The Historical Novel

This is the second work of the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and man of letters to appear in English translation. 'Studies in European Realism', a collection of essays translated by Edith Bone and published in 1950, was hailed on all sides as an outstanding critical work — by 'The Times Literary Supplement', Herbert Read, Angus Wilson and others. Thomas Mann, himself indebted to Lukács' criticism, described him as “the most important literary critic of today”.
Lukács has always been an influential figure in his own country; as a student he was responsible for introducing Ibsen and Strindberg to the Hungarian stage; he was Minister of Culture in the short-lived government of Bela Kun in 1919, and again in that of Imre Nagy in 1956. After the Second World War and up to 1956 he held the Chair of Aesthetics at Budapest University. Now in retirement, he is engaged in writing a major work on ethics.
'The Historical Novel' is a single work, produced during Lukács' exile in the nineteen-thirties. The historical novel had then taken on a special significance among writers such as Heinrich Mann and Leon Feuchtwanger, in whose hands it had become a means of opposing the humanism of the past to the barbarism of the present. Lukács traces the development of the historical novel from Scott to these contemporary writers. But 'The Historical Novel' is not a literary history in the narrow sense; it is concerned with the rise of historical consciousness in literature, and the selection of authors is restricted to the main trends and moments of this process. Thus a sense of history emerges in Europe when, for the first time, millions of people experience history directly in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The novels of Sir Walter Scott are seen as the first and classical embodiment of this historical sense. Scott's principles are kept alive during the heyday of Romanticism by his realist disciples, Fennimore Cooper, Manzoni and Pushkin. Thereafter Balzac applies Scott's historical art to contemporary social themes. Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' is shown as belonging to the same tradition. But in Western Europe Lukács notes a decline in the historical novel after 1848; it becomes a falsely separate 'genre' in the hands of Flaubert and the Swiss Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The organic link between past and present, which was the secret of Scott's greatness is lost. In England, Dickens and Thackeray are also affected by the false historical attitudes of the period. The historical novel, however, revives in the works of Anatole France, Romain Rolland and Lukács' own contemporaries; its future depends, for Lukács, on the extent to which it can renew the traditions of its classical forbears.