Lukács’ commitment to a conception of the work of art as a closed totality, structured by the strict laws of its medium and objectively reflecting the development of humanity in the mode of mimetic evocation, has considerable implications for his own judgments as an aesthetic theorist. His writings on literary realism that he published from the 1930s to the 1950s—especially “Realism in the Balance” (1938), The Historical Novel (1955), and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1955)—display to various degrees a mixture of philosophical insight and Stalinist orthodoxy. In any case, they are animated by strong commitment to the superiority of realism, as exemplified by Balzac, Tolstoy, Gorky (see GW 5) and Thomas Mann (see 1949), that he contrasts to the “decadent” avant-garde literature of his times. This position of his drew sharp criticism, for example from Seghers, Brecht and Adorno (see Lukács 1981; Brecht 1977; Adorno 1972; for the Lukács-Brecht debate see Pike 1985).