Béla K. Király

Lee Congdon

Károly Nagy

This comprehensive history follows the trajectory of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, including essays from a range of noted scholars and historians and reactions from leading non-Hungarian intellectuals of the time, such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. An appendix reprints the texts of crucial primary sources.

1956: the Hungarian Revolution and War for Independence

Based upon recently found manuscripts and correspondence, The Young Lukacs is the first comprehensive and fully researched portrait of Georg Lukacs to appear in any language. Lee Congdon finds in the young Lukacs's estrangement from his family and from Hungarian society roots for his continuing concern with the philosophic problem of alienation. The chance discovery in 1972 of Lukacs's early manuscripts and correspondence has made possible an authoritative intellectual biography of this major Marxist thinker. Congdon has mined the wealth of material in the Lukacs Archives in Budapest and drawn upon Hungarian scholarship that is all but unknown in the West. The result is a biography that reveals the relationship between the ideas Lukacs entertained, the world in which he lived, and the conditions of his personal existence. Congdon argues that Lukacs's understanding of Simmel, Dostoevski, and Hegel was profoundly affected by the world of fin de siecle Europe, the Great War, and the Russian Revolution. The evolution of Lukacs's own ideas, Congdon finds, was an expression of his relationships with three women -- Irma Siedler, Ljena Grabenko, and Gertrud Bortstieber. No one, writing in any language, has previously examined Lukacs's life and work in this context. Although Congdon acknowledges some sympathy for the young Lukacs and his enthusiasms, he shows that the brilliant and sensitive thinker, in the words of Dostoevski, "started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and . . . arrived at unrestricted despotism." The tragedy of Lukacs, he concludes, was that he hated injustice more than he loved human beings. Originally published in 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Young Lukacs

In this examination of Solzhenitsyn and his work, Lee Congdon explores the consequences of the atheistic socialism that drove the Russian revolutionary movement. Beginning with a description of the post-revolutionary Russia into which Solzhenitsyn was born, Congdon addresses the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the origins of the concentration camp system, the Bolsheviks' war on Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, Solzhenitsyn's arrest near the war's end, his time in the labor camps, his struggle with cancer, his exile and increasing alienation from the Western way of life, and his return home. He concludes with a reminder of Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West—that it was on a path parallel to that which Russia had followed into the abyss.

The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West

Solzhenitsyn

Embroiled in the political events surrounding World War I and the failed Hungarian revolutions of 1918-19, a number of intellectuals fled Hungary for Germany and Austria, where they essentially created Weimar culture. Among them were Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness recast Marxism and challenged even those who repudiated its politics; Bela Balázs, who pioneered film theory and collaborated with film-makers G. W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, and Alexander Korda; László Moholy-Nagy, who codirected the Bauhaus during its heyday in the mid-1920s; and Karl Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia was the most widely discussed work of noncommunist social theory during the Weimar years. In this collective portrait combining intellectual history with biographical detail, Lee Congdon describes how Hungarian thinkers, each in a different way, passionately advocated the need for community in a Europe torn by war and revolution. Whether communist, avant-gardist, or Catholic convert, each thinker is examined within the vast tapestry of his works, his cultural and intellectual milieu, and his experience as an exile. Despite the ideological differences of these men, Congdon reveals how their personal destinies and social goals often merged. Since many were assimilated Jews, he argues that their thinking on society was inextricably intertwined with their youthful sensitivity to anti-Semitism in Hungary and with the isolating limitations of their lives in Germany and Austria. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1933

Exile and Social Thought

This book details the lives and careers of four sports-writing greats—Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Shirley Povich, and W. C. Heinz—and the legendary athletes and events they covered for decades. These men all wrote during what is often considered sport’s Golden Age, lifting sports reporting to heights that it is unlikely to reach again.

Lee Congdon

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