ABSTRACT
George Lukacs occasionally made mention of his early attempt at writing a systematic aesthetics. In his recollection, this had been a disastrous undertaking which had never come to fruition. Lukacs was apparently oblivious to the fact that a part of that old manuscript had been well preserved, and that the copy could actually be found in his apartment, among the papers of his wife. Reading the so-called Heidelberg Aesthetics came as a minor shock to all students of Lukacs: the book rewrote the story of the man who had just recently vanished. The Aesthetics of the old Lukacs, a remarkable work despite its weaknesses, is but the privileged shadow of the idea, of the real and the original, of the Ur-Asthetik. The Ur-Asthetik consists of two different works, or, more precisely, of a completed work and a lengthy fragment.
