Mary Gluck introduces us to a LukAcs we have never met. Here is LukAcs among his friends, lovers, and peers in those important years before 1918, when he converted to Communism and Marxism at the age of thirty-nine.

Georg LukAcs claimed in later life that his early achievements lacked genuine coherence, being expressions of a vague "romantic anticapitalism" that only found resolution in his conversion to Marxism. By integrating LukAcs with his early generational grouping and making expert use of a new treasure trove of documents from his early years, Gluck demonstrates that...

A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist--alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flAneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive--created...

Famed for its cosmopolitan culture and vibrant nightlife, Budapest owed much to its Jewish population. Indeed, it was Jews who helped shape the city's complex urban modernity between 1867 and 1914. Yet these contributions were often unacknowledged, leading to a metaphoric, if not literal, invisible status for many of Budapest's Jews.

In the years since, particularly between the wars,...