Born in Budapest, György Lukács (1885–1971) was a philosopher and literary critic. His key expansion of Marx’s theory of reification helped to establish what is now know as “Western Marxism,” while his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and on the novel as a literary genre. In 1919 he served briefly as Hungary’s Commissar of Education and Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. His key works include Realism in the Balance (1938), The Historical Novel (1937), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), and The Theory of the Novel (1920).
photo: Karoly Gink, 1969
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