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Summary

The Hungarian Marxist literary critic Georg Lukacs (pronounced GAY-org LOU-cotch) was one of the premier theorists of socialist realism, the only acceptable style of literature in the Soviet Union. In order to champion realism, and specifically an ideologically charged realism, as the only good way to write, Lukacs had to set himself in opposition to the literary movement that had superseded realism in the West, modernism (writers like James Joyce, William Faulkner, Robert Musil, and so on). This essay is his attempt to distinguish the two absolutely, in favor of course of realism.

Basically, for Lukacs (and for the Soviet Union), modernism is the last desperate cry of a dying economic system, capitalism. As "late" capitalism crumbles, it generates more and more alienation and meaninglessness in its citizens, and modernism is the attempt to reflect...