[A] consideration of Lukacs' actual present-day views on contemporary literature shows that he is indeed a good Leninist—hence incapable of making those critical distinctions which have enabled Marxist writers in Western Europe (and the genuine "revisionists" in Poland) to say something sensible about the quite real problems of intellectual sterility and pointless literary artifice which confront European and American literature at the present time.

Ideally it ought to be the critic's task to demonstrate all this in detail, taking as one's text both the essay on Contemporary Realism and the earlier volume entitled The Historical Novel. Although (or because) twenty years lie between their writing, the two books complement one another. The Historical Novel was composed in the winter of 1936–7: at the very height of the Great Purge, and some two years after Lukacs—in an address to the philosophical section of the Communist Academy in Moscow—had performed the first of a long sequence of public acts of self-abasement by denouncing his own pre-Leninist writings (notably the famous History and Class-consciousness of 1923) as "idealist" and "objectively" Fascist…. Though less frenzied in tone, Lukacs' critical writings during this period, including The Historical Novel, faithfully reflect the temper of this remarkable pronouncement, notably in their determination to re-write the history of contemporary literature in terms of Fascism and anti-Fascism. To this end "the historical novel of anti-Fascist humanism" (as represented by some worthy, but distinctly second-rate, German emigré authors of unimpeachably bourgeois-democratic outlook: it was after all the Popular Front period) had to be provided with a genealogical tree reaching back to Walter Scott (not a democrat, but a realist, hence to Lukacs a forerunner of his real heroes: Balzac and Tolstoy). (p. 75)

[The book] might be described as orthodox Leninism, both as to sentiment and style. (Lukacs' insensitivity to the German language, in which he has composed nearly all his writings, and his indifference to style in general, would require separate treatment: it seems to have been part of his self-imposed Bolshevisation, for prior to the 1924 catastrophe he affected an elegant, even somewhat precious, manner.) Its relevance to literary criticism, or even to literary sociology, is debatable. In any case 350 pages of this sort of thing, unrelieved by a single gleam of humour, might seem rather a burden upon the reader. Yet this turgid monograph is not without its merits, once account is taken of the fact that the author is concerned with long-run changes in the cultural pattern. Since for Lukacs (as for every Hegelian) form and content make a whole, he is able to relate formal changes—e.g., the Romantic "poetisation" of the historical novel—to conflicting tendencies in society. Thus, (to take one of the many examples he offers) in discussing the Romantic upsurge in French literature after 1815 he is able—with the direct help of Marx admittedly—to discern the survival in Chateaubriand of that part of the Enlightenment tradition which had its original locus in the courtly aristocracy, and to contrast both his and Vigny's "ahistoricism" with the continuation of the 18th-century tradition in Stendhal and Mérimée. This sort of historical-sociological cross-reference, when backed by wide reading, can be illuminating, and in the more strictly literary parts of The Historical Novel the method does come to life: notably in the section contrasting the novel and the drama. Indeed when he is analysing the formal (and historical) differences between the epic and the drama, Lukacs here and there almost recovers the intellectual level of his youthful work, culminating in his fragmentary but magnificent Theorie des Romans (1916). This may be no more than a way of saying that he has always lived on his early insights, but that is a common enough fate. The tragedy is that these insights have been progressively buried under a monstrous load of sociological jargon, self-conscious popularisation, and polemical journalism. (pp. 75-6)

By comparison with the frenetic nonsense Lukacs produced in the closing years of the Stalin era—he was of course under considerable pressure to demonstrate his orthodoxy, but writers have traditionally been required to show some concern for intellectual standards, as well as for their skins—his current manner is fairly detached and at times almost mellow. Thus in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, not only is there a somewhat grudging attempt to make sense of Kafka, but the criticism of modern music in general, and Schoenberg in particular, is backed by a quotation from the Western "modernist" Theodor Adorno (though objectivity is not carried to the point of informing the reader that Adorno is a Hegelian and a Marxist).

For all these welcome changes in tone and manner, Lukacs' critical assessment of modernism effects no real departure from his previous position. Perhaps that was not to be expected. What is remarkable is that he has not got beyond the simpleminded antithesis realism-decadence which was his theme in the Destruction of Reason. Indeed at one point …, he reverts to that monstrous pamphlet for the purpose of acquainting the reader once again with his obsessive notion that the departure from "bourgeois realism" paved the way for a progressive collapse whose stations are marked by the names Dostoyevsky-Nietzsche-Hitler; with Joyce and Kafka relegated to the margin among those writers who—whatever their political views—"connive at that modern nihilism from which both Fascism and Cold War ideology draw their strength." At this level, not only is there no meeting-place for different viewpoints, but the temptation to repay the writer in his own coin becomes overwhelming. After all, we now have it on the best of authorities that Stalin's univers concentrationnaire differed from Hitler's chiefly in that the number of his victims was even larger. This may seem irrelevant, but a critic who politicises every issue—to the point of solemnly treating Kafka's nightmares as evidence of "the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism"—is asking for trouble. The more so when he affects to regard Freud—the greatest representative of the Enlightenment tradition in modern times—as an obscurantist and contrasts him unfavourably with the simpleton Pavlov. If Lukacs really believes this sort of nonsense—it is never quite certain how much of what he says represents actual convictions—one can only conclude that twenty years of Zhdanovism, plus an endless series of accommodations, have permanently impaired his critical faculties.

Two separate aspects of this intellectual disaster must be distinguished here. In the first place, Lukacs manifestly has failed to do for East European Marxism what writers like Sartre, Lefebvre, Ernst Bloch, T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Italian Marxists of Gramsci's school—not to mention the ex-Marxist group around the New York Partisan Review—have done for the sociology of culture in Western Europe and America. He nowhere reaches their level, and this failure is not due to his Marxism, but to his involvement with Soviet orthodoxy; an orthodoxy rooted in Chernyschevsky and the other founders of the 19th-century Russian Populist school. Secondly, his obstinate refusal to see that "modernism" is a truly international phenomenon compels him to side with Eastern officialdom in opposing the genuinely creative, liberating, and truly realist tendencies at work in Soviet and East European life and literature since the "thaw." If he were really what his New Left admirers mistakenly imagine him to be, he would by now have become the patron saint of "revisionism." Actually there is good reason to believe that he is now an isolated figure even in his native Hungary: not because the régime wills it (he is in fact quite free to write and publish, even in the West) but because the younger generation—which until 1956 looked to him for leadership—has turned its back upon him. And no wonder: his attitude to modernism is really no different from that of officialdom, though nowadays expressed in more temperate language. What are young people in Budapest, Prague, or East Berlin to make of a critic who treats "socialist realism" as the only legitimate successor to "bourgeois critical realism"? (pp. 76-8)

[A] critic who dismisses the whole of modernism as "decadent" shows that he is simply unaware of what is going on around him. If anything is certain, it is that the younger generation in the Soviet orbit is fed up with "socialist realism" and as instinctively "modernist" as its "alienated" counterparts in the West. And what are Western readers to make of Lukacs' curiously old-fashioned insistence that "the contemporary bourgeois writer will have to choose" between Kafka and Thomas Mann? The fact is that neither the writers themselves nor their readers are any longer "bourgeois." They are intellectuals living in an industrial society whose tensions necessarily give rise to problems which modernism undertakes to solve: problems no different from those experienced by people in the Soviet orbit, except that in the West political freedom makes life rather less intolerable. If Lukacs were really trying to bring Marxist sociology to bear upon this situation, he would realise soon enough that where art is concerned the problem is pretty much the same in East and West. He could then still give vent to his dislike of modernism, but at least he would be relieved of the pseudo-problem he has created for himself by treating it as "bourgeois," when in fact it is one of numerous signs that 19th-century bourgeois culture (the only culture he really understands) is coming to an end. (p. 78)

[In] the one respect in which Lukacs has remained true to himself—rejection of naturalism and adherence to the classical heritage—he has failed to establish a position which transcends the usual sectarian quarrels. To do that he would have had to see the modern situation as it really is, and for that his critical apparatus was inadequate. By now, thirty years of apologetics have taken their toll, and the disciples who claim for him the status of "the Marx of aesthetics" merely disclose their own inability to measure the extent of his failure.

Failure on an enormous (though rather anti-heroic) scale, for Lukacs had it in him to apply Marxism to aesthetics at a level adequate to the subject-matter. Though lacking true originality—the notion that in his own sphere he rivals Marx can be entertained only by people who have not read either—he possessed a theoretical equipment superior to that of most Central European scholars of his generation. His range was (and in some respects still is) extraordinary, and his youthful exposure to German intellectualism in its pre-1914 peak period provided an immensely hopeful starting-point: the more so since he was an instinctive cosmopolitan and quite free from the specifically German narrowness. With these antecedents, and equipped with an intellect not indeed very powerful (abstract reasoning was never his forte), but subtle, flexible, far-ranging and genuinely critical, he might have achieved something comparable to the attainment of Dilthey and the other great neo-Kantians in the pursuit of what the Germans call Geistesgeschichte: a major body of work in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition which could by now have enabled the intelligentsia of East-Central Europe to emancipate itself both from its own provincialism and from the pseudo-universalism of Soviet ideology. (p. 79)

Instead of a genuine critique of modernity in its all forms (including its "ideological reflex" in literary modernism), he has produced a vast corpus of dogmatic writing attuned to a simplified dualism which is already out of date, and which systematically eludes the pressing problems of industrial mass culture in East and West alike; instead of authentic dialectical Marxism, there is blind commitment to the simplified Leninist version; instead of genuine controversy, the stereotyped language of the Cold War. At the age of 78, and after almost sixty years of intensive and far-ranging activity, Georg Lukacs has not merely failed to write the Marxist aesthetics his admirers expected from him: he has failed altogether as a responsible writer, and ultimately as a man. It is one of the worst intellectual disasters of this disastrous age. (p. 80)