Olga Tokarczuk’s New Rules for Realism

In his 1956 study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács distinguished between two literary traditions. Comparing the works of Thomas Mann, whom he considers a realist writer, with the works of Franz Kafka, whom he positions as a modernist, Lukács argued that Mann presents a view of individuals as social and political beings who are firmly rooted in an identifiable time and place. Kafka’s parables, by contrast, for Lukács, are stories of alienated individuals who are meaninglessly “thrown into the world” and they are consequently static and ahistorical.