Lukács at Tashkent

Is anti-fascism a strategy determined by the turns of national politics and the balance of forces of imperialism? To Georg Lukács, writing in the Soviet Union during its invasion by fascist Germany, anti-fascism is the struggle in the sphere of ideology against barbarism in the shape of a militant humanism. A preface written in 1947 for a French translation of a collection of essays on anti-fascism, which was never published, from this period of invasion informs readers: ‘This book was born during the winter of 1941–42, at a time when, due to the dangers that beset Moscow, I had been evacuated to Tashkent with other antifascist writers.’