Written in 1955-1956 during the first uncertain "thaw" after Stalin's death, this book marked a considerable departure from Lukacs' rigid posture of the immediate postwar years, when he denounced practically all important Western writers as reactionary warmongers. It is fairly detached in manner and at times almost mellow. Lukacs makes a somewhat grudging attempt to make sense of Kafka, and he backs up his criticism of modern music and Schoenberg with a quote from the Western "modernist" Adorno. (1963)