The Hungarian literary critic and philosopher Gyorgy Lukács (1885-1971) was one of the foremost Marxist literary critics and theorists. His influence on criticism has been considerable in both Western and Eastern Europe.

Gyorgy Lukács was born April 13, 1885, in Budapest, into a wealthy, intellectual, Jewish banking family. He was a brilliant student and was given a cosmopolitan education in Hungary and Germany. Until 1917 he devoted himself to art and esthetics and was not interested in politics. Writing primarily in German, he achieved his first fame as a literary critic with The Soul and the Forms (Hungarian, 1910; German, 1911) and The Theory of the Novel (1916 as an article; 1920 as a book), a study of the spiritual aspects of the novel. During World War I he taught in a German university.

Because of the shock of the war and the impressions made on him by the Russian Revolution...