György Lukács (1885–1971): A Brief Chronology of Life and Work

1885 Birth in Budapest

1902–06 Student in Budapest and Berlin

1904–08 Thalia Society, involvement in theatre

1906 Doctorate in Cluj (Kolozsvár).

1906–07 Monograph, ‘The History of Development of Modern Drama’, wins prize

1909 One semester in university in Berlin; friendship with Leo Popper

1910 Publication of Soul and Form in Hungarian

1911 Publication of The History of Development of Modern Drama.

1912–18 Heidelberg University; friendship with Ernst Bloch; Heidelberg Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics (unpublished)

1913 Aesthetic Culture in Hungarian

1914–18 First World War

1914 Marries Yelena Andreyevna Grabenko; The Theory of the Novel,  published in 1916

1915–18 Visits Budapest; organises Sunday Circle; Free School for Intellectual Sciences; Society for the Social Sciences

1918 October Aster Revolution in Hungary; Béla Balázs and Those Who want None of Him; relationship with Gertrúd Jánossy (neé Borstieber); December, joins newly formed Hungarian Party of  Communists

1919 Tactics and Ethics; March: Republic of Councils, Deputy Minister for Education; August: Defeat of Republic of Councils, Lukács underground’

1919–30 Exile in Vienna; articles in Rote Fahne, Kommunismus, 100 per cent

1921 Third Comintern Congress

1923 History and Class Consciousness in German

1924 Lenin: The Unity of His Thoughts

1928 Blum Theses

1930 Expelled from Vienna, moves to Moscow

1931–33 Berlin, Linkskurve; Marxist Workers’ School

1933–45 Exile in the Soviet Union; works with Mikhail Lifschitz

1933 How did Fascist philosophy come about in Germany?

1936 Historical Novel

1938 The Young Hegel (unpublished)

1941 June–August: arrested in Moscow

1945 Return to Hungary

1946 Appointment in Budapest University, students: Ágnes Heller, István Mészáros; Goethe and His Age; Great

Russian Realists

1947 Literature and Democracy (in Hungarian); The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy

1948 For New Hungarian Culture

1948–51 Lukács debate

1951 Destruction of Reason, published in 1954

1952 Great Russian Realists (third enlarged edition)

1956 27 October–3 November: Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy government

1956–57 November–April: deportation to Romania

1957 The Specificity of the Aesthetic

1962–71 The Ontology of Social Being

1969 Record of a Life: draft and interviews by István Eörsi and Erzsébet Vezér

1971 Death in Budapest