György Lukács was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, he spent his youth in Berlin and Vienna studying German philosophy. As a Marxist revolutionary, he was involved in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). After writing Theory of the Novel (1920), a noted essay inspired by the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Lukács published History and Class Consciousness (1923), which countered the deterministic Marxism that was typical of the Second International with a neo-Hegelian view of the proletarian revolution.