Georg Lukács (1885-1971) is the one Eastern European critic and philosopher who still commands an audience in the West. In the East, where he must have had a great effect on the formulation of Marxist aesthetics and the concept of realism, he has been relegated into the past as a “revisionist.” Only in Hungary is there a devoted circle of followers still flourishing. His influence in Germany and Italy was and is enormous. In Germany, there is a collected edition of his writings which, still incomplete, runs to twelve stout volumes, and a large, often polemical literature on about every aspect of his wide-ranging work. Theodor Adorno, the most prominent member of the Frankfurt School, although he attacked Lukács strongly, spoke of the “halo” which surrounds his name, due to the writings of his youth: The Soul and the Forms (1911), The Theory of the Novel (1916), and History and Class Consciousness (1923). In Italy the interest is about as great. The echo in France has been weaker, but the sociologist Lucien Goldmann is an avowed disciple and the philosopher Merleau-Ponty has written on him.

Lukács’s reception in the English-speaking world came later. Apparently, Essays on Realism, introduced in the English edition by Roy Pascal and in the American by Alfred Kazin in 1950, was the first book of his to appear in English. Much has been translated since, but his main work, the two-volume Aesthetik, still goes begging. In recent years, Marxists and other sympathetic