The young Lukács' plans for a book on Dostoyevsky were ambitious in scope. On the one hand they essay a sharply defined formal distinction between the semantic worlds and the functional modes of art, ethics, and everyday communication, only to reestablish the relation between them on the content plane in an essayistic form of writing modeled on Dostoyevsky. The present study undertakes a systematic reconstruction of this project as documented both in the large-scale unfinished works (»Theory of the Novel« and the Heidelberg aesthetic theory torso) and in a large number of minor texts and author's notes. In so doing it locates the place of the work in the intellectual context of the early 20th century.