[..]

This group of young writers provoked an intellectual landslide and brought a never-before-seen effervescence to a predominantly conservative and stagnant society. The intellectuals of my generation lapped up their words and learnt to see the Hungarian world through their eyes. We were proud and conscious of our freely undertaken social responsibility. We were Hungarians but totally devoid of any national or racial prejudice. Yet we were biased: we had love in our hearts for all the oppressed. We were familiar with the causes and processes of social ills. We looked ahead and never longed for things past.

Yet all things considered, I would label Zoltán Szabó neither a village explorer nor a peasant writer, despite the fact that his two outstanding works greatly boosted the political success of both groups. Zoltán Szabó is neither a village explorer nor a peasant writer. Or he might be both, but on a far higher level: Zoltán Szabó is an explorer of reality, the totality of Hungarian reality. He strives to use his knowledge to grasp the essence of reality in all his works, whatever their subject matter.

[..]

The vital experience that also shaped his life was a bursary he received from the French government. Thus he personally witnessed the fall of France in 1940, which he recorded on paper. He included it in his newspaper column and later published it separately under the title of Collapse (Összeomlás, 1940). What he saw induced him to insert the phenomenon of collapse into his vision of Europe and France, and to project it onto his vision of his own country, too. Once this experience had settled in his mind, he lived through another collapse, one which had a far more profound and painful effect on him, for it meant the end of Hungarian statehood in 1944. He summed this up in an article, "Without Lies", which appeared in the first issue (1945) of the revived journal Valóság. "The reality is this: the war has trampled over Hungary, liberating the land from the Germans, and set free the democratic forces that still existed here, so that the nation might begin to build a new life in new circumstances. There is nothing surprising in the fact that those who talk of liberation and those who listen feel more the trampling. […] Any catastrophe will bring personal experience to the fore. This is even more so in a country where preventing this catastrophe never became a public matter but remained a private affair; a country where there was no ‘mass opposition’, and resistance barely transcended the boundaries of a simple defection from an evil cause; a country where almost everybody escaped the catastrophe either as a private individual, a civilian fugitive or an army deserter. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the average Hungarian, whose private life and livelihood was devastated by the war, has one and only one first wish, namely to sort himself out. To tend to what is his own. All public matters are judged insofar as how they affect or hinder this. This is why for many people the idea of public affairs and the idea of indifference are so strangely alike ."

[..]

A short quotation provides a counter-point to the piece I have quoted from 1945: "One of the lessons to be learnt from what has happened is that we were wrong in the opinions that we felt obliged to voice in order to avoid the pitfalls of self-deceit and self-praise. […] We were wrong when we thought, on the basis of our experience in ‘44 and ‘49, that the people of Budapest were mostly informers. […] We were wrong when we thought that Hungarians’ conduct in general was best characterized as: ‘When I see the masses appear, I try neither to see nor to hear’. […] At the same time, it must be said that empty commonplaces of the chivalrous and ‘brave’ and generally ‘self-sacrificing’ Hungarian nation were not completely unfounded; these were now corroborated in Ferencváros, Angyalföld and along Rákóczi út too. It is only fit to mention, though, that these noble virtues were mostly expressed by the proletariat and, to some extent, the petty bourgeoisie also showed some inclination; honour is as contagious as villainy. The view, voiced even by some Hungarians, that our people are, alas, not inclined to democracy has been totally refuted. […] While we should be wary of idolizing our people, we must not fail to recognize the facts. The fact, for example, that at that instance Hungarians did more to give meaning to the word Europe, at least in their own country, than all the other European peoples as well as the Council of Europe and the Movement of Europe put together."

And another quote, a short passage from a 1977 lecture, "1956: Revolution, History, Reality", faithfully characterizes both 1956 and Zoltán Szabó: "The revolution of ’56 in Hungary was undoubtedly ‘national’, meaning ‘nation-wide’, and in a double sense. On the one hand, it was nation-wide because its actions, extra-parliamentary small parliaments or spontaneously created councils covered the territory of the whole country this side of the borders; on the other hand, it was nation-wide in a restrictive sense too—it went beyond the frontiers of the country in none of its efforts and none of the demands it made. It lacked messianism, the type of messianism that strives to set an example as it transcends the boundaries of a country and steps upon the world stage. Thus it had no nationalistic component. […] The 1956 Revolution in Hungary was not an expression of the national character. It was the Hungarian nation itself that the revolution had forged."

[..]