When I was about eighteen I burned all my manuscripts. From then on I had a secret criterion for the limits of literature: anything I could write myself was necessarily bad. Literature began where I felt that something had been written which I could not emulate.

This recollection, with its odd qualities of subtlety, irony, dogmatism and dialectic, almost encapsulates the contradiction of George Lukács. Born into a family of the Mittel Europa Jewish bourgeoisie, and heir to the high culture of the turn of the century, he became Hungary’s leading Communist intellectual. Although he was often out of favour with the orthodox, he never felt comfortable as a dissident, and always sought to make his peace with ‘the party’. Although he did not actually burn his greatest work, History and Class Consciousness, he disowned it as ‘idealism’ in an apparently voluntary auto da fé, and discouraged its republication. By the time of his death in 1971, having declined the opportunity to emigrate, he had achieved a peculiar ‘double act’ in the mental life of Eastern Europe; virtual invulnerability from the regime and near-total, if passive, repudiation of it. There is evidence, presented in this enthralling and difficult book, that towards the end of his life Lukács began to suspect that the whole Communist enterprise had been a waste. But that was one act of repudiation which he could not make public.

This oral autobiography, which consists principally of a series of exhaustive interviews, recalls a world we have lost. The marxisant, cosmopolitan culture of Central Europe between the wars, which spanned literature, politics and psychoanalysis, and which included Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Wilhelm Reich and Ernst Fischer, was ground to atoms between fascism and Stalinism. Those surviving atoms were drawn, usually, to one pole or another. Lukács, who served as the model for Naphta in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, decided early on to identify his own survival with that of the Soviet Union. He had served as a commissar in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet of 1919 (whose leader, Bela Kun, was a stern practitioner of the proto-Stalinist methods to which he himself later fell victim). Lukács survived the bloody counterrevolution, exile and the purges – to his dying day he could not be sure how he managed to live through the third of these – and took his place in the Hungarian Communist regime that was established after the Second World War. In the upheaval of 1956, when a ‘reform’ movement emerged in the party, he agreed to serve as Minister of Education in the government of Imre Nagy. But he did so at least partly in order to prevent ‘reform’ from degenerating into mere ‘bourgeois liberalism’. Nagy’s decision to leave the Warsaw Pact, which provided one of the many pretexts for armed Russian intervention, was a step which Lukács opposed. This did not prevent him from being deported, along with other figures in the rebellion, to a remote area of Romania. It may have saved him from the execution without trial which awaited Nagy and others once world attention was focused elsewhere.

In some ways, the career of Lukács reminds one of the comment made by the German revolutionary, Eugene Levine, before he was murdered by the conservative predecessors of the Nazi Party in 1918. ‘We Communists’, said Levine, ‘are all dead men on leave’. But it’s hard to repress the suspicion that Lukács made some bargains with Lucifer even when he went AWOL. To cite an example that recurs more than once in this book, here he is as a prisoner of the Stalinist police in late 1956 or early 1957:

My interrogators said to me that they knew I was no follower of Imre Nagy and so there was no reason why I should not testify against him. I told them that as soon as the two of us, Imre Nagy and myself, were free to walk about Budapest, I would be happy to make public my opinion of all of Nagy’s activities. But I was not free to express an opinion about my fellow prisoners.

This is an exemplary, almost gentlemanly, position to have taken. But it relies for its value on a conception of political pluralism – of the absolute importance of free speech and dissent – which Lukács did not generally uphold. Even as late as 1969, we find him referring to the Moscow Trials as ‘superfluous’ – a distinctly euphemistic characterisation. And he barely troubles to hide his opinion that some of Stalin’s enemies – the Left Opposition and the followers of Zinoviev – more or less got what was coming to them.

Lukács was able to continue working, while other revolutionaries were being exterminated, because much of his criticism was opaque to the party hacks. He restricted himself as much as possible to the fields of philosophy and aesthetics, writing sinuous defences of Hegel and Balzac against the prevailing vulgar reductionism. One cannot blame a man for surviving, as some of Lukács’s enemies do. But it is still important to remember the price that compromise exacts.

Lukács was versatile enough to reason his way to almost any conclusion. In these pages, he justifies the self-suppression of his own works by reference to Thomas Mann, saying that Mann ‘would never have written Dr Faustus if he had remained convinced of the views put forward in his book on the war. That is the whole point of ‘And until you possess this maxim: Die and become!’ That is what Goethe perceived so clearly.’ The editors (who have done a generally scrupulous job of annotation and reference) add that the next line of Goethe’s poem Selige Sehnsucht reads, ‘You will be but a dismal guest on the gloomy earth’. Lukács’s apologia seems to me to leave the couplet rather ambivalent.

Lukács hoped to show, in theory and in practice, that Marxist materialism and Hegelian idealism were ‘complementary and not antithetical. Perhaps, in another country or another century, his ontological work would have stood a better chance of completion. Perhaps, granted those impossible conditions, his work on Waiter Scott and the genesis of the novel would have been less haltered by the demands of ideology and caution. He could have devoted more time to elaborating his preference for Kodaly over Bartok. As it is, he has left us with some sardonic and cryptic pensées, of which the best known is his dictum that, ‘Even the worst socialism is still better than the best capitalism. This only appears to be a paradox.’ It certainly does appear to be a paradox if, for instance, it can be construed as meaning that Albania is ‘better’ than, say, Holland. The synthesis necessary for the resolution of such a contradiction is one that, in his life and in his writing, both of which were courageous in their way, Lukács never managed to attain.

Today, Hungary is routinely celebrated by journalists as the most liberal and ‘relaxed’ of the states of Eastern Europe. This ‘relaxation’ is the product of a certain latitude for market forces, a limited tolerance for political opposition, the memory of a bloody insurrection, and the balancing skills of the ex-Stalinist Janos Kadar.’ ‘Goulash communism’, in a phrase. Lukács can probably take some of the credit for it. Yet in no sense does it represent what he wanted for the future: there is another apparent paradox that he might have savoured.