These essays, written over a number of decades, are intended to throw light on the central problems of the work of Thomas Mann whom Luk cs describes as 'the last great bourgeois writer'. Luk cs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Luk cs hoped that socialist culture and its qualities would eventually overcome.