BOOK REVIEW 71 sharply. If he was shut up in the morning he apologised quickly. But if he was punished after 1pm. he refused to apologise. The reason was simple. His mother wished to avoid tensions after his father got home at 1.30. The result was that he was let out without an apology before 1.30. He set protocol against protocol. One recognises the tactician Lukacs. The counter-world to domestic protocol was provided by the world of literature. At the age of nine he discovered the Iliad and Cooper's novels. He sided instinctively with the losers, with Hector and the Mohicans against their conquerors. For Lukacs this is important, because his father (whom Lukacs othrewise liked and respected), as a successful banker, considered success as the criterion for right action. But from literature Lukacs learned that there is no necessary relation between the two. The road from a child's rejection of protocal and convention which are not rationally justifiable to a critique of society was a protracted process in the development of self-awareness. An important role in this was played again by modern literature. The discovery at the age of 15 of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Zola, Swinburne^ Ibsen exerted a strong influence on him and helped him to grasp the connection between a critique of convention and a critique of social order within which it is situated. A realistic assesment of his abilities seems to have characterised Lukacs right from the beginning. He was obviously extremely precocious playing a public literary role even before he was 18. But he soon realised that he was not a creative writer and destroyed all his works at 18 and retained what he calls a secret criterion for literature: anything he could write himself was bad literature. Good literature started after that. Literary criticism and philosophy started absorbing his interest. The sketch and conversations are full of interesting insights and assesments of his contemporaries, of political events and developments. But it is not possible for a reviewer to match the autobiogra-pher in commenting on every portion and problem of the chronology. Instead we shall restrict ourselves to focussing on one important aspect: Lenin and the Road to M^rx, which emerges with great clarity from the book. It is well known that the variation of bourgeois philosophy called 'Western Marxism' has practically canonised Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923). The sketch and conversations once again emphasise a position Lukacs developed in numerous other writings. It was only after overcoming the limitations of History and Class Consciousness by studying Lenin that Lukacs was able to take the road to Marx. After his doctorate in Budapest (1906) Lukacs studied and lived mainly in Berlin and Heidelberg, where, among others, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Paul Ernst, Emil Lask, Ernst Bloch were