“Source: The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. by Georg Lukács, translated from the German by Anna Bostock, published by Merlin Press. THE FIRST draft of this study was written in the summer of 1914 and the final version in the winter of 1914-15. It first appeared in Max Dessoir’s Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916 and was published in book form by P. Cassirer, Berlin, in 1920.”
“When I tried at this time to put my emotional attitude into conscious terms, I arrived at more or less the following formulation: the Central Powers would probably defeat Russia; this might lead to the downfall of Tsarism; I had no objection to that. There was also some probability that the West would defeat Germany; if this led to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, I was once again in favour. But then the question arose: who was to save us from Western civilisation? (The prospect of final victory by the Germany of that time was to me nightmarish.)”
“Nevertheless we have here an unambiguous formulation of the new function of time in the novel, based on the Bergsonian concept of ‘durée’. This is the more striking as Proust did not become known in Germany until after 1920, Joyce’s Ulysses not until 1922, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was not published until 1924.”