Georg Lukács was born in 1885 in Budapest, into a wealthy Jewish banking family. He studied at universities in Budapest, Berlin and Heidelberg (where he was befriended by Max Weber), and in 1916 published his first major work in the literary field from which his name was to become inseparable, The Theory of the Novel.

Won to Marxism through the inspiration of the October Revolution, Lukács joined the new Hungarian Communist Party in 1918 and in the following year became Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. In exile in Vienna, then Berlin, in the years that followed, he wrote History and Class Consciousness, the single most influential work in what came to be known as the Western Marxist tradition. There followed the short study Lenin and then the so-called Blum Theses, in which Lukács tried unavailingly to wean his party from its ingrained leftism. After that defeat, he withdrew from direct politics into philosophical and critical activity, from 1933 onwards in Moscow, where he wrote, among other works, The Historical Novel. He remained there until his return to Hungary in the last months of the Second World War.

Lukács now resumed an active role in the Communist Party, leaving a record that has remained controversial ever since. In the defining crisis of 1956, however, he sided with the popular movement against the flailing Stalinist regime, and accepted office in Imry Nagy’s coalition government. After the Soviet invasion at the end of that year, Lukács was deported to Romania and held under house arrest. Spared execution and allowed back to Budapest the next year, he continued to write and publish for the rest of his active life.

The interview published here was given in Budapest in late 1968, soon after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, to which the closing exchange tacitly refers. It was first published after Lukács’s death in 1971.