Béla Pomogáts

Spokesman for the "Literary Nation"

The name of the Hungarian literary historian Lóránt Czigány, who has lived in London since 1956, is well known in intellectual circles in Hungary and even better known to the Hungarian literary and artistic diaspora in the West. He is one of those émigré writers and scholars who early recognized that they may have their own particular tasks in nurturing the culture of the nation, and that in performing these they should engage in dialogue with representatives of the cultural life in Hungary. This was a recognition shared by others as well - the better part of the young intellectuals who, after the repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, left for the West where they have shaped their life and work in the service of this idea.

As a young student at the University of Szeged Czigány participated in the revolutionary events as a member of the National Guard. After the Soviet intervention he fled to England, where he studied at Oxford and London. He worked in the British Museum Library, where he was responsible for Hungarian books and built up a high standard collection. He was a guest professor in the United States in Berkeley; he worked for the BBC World Service, Hungarian Section and contributed to The Times; for a short time, during the term of the first post-1989 democratic government, he served as a diplomat at the Hungarian Embassy in London.

As a literary historian he has focussed on the reception of Hungarian literature in Britain over the ages and on Hungarian émigré literature. He has published extensively on Hungarian literature, both classic and modern; the majority of his essays are still only found in the pages of Hungarian language journals published in the West. His major work was The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature: From the earliest times to the present, published in 1984, a long-awaited, large-scale synthesis in English of eight centuries of Hungarian literary output. In 1990 he published, in Budapest, a volume of essays, entitled Nézz vissza haraggal! (Look Back in Anger), on the vulnerability and struggles of a literature that was “nationalized” and placed in the custody of the party-state; here he gives an account both of timeservers and fine examples of moral integrity. His volume Gyökértelen, mint a zászló nyele (Rootless as a Flagstaff), a selection of his essays and shorter articles on Hungarian literary life and its best men of letters in exile in the West, appeared in 1994.

Some of his writings portray those masters of Hungarian literature in the West who have now received their due recognition in Hungary - such as the novelist Sándor Márai, the essayists László Cs. Szabó and Zoltán Szabó, and the poet György Faludy. He offers a sensitive picture, also a self-examination, as it were, both personal and as a member of a generation, of the late István Siklós, whose work as poet and essayist is part and parcel of modern Hungarian literature and who was also instrumental in organizing British contacts for Hungarian literature during his long years at the BBC World Service, as contributor to and then as head of, the Hungarian Section. He also surveys the important centres of Hungarian intellectual life in the West and of HungarianHungarian dialogue, giving an almost chronological account of the Szepsi Csombor Circle in London, the Kelemen Mikes Circle in the Netherlands, and the Hungarian as a Native Language Conference staged annually in Hungary.

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Béla Pomogáts

is a literary historian and critic. He has published extensively on Hungarian writing outside the country’s borders. He is President of the Hungarian Writers’ Federation.