Horst Sturm · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

György Lukács was among the founders of Western Marxism, developing the theory of reification and shaping how a generation of critics read Karl Marx's account of class consciousness; his criticism also made the case for realism in the novel as a serious literary form. He briefly served as Hungary's minister of culture during the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. His relationship to Stalinism remains genuinely contested among historians — he both defended it as an embodiment of Marxist thought and, at other points, argued for a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism.