Mr Lukacs changes trains

Edward Timms

  • Georg Lukacs: Selected Correspondence 1902-1920 translated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar
    Columbia, 318 pp, $25.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 231 05968 X

When Georg Lukacs joined the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918, his admirers were taken by surprise. This gifted young man from an affluent Jewish background, then aged 33, had previously devoted himself exclusively to cultural pursuits. After coming into prominence around 1905 as one of the instigators of the Hungarian intellectual revival, he had gone on to make his mark in Germany as a cultural theorist in the tradition of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber. When he settled in Heidelberg in 1912, he seemed set for a distinguished university career. His early inquiries had focused on the relationship between spiritual experience and aesthetic form, summed up in the title of his influential collection of essays, Die Seele und die Formen (1911). His writings displayed a lively awareness of the dependence of literary forms on sociological variables. But there was no sign of a Marxist (let alone revolutionary) perspective.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[1] Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism by Michael Löwy. New Left Books, 1979.

[2] Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch edited by Istvan Eorsi, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Verso, 1983.

[3] The Young Lukacs by Lee Congdon. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

[4] Gyorgy Lukacs: His Life in Pictures and Documents, edited by Eva Fekete and Eva Karadi. Corvina Kiado, Budapest, 1981.