ABSTRACT
In due course the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukacs took over Marx's Balzacian mantle down to its last stitch or fold, allowing Marx's preferences to dictate the form of his praise of Balzac's realism. Balzac is a prominent presence in all Lukacs's literary criticism, beginning with his early work The Theory of the Novel, which was originally intended as an introduction to a book on Dostoevsky. In each individual novel is achieved what the young Lukacs termed 'a genuinely epic significance', for heterogeneity of the constituent elements is redeemed by the homogeneity of the fundamental situations they illustrate. Zola, for all his professed left-wing stance, is thus seen by Lukacs as 'an antirealist historian of the Second Empire, fantastic and grotesque in his distortion'. Zola is undialectic. Lukacs devoted separate essays to both Illusions perdues and Les Paysans, to which he added a third essay on Balzac and Stendhal.
