György Lukács

György Lukács ( /ˈluːkɑːtʃ/; ; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher, æsthetician, literary historan, critic, and Marxist. He was the founder of Western Marxism, the interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideologic orthodoxy of the USSR; as such, he developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of the class consciousness theory by Karl Marx. As a literary critic György Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).