ABSTRACT
Not the least achievement of the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) was to survive into old age the almost continuous experience of being an intellectual in situations of extreme political danger. Born in Budapest, Lukacs was educated at various German universities and experimented with various philosophies until 1917, when the Russian Revolution fired his enthusiasm and led him to adopt Marxism. His brilliant theoretical work History and Class Consciousness (1923), however, offended the rapidly hardening Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of Moscow, and Lukacs was subsequently obliged to repudiate some of the ideas expressed in that work as the price for remaining within the Communist party. During the Stalinist era, much of which Lukacs spent inside Russia, the writings he produced were undeviatingly orthodox and often propagandist. From 1933 to 1944 Lukacs worked at the Philosophical Institute of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, returning in 1944 to teach at the University of Budapest. In 1956 he joined the shortlived government of Imre Nagy established by the uprising of October-November, but managed to survive the re-imposition of Russian control with nothing worse than a brief period of exile and an official ban on the publication of his work. He was readmitted to the party in 1967, and was subsequently allowed to express his opinions openly.
