BÉLA POMOGÁTS:
The Idea of Hungarian Autonomy in Transylvania
Autonomy of some kind has been a cherished goal
of the approx-imately two million strong Hungarian minority in Transylvania,
ever since the Peace Treaty of Trianon in 1920 annexed Transylvania to
Romania. The article, by the current President of the Hungarian Writers'
Association, a noted literary historian and critic who frequently writes
on the literature and culture of Hungarians outside this country, traces
the history of the efforts to achieve autonomy in Transylvania in the context
of Romanian politics and the wider perspectives of the region. These efforts
were and are based on the conviction--reinforced by experience--that only
an enacted autonomy can assure the preservation of their culture and national
identity for the Hungarians living in Transylvania. The three major ethnic
groups which coexisted until recently in Transylvania, the Hungarians,
(with their Szekler subgroup), the Saxons and the Romanians, all settled
there in the Middle Ages. (The Saxons, who came in the twelth
century, a 300,000 strong minority, are as good as gone by now. The Ceau
escu regime forced many to emigrate to Germany for a ransom and the majority
of those who were left availed themselves of the brief interregnum after
communist restrictions on emigration were lifted and before German restrictions
on immigration were imposed.) Tilting the demographic balance in favour
of Romanians by settlement policies has been a goal of Romanian governments.
The cultural gap between Romanians and Hungarians is quite considerable
as Hungarians are Calvinists, Catholics and Unitarians, while the majority
of Transylvanian Romanians belong to the Orthodox Church, with a minority
being of the Greek rite in union with Rome. While Romanian is a Romance
language, Hungarian belongs to the totally alien Finno-Ugric group of languages.
Also, Romanians only abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet in the nineteenth
century. The towns and cities of Transylvania, all built in the architectural
styles of the time in Western Europe, with their rich economic, cultural
and communal life, developed infrastructure, institutions of learning and
their highly structured society were all the work of Hungarians and Saxons;
Romanians only started to play a significant part in Transylvanian culture
and politics in the nineteenth century. Up to the Turkish invasion in the
sixteenth century, when the greater part of Hungary came under Turkish
rule that lasted for 150 years, Transylvania was an autonomous province
of the Kingdom of Hungary.
When the remaining part of Hungary came under Habsburg rule in the mid
sixteenth century, Transylvania started a separate life
as a sovereign state, a Protestant principality under an elected Hungarian
Prince of Transylvania. It remained sovereign even after the Turks were
pushed out of Hungary, and played a part in European politics, distinguishing
itself among the nations by its legislated religious tolerance and the
way the three nations peacefully co-existed within its borders. Later,
as a Habsburg crown land, it enjoyed the same kind of self-government in
the Empire as the Kingdom of Hungary, Bohemia or Croatia did. With the
Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867, Transylvania again became a
part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
The article surveys the history of the idea of
Hungarian autonomy in Transylvania, and the changes it underwent
with the passing of time. Even after Trianon, some Romanians in Transylvania
stood for independence because they opposed the policies of Bucharest.
After the toppling of Ceaucescu, Communist nationalism
and chauvinism gave way to open nationalism in Romanian policies in Transylvania.
Hungary became the bogyman used by various extremist politicians to rally
a frustrated and impoverished population behind the goal of building an
ethnicly homogeneous "Great Romania", and Hungarians in Transylvania
again suffered all sorts of discrimination. After a basic treaty between
the two countries, both aspiring for NATO and EU membership, was signed
under great international pressure, it is only under the new, Constantinescu
government, that the provisions of that treaty are starting to bear fruit
and a much hoped for historical reconciliation
between the two countries has appeared at the horizon, when even
Hungarian autonomy may get a better chance than ever before.
JOHN LUKACS: A Thread of Years (Excerpts)
John Lukacs is a Budapest-born American historian specializing in twentieth
century European and American history. He has also written important works
on the philosophy of history. He has more than twenty books to his credit,
among them such internationally acclaimed works as The Great Powers
and Eastern Europe; A History of the Cold War; Decline and Rise of Europe;
The Last European War, 1939-1941; Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait
of a City and Its Culture; Confessions of an Original Sinner; The Duel.
10 May--31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler;
The End of the Twentieth Century. The excerpts printed in the magazine
are from his latest book, soon to be published in the US. This is an unusual
undertaking indeed for a historian: a cross between essay and fiction,
it is a highly interesting way of personifying and thus highlighting and
thereby explaining ideas at work in history and shaping our life. Here
is how he himself explains his experiment by way of an introduction:
Readers of The Hungarian Quarterly will find here three chapters from A
Thread of Years, to be published in February 1998 by Yale University Press.
For most articles or books an Introduction is unnecessary: their contents
ought to speak for themselves. In this case, because of the unusual nature
of A Thread of Years, a short introduction cannot be avoided.
The book consists of sixty-nine chapters of a few pages. Each bears
the title of a calendar year: 1901, 1902, 1903, and so on.--The Hun garian
Quarterly has chosen the chapters 1919, 1948, 1963 for this advance publication,
because of the Hungarians who figure in them.
In this odd book each chapter consists of two parts. The first is a
description of a particular place and of particular people--their behaviour,
their talk, and the inclinations of their minds at that particular time.
Allow me to call these
"vignettes." The second part of each short chapter is a dialogue.
Then and there a second person challenges the significance of the vignette
as written by the author, his friend, since that significance is debatable:
why these people? why this place? why that time? why that scene? For not
only do these places differ; none of the people therein are the same.
This second person is my alter ego. How and why and when this dual structure
came to my mind I cannot tell. I must also eschew the main part of the
Introduction to be printed in A Thread of Years, which describes the main
theme of this book ("This book does not have a story. But it has a
theme") simply because that is not relevant to the three chapters
printed here. All I will say is that none of my vignettes deal with historic
personages or with great dramatic events. They are period pictures, even
though an underlying theme exists, alluded to here and there: the petite
musique of a grande histoire. Perhaps half-dozen of these annualized vignettes
deal with Hungarians and Hungary. (There are another half-dozen where Hungarians
do appear). The reason for this is that when I struggled with what to write,
say, for 1904 or 1919 or 1940 what came to my mind were some things about
my native people or my native country; and one ought to write about things
and people one knows best; and in these cases I had to place them within
a certain time, a particular year. The people are invented. But the historical
situation is not.
Yet A Thread of Years is neither a novel, nor a historical novel. This
calls for a brief explanation. The historical novel appeared first in the
early nineteenth century, inseparable as it was from a then developing
historical consciousness. From Walter Scott to Tolstoy and to others it
occurred that a historical background may make their novels more interesting
and perhaps even more telling. Yet that genre of the historical novel belonged
largely to the nineteenth century, it is outdated now. During the twentieth
century, then, something else has been happening: the hybrid that has the
silly name of "faction." Writers who have been trying this include
such different persons as Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Styron, Doctorow,
Vidal, Mailer, Sontag, Pynchon, even Solzhenitsyn. For them history is
no longer the background but the foreground. This is interesting, a further
subterranean development of a historical consciousness. Yet their works
are flawed--for they illegitimately and sometimes even dishonestly mix
history and "fiction" up and together. They include and twist
and deform and attribute thoughts and words and acts to historical figures
who actually existed. This is illegitimate, since it produces untruths.
I am trying to do the very opposite. Instead of attributing words and thoughts
and acts to famous persons who did exist, I am writing about everyday people
whom I invent, but whose plausibility exists because of the historical
reality about their places and times. My book may be an attempt at a new
genre. Do not take this too seriously. My attempt is imperfect; and I have
no interest in inventing startlingly new forms. At the end of this century
I am dubious about anything and anyone who claims to be avant-garde; and
as for An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Victor Hugo's hoary nineteenth-century
phrase) well, it is almost certain not to be any good. Meanwhile, historical
writing still has a long way to go. History has not yet had its Dante or
its Shakespeare. That will come one day, and my book is not that. For,
while it is not a novel, it is not history either. Yet my purpose is historical.
My pictures--the vignettes--are meant to attract the reader's interest
to certain people in certain places and in certain times: couleurs locales
that ought to be good enough to linger in his mind.
Well after completing my book the sudden thought came to me during a
visit to Hungary: a Hungarian writer, a great Hungarian writer, ought to
rise one day and begin the writing of a history of different Hungarian
minds through the twentieth century, in sixty or eighty or one hundred
vignettes, a work that would be similar to mine but the execution of which
must be different and better. So there is an idea whose time will come...
because it must.
The Hungarian Quarterly has printed three parts from John Lukacs's
new book that pertain to Hungary and its recent history. The third one,
entitled 1963, is about a group of emigré
Hungarians meeting at a resort in Austria in that year and engaged in the
kind of small talk and gossip that was a favourite pastime of the Budapest
middle class between the wars-- to which the author himself belonged.
Indian summer this is."
"Oh, no. It's not October yet."
"You're right--but for me it is Indian Summer."
Words spoken by an elegant and still handsome woman, in her late fifties,
in a language--Hungarian--where "Indian Summer" is more telling
and startling than in English: it is "Old Women's Summer", "Vénasszonyok
nyara."
"For all of us," another woman says; and around the table everyone
laughs, a little.
They sit in beautiful afternoon sunshine. Six of them: two married couples,
a widow, a single man, on the terrace of a hotel--a gravel ellipse under
summer umbrellas now gathered in, on top of a stony rampart above a lake.
The lake is the Worthersee in Austria, in the province of Carinthia, an
old and famous Central European summer resort. This is mid-September, and
half of the summer visitors and tourists are gone. On the narrow sandy
beach on both sides of the terrace there are still a handful of bathers
and swimmers. The wavelets of the lake keep lapping against the stones
with a chilly monotony. But the sun is strong enough for some of the women
to take off their cashmere cardigans and fold them or drape them on the
back of their chairs, the breeze from the lake is not strong enough to
chill them. The brightness of the air is almost supernatural: the mountains
across look closer than they actually are. The lake is dotted with the
white flecks of a dozen sailboats and there comes, momentarily, the roar
of a motorboat and a water-skier racing in its wake. On a nearby promontory
stands a very large villa, with its gardens descending in terraces lined
with laurels, roses, yews. The air is so clear that those flowers, too,
look closer than they are.
The villa is postwar, and the water-skiing is postwar, but otherwise
the scenery is much the same as it was before the war, thirty years ago,
or perhaps even earlier. This group of six people know that, and it is
one of the reasons they are here. They have been here before, though perhaps
not on the same terrace--they have come over here from another hotel, for
the pastries and iced coffee, with whipped cream for some of them. That
afternoon custom, too, is as it was before. They are survivors. One of
the couples fled from Hungary where Communism was about to be imposed,
in 1947, the other couple and the widow in 1949, the single man in 1956.
They had lived through the war, and the German occupation, and the siege
of Budapest, and the Russian conquest of Hungary. Now one couple live in
New York, the other couple in Milan, the widow in Vienna, the single gent
in Munich. All of them had known each other in Budapest, two of the women
were classmates there, and now they are old friends. At least three of
them take vacations together each year, the others come every two or three
years, having spent weeks and months beforehand writing letters and telephoning
each other about where to go and when, to a customary hotel of theirs or
to another one? All of them are between fifty-five and sixty-five. The
women are well-dressed, two of them rather smart in their imprimé
dresses and with their silk scarves and fine shoes, their hair freshly
done; the men are heavier and well-dressed too, in a somewhat old-fashioned
way, in their linen suits or in a sweater with an ascot tucked in around
their necks. A foreigner would find it difficult to classify them, even
without hearing their strangely uncategorizable language. Only the Austrians,
the hotel personnel and the older ones among the waiters know that they
are Hungarians, but not Hungarians from Hungary: Hungarian emigrés.
They look well-heeled, and so they are. Well they have survived everything,
or almost everything, except that they have their memories of the people
and the lives they lost: the widow's husband beaten by the Communist police
and dying ten years later in Vienna because of his hopelessly damaged kidneys;
the brother of one of the men killed in a death-camp in Poland (two of
the group are half-Jewish); the parents of another deported by the political
police and then permitted to return to Budapest where they now live in
two cramped rooms. But they have another set of memories, of other people
and other lives too, and so their talk is the old high talk of old fashionable
Budapest, with its inestimable knowledgeability of human matters. This
lends another dimension to the music that murmurs beneath their talk, for
each of them hears the sea of the past murmuring close, as if their left
hand held a shell out of that sea against their ears, day and night.
Must I tell you," one of the women says, "that one of the
pleasures of friendship is to talk of our own infirmities?" About
a common acquaintance: "He is so selfish, not only the way he lives;
he is always pushing others to arrange
their lives as he wishes them to live." About the divorced daughter
of another acquaintance who is pregnant again, without being married: "She
reminds me of Germany," "How?" "After expanding she
can't retain her conquests." About New York: the gentleman tells what
happened when he had collapsed; in an emergency, he was transported to
a big hospital; no one knew whether he had a stroke or a serious heart
attack; he was unconscious. "And guess what was the first thing the
nurse said when I came to." "What?" "Man, you sure
got cloudy urine."
But their conversation gathers speed and seriousness when they turn
to the handsome widow. Gossip is thickening into advice. They know that
she is being courted by another Hungarian emigre who lives in Switzerland
and who keeps inviting her to Leysin or Davos in the summer and to Menton
or the Canaries in the winter, and that a month ago he was in Vienna on
business, setting up in the Sacher, and asking her to dine with him, which
she did. They know him; he is stocky, with a gravelly voice, rich, perhaps
a bit vulgar; but he has, after all, placed himself in the very midst of
rich life, there are all those rich hotels and resorts and restaurants
where he makes sure that he is known, and there is that rich apartment
of his in Geneva. "Quite overdone, üppig", the widow says,
in German. "He showed me his collection of emeralds. Stunning, but
I think he collects them for investment, business, G'schäft",
she says, again, with a slightly contemptuous Viennese pronunciation. "Vera!"
her best friend stops her. "He talked about you to us in Milan, all
the time. He took us out to dinner, and to the Savini..." "Yes,
because you had got him a ticket to the Scala." "Stop it. He
is all Feuer und Flamme about you." Feuer und Flamme: "Fire and
Flame"--they throw a few such German phrases into their talk, not
because they find themselves in Austria, but because that was another old
Budapest custom too. Vera smiles, quite contented, but she also shrugs
her shoulder a little. They know her and love her and are convinced that
marrying that man is what she ought to do, what she must do now, on the
cusp of the autumn of her life. They know all about her, her virtues and
her missteps (if that is what they were), including the fact that for two
years she had a sad and rather hopeless love affair with a younger man
who had fled from Budapest to Vienna after the 1956 Rising; and also that
many years ago one of the married men in the group had been in love with
her, though they are sure (especially the women) that she has got no one
now (but, as the men say among themselves, walking back to the hotel, one
never knows.)
However, what they know about her, what she did do and what she will
do does not belong to this vignette. What belongs to this vignette is their
survivorship. Great chunks of their lives had been amputated, all of them
are maimed, in one way or another--but are they maimed worse than are unhappy
women or men of a corresponding class of people, say, in England or America?
More, yes; worse, no. Their wounds are deeper but they heal better. The
Muses are the daughters of Memory, but these people know how to govern
their memories; they are the orphaned children but the orphaned fathers
and mothers, too, of their memories. And they know where they are. In the
midst of Indian Summer, that is. They are like all Hungarians, congenital
pessimists; but here they sit, in the still warm September sun, having
Eiskaffee, mit Schlag on the Wörthersee, talking to each other in
1963 à la 1936. They all live a little beyond their means ("if
I could only afford to live the way I live," one of them says), which
is very Hungarian, too, and the six of them have a total of four children,
which is very bourgeois, and they know that they will not live much longer
and then rest (rest? if that is the word) in alien cemeteries; but now
their flesh and their souls are warmed by this Indian Summer; and perhaps
they know that this is not only their Indian Summer, it is the Indian Summer
of Europe, more, the Indian Summer of Western civilization, of the only
civilization that they know--and that we know.
*
I know that you know those people very well, and that you are fond of
some of them; but we are concerned with history, aren't we? I fear that
you are overdoing that Indian Summer bit. The Indian Summer of Europe--or,
at that, of Western civilization--were the years before 1914."
Of course. But this is something else: it is the Indian Summer of Indian
Summer, the sun having come out for a few years, that's all. They are in
the midst of the recovery of their lives, including some of their comforts
and standards. That of course can happen anywhere, any time. But they are
also in the midst of the recovery of Western Europe after the war, as a
matter of fact, near its ephemeral peak. Incidentally, they know that.
On that particular afternoon they do not talk much about politics, but
they all agree--wrongly--that the United Europe is coming; as one of the
men says, "that can no longer be reversed", and of course they
are all in favour of a Union of Europe. It did not happen that way, and
perhaps it will never happen, but that is something we know in 1993 when,
I fear, most of them will be dead. However, there is one thing I want to
say. Having been cosmopolitan Hungarians, the desire and love for Europeanness
was bred into them. And, unlike some Western Europeans, they are very pro-American
too. Because of many reasons: America the leader, the hope of the free
world, etc., etc. They understand little about American politics and American
tendencies--including the couple who live in New York. Perhaps they like
America for the wrong reasons. But they know that this recovery of Europe
after the war, this restoration, was largely due to American generosity
and to the American example.
"Very nice; but that prosperity includes things that they do not
and cannot like very much. All those crowds of tourists. The rise of the
proletariat. Giving credit to the masses--that was the American achievement.
After the war the Europeans have thought it best to emulate it: the welfare
state, instalment buying, and soon the credit cards. The lower classes
first merging into and then submerging of what were the middle classes
once. All polls and popularity contents and television. Well, it is usually
you, not I, who keeps worrying about where this will lead, where it has
already led, whether it has been any good."
Let's not think about the results. What I was trying to suggest was
that there was this little Indian Summer after the big Indian Summer, in
Western Europe for about ten years, say 1958 to 1968; and that these people,
not Western Europeans by birth but refugees and survivors, knew it perhaps
better than any other people. And they are blessed thus, but perhaps they
do not know that.
"Spare me your apocalyptics, and tell me just one more thing. What
happened to Vera, and to Fire and Flame"? Reader, she did not marry
him.
"It's 'Reader, I married him.' " You have your Jane Eyre wrong.
Well, she did not marry him, but not because he wouldn't know Jane Eyre,
or Strindberg from Schnitzler. He was not civilized enough.
"But I feel, and perhaps you suggest, that she had slept with him
once, perhaps in Vienna, or how would she know about his apartment in Geneva?"
I am afraid that this must have been so, and I will admit that this would
not have been taken so lightly either by her or by her kind of people fifty
years before, which is why I insist that this was an Indian Summer after
the real Indian Summer...
"There is, however, one good thing to say for this century, and you
know what it is. In 1963 this woman, in her late fifties, is attractive,
indeed, she is still sexually desirable. Wouldn't have happened in 1893."
Good point, but doesn't belong here.
Poets of the Younger Generation
The internationally known great names of contemporary Hungarian poetry:
Sándor Weöres, János Pilinszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy,
Gyula Illyés, László Nagy, István Vas, are
all gone, and a next wave of important poets, in ripe middle age, like
Ottó Orbán, Dezs Tandori, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, György Petri,
Zsuzsa Takács, Imre Oravecz, István Csukás, is now
taking their place. Meanwhile, a younger generation of very different voice,
outlook and techniques has become highly visible in recent years. As one
of them, András Petõcz, explains in an introductory
essay to his selection of poems by members of his generation, their roots
go back to the early eighties, the last phase of the Kádár
regime, to forbidden underground happenings, performances and clandestine
readings at various university clubs and private flats, to samizdat publications,
and the free experimentation they engaged in as they were seeking new ways
to express their restlessness and dissatisfaction with the restricted conditions
of literary life, their distrust in old values, their new attitude to language
and form, their craving for freedom. Here are three poems from the
selection in the journal by younger poets, all translated by the American
poet Jascha Kessler.
Miklós Erdély: A Time-Moebius
Idõ-Mõbiusz
- What is to be and can re-act, is.
- What reacts on itself, knows itself as its cause.
- He who returns to act as his own cause, makes himself.
- He who acts as cause of his own cause makes himself as he already is.
- He nevertheless could not have made himself as he already is had he
not
already made himself as he is, although he'd made himself as he is by himself
as he had already become.
- What is afterwards reaches back to before to become afterwards.
- So it makes itself as it is by what it is.
- Therefore to be free to be free is to be free in time.
- If you live believing you can reach back to every instant of your life,
you live
saved by yourself.
- One is thus subjected to one who knows one best: oneself.
- Fear thyself.
- What is to be, already is.
András Petõcz: In Praise of the Sea
A tenger dícsérete
At the edge you stop,
like that, easily,
though in your head
you let the pen run on,
tracing its airy arcs,
its peaceful, lighthearted
jogging run over
the undulating endless
smooth white blank
page of paper,
you let it run as though
running over the sea,
your feet touching
the tops of the waves,
treading their troughs,
arcing over their crests,
the pen, your pen it is,
half-dreaming, half-falling,
and yet still:
almost awake.
At the edge you stop,
infinite waters before you
infinite watery surface,
and you glance at it,
contemplating the waves,
their life rising, falling,
resurging, panting, dashing up,
and crashing down again,
and up above! the gulls
screeching in the air,
albatrosses, and
all those other birds
flying and floating by
as you gaze at them,
envying their easy flow
over their own pages;
and watch your pen
run on, on yours,
your laughter as they
run, racing up
from out of nothing,
your words, the waters,
their deepest deeps,
the repeating rhythms
perhaps, of the waves
falling again, and new again,
the crashing tops of the waves,
and the longing,
the longing to utter
at last, to be able at last
to utter, to tear out of yourself
out of yourself
rend from yourself that
What is this? Infinite waters...
and a still sea.
The light voice!
The sea cannot be uttered,
whether heavily, or
lightly, the prankish
pen runs nowhere.
But the birds! They know
why they are wheeling
overhead, and they know
who called them here,
and who it is
will gently see
to them when their
loveliness is gone.
László Villányi: The Four
Seasons
Négy évszak
Up and down the bank he walks, the old man. Flexes one arm oddly, holding
it away from his side. (It's here that someone took it from him forty years
ago.)
Walks down the river. Looks out, surprised, as though something were coming
on the the current. (She would come wearing gray in springtime, red in
summer,
violet in fall.)
In wintertime takes his cap off, raises it before him tilting his head
to one side, sets it just so there. It drops from his fingers to the snow.
(He'd lend her his cap in the cold because her head was always bare.)
Wades into the water in all four seasons. Sits. Grins. Spreads one arm,
then both. Turns about. Kneels. Stretches his legs out. (They would bathe
together. She would soap him.)
Back on shore, he makes odd movements with both arms, bends over, takes
two steps forward. (She would slip into his robe that way in his room.
The zipper was jammed.)
SÁNDOR KÁNYÁDI:
Metaphors Coming Apart at the Seams
Sándor Kányádi is a Transylvanian poet and translator
who lives in Kolozsvár (Cluj in Romanian). Of all European Communist
countries, dictatorship was harshest in Romania. Poets had to sing the
praises of "the Heroic Son of the Carpathians", "the Great
Conducator": President Nicolae Ceau escu, or, if allowed to publish
at all, had to make sure that close scrutiny by censors should not find
any trace of dissent or hidden political meaning in their work. Hungarians
were in an extra tight situation to boot as the Ceau escu system handled
them with utmost suspicion in the first place, and was at work to destroy
their past and culture in its efforts to produce a homogeneous, submissive
Romanian population. Under such conditions, Kányádi writes,
it fell to writing, especially the writing of poetry, to carry every burden,
national and social; when, especially for national minorities here in Eastern
Central Europe, poetry--to coin a biological metaphor--was the only possible
metabolism in our intellectual life. We had to metaphorize everything,
or the reader did it for us, forever reading between the lines, searching
for the hidden meaning. And as the Holy Writ says, Seek and ye shall find.
Looking back, many laughable examples and laughable cases come to mind.
The empathy of readers, this capacity to project themselves onto what they
were reading, not only increas ed the strength and power of the written
word, but made legends of certain writers, whose every manifestation was
followed with close attention, whose every word was devoutly passed on.
If a certain Someone, generally mentioned by first name only, happened
to say in the dead of winter that spring would be here soon, word would
get about that winter was coming to an end, it would soon be spring--and
it was not just any person who had said so. And this would be emphasized
by a wink.
For thirty years I worked for a children's paper, and--as I put it--seasons
came and went more often in my writing than in real life. What else was
there to write about, if one wanted to do honest work? Consequently, I
had my proper share of the aforementioned glory. For example:
Sometime in the beginning of the seventies, I was giving a talk in a
village school in the backwoods of Transylvania. During a programme improvised
on the spur of the moment in my honour, the children chosen to recite poetry
were so awed by the occasion that they kept drying up. So, to restore their
self-confidence, we recited a well-known Petõfi poem together,
one that I was sure everybody knew by heart, the adults too, anyone who
had at least two or three years of schooling. Then, to prove how clever
they were, I made a bet with them, wagering that they would be able to
learn a poem they had never heard or read before if we said it aloud, all
of us together, three times. To their great delight, after the second choral
recitation they did not need my help to chant:
Wood, field and meadow
all covered deep in snow.
Everything's white all around,
just like grandmother's bun.
Everything's white all around,
just like grandfather's whiskers.
All around, everything's white
except for the blackbird's feathers.
I won my wager. We had got to the liver paste sandwiches--the staple
diet at the time, as liver paste was the cheapest tinned food available,
and my hosts were most often teachers and librarians whose modest salaries
did not run to much else; some days I visited three or four villages, generally
schools, community and cultural centres--as I say, we had got to the liver
paste sandwiches, when the young teacher of Hungarian literature said in
a soft, conspiratorial tone:
"The blackbird stayed black, and shall stay that way!"
I did not understand at once what he meant by this and started to explain
that yes, the poem was like a child's drawing--later on this became the
title--a white page with a blackbird drawn in black. "We understood
what you meant: come hell or highwater, the blackbird will stay black!"
he said, and gave an encouraging wink to indicate there was nothing new
that I could teach him. What could I have said to a poor teacher of Hungarian--I
didn't want to upset his beliefs. But the following day, when the chief
librarian of the children's library in a large city, an old university
colleague of mine at that, winked at my blackbird, saying what he liked
most about my poems was that one could always find oneself in them, no
matter if one was present in the form of a blackbird, the main thing was
that one was there--I just had to laugh. It was no good my trying to make
a joke of my blackbird, to laugh the matter off. He laughed at me and told
me say what you like, we know the poem is about us. In the end I too began
to believe there was something of a blackbird in all of us, but didn't
take it seriously enough to be able to refrain from relating the incident
as a funny story some months later in a company of Hungarians from Yugoslavia.
We would have got a good laugh out of it if a learned gentleman, a former
minister for national minorities under President Tito, did not curb our
laughter, saying, in deadly seriousness: they were quite justified in perceiving
the blackbird as a symbol, you yourself, if subconsciously, must have meant
it as such. After that, all further explanation would have been quite useless.
I had to resign myself once and for all to the fact that grass, tree, flower,
animal, bush, winter, spring, summer, autumn, in other words every season,
every living thing, plant, animal, bird becomes a symbol in a poem. Such
was the situation--the poetical situation at the time. As absurdly funny
as it was sad.
In this charming and witty piece the poet tells about situations in
which he had to experience in funny and not so funny ways the changing
role of the poet in society. Nowadays, with freedom,
the interest in poetry has waned, he observes.
Women in the Nineties
A major subject presented in this issue is the role of women in the
transitional Hungarian society of the present. Among the three articles
approaching this vast subject from different angles, SMALL-TOWN WOMEN,
by Monika Mária Váradi and Katalin Kovács, stands
out. It is based on a survey done within the framework of a cooperative
effort to explore the situation of women in Eastern Europe. The Wenner
Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, and the Open Society
Institute of the Soros Foundation provided financial assistance for the
project. The full results of the research will be published soon in the
US.
In SMALL-TOWN WOMEN the authors report on the lives and views of the
70 women they interviewed in a Hungarian town to which they gave the fictitious
name "Karikás". 10 of the women were unskilled workers
in the local factory, 7 were doing clerical work, 13 were businesswomen,
12 schoolteachers, 4 managers, 6 laboured in agriculture, 8 were civil
servants (white-collar workers). 10 belonged to the local elite, either
in their own right or through their husbands--businesswomen, managers,
local politicians and managers' wives. Here are a
few answers by women working in agriculture to questions relating to
politics: In Socialist times, party membership was a matter of course for
the middle cadres of factories, and a sine qua non for advancement. Three
of the women spoke cogently about this. They said that at the time they
felt "honoured" when they were asked to join, and have fond memories
of the atmosphere at the compulsory party seminars. "There was the
shift overseer, the team foreman, and the workers. So in this small family
in which you were working, you were together, and you could talk to them."
Yet after 1989, none of these women joined any of the organizations that
grew out of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party; nor did those working
class women who had not felt particularly "honoured" when, under
pressure by their team leader, they joined the Party along with all the
others working in their shift. "Some came from very religious families,
and said, 'I'm sorry Magdika, but I'm not joining, my family will disown
me.' At which [the group leader] said, 'Look, Marika, we're not telling
a soul, just join.' The poor thing, she even cried. She [the group leader]
was determined to get rid of anyone in her shift who didn't join. And in
the end she was awarded the Hero of So cialist Labour title, because she
showed how she could turn every soul under her wing into a partisan. I
was so angry at Party meetings--hardly aware where I was. And we were young,
we had better things to do, the sun was shining, but there we were, for
an hour and a half or thereabouts, because we had to be there, there were
lots of other things to attend to, and so we said, for goodness' sakes,
why must I waste an hour and a half on this ridiculous nonsense."
The lack of political interest among the manual labourers and white-collar
workers stems from two factors. Neither political activity nor strong religious
beliefs could be said to have characterized the poor rural peasants' and
town-dwelling manual la bour ers' background from which these women came.
At the same time, white-collar workers are not targeted by party rhetoric
of whatever colouring, and there is no party on the Hungarian political
scene which the workers think of as a working man's party. "Well,
I was expecting that it wouldn't be any worse for us. But then came democracy.
You know... And then came this Socialist Party, I was waiting for it to
happen, the long and short of it is, I voted for them. I thought maybe
they'd want what we had before. But why is it grinding people into the
shit? But the worst of it is... not those on top, it's always those already
down who go further down, on and on."
With the change in regime, these people, coming from a poor peasant
and working class background, lost their security. Com pared to the poverty
they had known in childhood, late-Kádár Socialism was a boom;
they felt a sense of security, that "it was worth all the work",
and that "if you work hard enough, you will go up in the world."
"Basically, we're not working any more than we did before, in the
factory. Before, it was much more difficult, because there was more physical
work... but you did it... till you dropped, you'd have done the work for
the whole plant alone, because it was worth it... We weren't tired emotionally,
just physically... We worked, and joked, and sweated, but with good cheer."
Things have drastically changed. For most working families, the main
problem is survival. They are afraid that they will be reduced to the level
of their parents 40 or 50 years ago. The fact that these insecure and frightened
labourers and white-collar workers now have a small share-holding in their
own workplace, has done nothing to alleviate their fears. Instead of feeling
that the factory is theirs, the opposite is the case; they feel they have
less to do with it than ever, because not only the majority of the shares,
but all the essential information, too, remains in the hands of the management.
They say that the divide between them and the management is growing by
leaps and bounds.
For the manual labourers and white-collar workers, post-1989 society
suffered from a great divide not only in a financial sense, with a small
number of the newly rich and a large number of those who are growing poorer;
they also feel that within the new order of things, work counts for nought,
nor does it guarantee even the humblest of living standards. "When
I look around," one woman said, "I feel sad, because I never
learned how to do anything else but work. That's how I grew up, it's what
I know. I thought I could earn a living that way. And now all I hear is
you've got to go into business. But I'm not cut out for that. Even if I
had any capital, I'm not one of your clever schemers. I'm not enterprising
enough to start something. What I wanted, what I still want, basically,
is to make a living doing a job of work. Some people are born for that.
Not everybody's good at business, but this system, it humiliates the worker."
This is how two top white-collar working women described
their time of motherhood.
Top white-collar working women divorced for different reasons, and in every
case, it was they who started proceedings. Every one of these women married
out of love. They wanted to be good wives and good mothers, and to have
a career at the same time. They could not go on living with their husbands
as they prevented them from pursuing their own careers, or were not "partners"
in their lives, by which they meant that the husbands should help with
small children and support their wives in their professional ambitions.
On the other hand, these women did not tolerate their husbands' pastimes,
the drinking bouts with friends after soccer games, the card games that
stretched into the early hours, instances where the husband "took
out the garbage in the afternoon and didn't come back till eleven at night,
because he went drinking with the boys"--a situation which was tolerated
least of all when the women felt bound hand and foot, especially if this
occurred because of the husband's wishes, or because they were rearing
small children.
"When I was married," one woman explained, "my husband
wouldn't allow anybody near me, regardless of whether this was a man, a
woman, or one of our friends. He only cared about goulash and white shirts.
My whole life revolved around making tasty variations of goulash, and baby
food for the children. In the end I was so angry and tired, I couldn't
eat." Another woman told us, "When my little girl was born, I
said, well, I ended up bringing another servant into the world! Because
if you're a wife, you are promoted to a hotel maid. 'Clean clothes, warm
cunt,' that's what they say that men want."
Both of the women just quoted had small children when they were divorced.
Though they were not willing to be the servant of their husbands, they
didn't mind taking care of their children, and in this they were supported
by their parents. Of the four children they had between them (two children
each), three were graduates, and the fourth travelled the world, a photographer,
a real lad "taking after his mother". When they were young, both
women were the apples of their fathers' eye, and both their mothers were
housewives. These fathers gave their daughters a sense of direction, and
it is also thanks to them that both these women have an admirable amount
of self-confidence. Their mothers continued what they had always done:
to give their all in the service of their families--and by now, the families
of their daughters as well. Well over seventy, they continue to do so to
this day.
