Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast
Edited and with an introduction and notes by Rodney Livingstone

The essays in this book – on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorf, Georg Büchner and Heinrich Heine, and on the novelists Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane – were mostly written between 1936 and 1944 when Lukács was in exile in Moscow. After the literary polemics of the earlier 1930s, Lukács increasingly turned to the literature he knew and loved best – the German classics and nineteenth-century realists. His defence of realism against the crude simplicities of ‘socialist realism’, and against all didactic literature, is implicit and occasionally explicit, throughout these studies. However, Lukács’s main purpose in these interpretative essays was to establish the historical, social and literary context in which these writers worked, to attain a fuller understanding and appreciatioin of what they wrote, and to settle accounts where necessary with contemporary critics in Germany who were attempting to coopt some of them into a fascist pantheon or – in Heine’s case – to vilify them.

Lukács appears in this volume as a literary historian of unusual breadth and erudition, ready to make illuminating comparisons between Kleist and Schiller, Büchner and Shakespeare, Heine and Balzac, Keller and Tolstoy, Raabe and Dickens, or Fontane and Thackeray. He also appears as a critic whose discussions and assessments of individual works, whether plays, novels, short stories or poems, are enlivened by the exploration of the relations between historical period, style and aesthetic form which runs through all his literary work.

Published by Libris in 1993