History and Class Consciousness, 1923), and Berlin, he spent the period 1933–45 in Moscow, engaging in debates on Marxist literary criticism and writing his major literary study, The Historical Novel (1955). This work examines the historical awareness of W. Scott, Balzac, and other 19th-cent authors. After a period in exile in Romania, he was allowed to return to Hungary as a private scholar, devoting himself to a long work on aesthetics. The most influential of Marxist critics, he valued highly the ‘bourgeois’ tradition of fictional Realism for its understanding of social and historical dynamics. While distancing himself from the official doctrine of Socialist Realism, he deplored the alleged nihilism of Modernist experimentation in literature, notably in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958).