The very title of this fascinating book points to a fundamental difference between the position that writers occupy, or are believed to occupy, in East European, as opposed to Western societies. Who in the West would want to write a major monograph on relations between writers and those in power? It is understood, especially in the United States, that writers are free to criticize everybody and everything to their hearts' delight, but that they should wield little, if any, political clout. Their primary role is to entertain, not to influence decision-making in a democratic state. Not so in Eastern Europe where writers are expected to represent the conscience of the nation. When tyrannies, whether domestic or imposed by a foreign power, create an unbridgeable gulf between the governors and the governed, it is the duty of writers, poets, and other creative intellectuals to uphold national values, even at the risk of their lives. The bard who sings his defiance of arbitrary authority and who is killed for his efforts is a recurrent theme in East European patriotic literature. National revolutions are often seen as the direct consequence of the bard's self-sacrifice. In brief, literature in this region has often served as a surrogate for politics, and writers and poets have often substituted for politicians, who were seen as corrupt, tyrannical, or in foreign pay.

But there is also an opposite figure, especially in twentieth century literary works: the bard who bows to tyranny for money, privileges, or to protect his life. Éva Standeisky explains very well that writers in mid-century Hungary played both roles, sometimes simultaneously, and that to see them as knights in shining armour would be as wrong as to treat them like the rogues many of them often appear to be. Moreover, Standeisky makes it clear that while Hungarian writers exercized real political influence before the events of 1956, this influence began to wane almost immediately after the Revolution when their earlier sharp criticism of the Communist regime was gradually replaced by compromise and submission. The author does not state it in so many words, but we know that what is finally diminishing the political importance of writers in Hungary or elsewhere in Eastern Europe is post-Communist democracy which treats writers no better and no worse than they are treated in the West.

To be more precise, as Standeisky explains, during the three years preceding the revolution of 1956, Communist writers in Hungary played a crucial role in uncovering the crimes and shame of the Stalinist Communist regime; this often included their own crimes and shame. Fatefully, however, the spiritual upheaval writers created in making reformist demands soon burst from the confines of the writers' clubs and literary journals. A mass political movement emerged that wished not to reform but to end Soviet rule and with it perhaps state socialism. These rapid developments made writers both enthusiastic and uneasy; during the revolutionary days, they ran after the events more than they led them.

Carried away by the excitement of the Revolution and their own popularity, writers made radical statements; after the suppression of the Revolution this led to retribution. Interestingly, however, retribution affected only a minority of writers; the vast majority escaped punishment for having written the same type of poems, manifestoes, and editorials that had sent others to prison.

[...]

Déry's statement brings us to a dilemma that Standeisky tends to shy away from: scores of writers under the Rákosi-Révai regime were of Jewish origin, as were, of course, many among Hungary's political leaders at that time. The fact that both Jewish writers and Jewish politicians had Hungarian names; that they behaved like any other Hungarian, and that they never, ever openly admitted their Jewish origin in public, makes the problem all the more interesting. Déry's statement could be and probably was interpreted as meaning that he, a Communist, survived thanks to the timely arrival of the Red Army. In reality, he was haunted by his Jewish descent, and that by being a Jew he had come so close to death under Nazi rule.

Very occasionally, Standeisky quotes Déry and other writers making oblique and mostly private allusions to their Jewish origin, but she does not attempt to investigate how this influenced their behaviour, or that of their non-Jewish fellow-writers, or that of the Party leadership toward them. Yet it must have been a crucial factor. Not without reason did the interwar and the immediate postwar Communist Party harbour such a disproportionate number of Jewish intellectuals. Déry and colleagues survived the Holocaust because they lived in Budapest from where Jews were not deported to Auschwitz; or because they were lucky, or because they had non-Jewish friends. Still, the loss of family members and friends as well as the fact that they had been rejected by Hungarian society must have left a very deep mark on them.

These writers were no Zionists and even their professed Communist internationalism did not exclude their Hungarian patriotism. Like all other Hungarian Jewish Communists, whether in 1919 or after 1945, they not only felt Hungarian, they tended to see themselves as among the better Hungarians. Still, their life since at least 1944 was ridden with fear. Standeisky quotes Zoltán Zelk, another famous reformist Communist writer and poet who, initially during the 1956 Revolution, did not dare attend demonstrations because, as a Jew, he feared that he would be torn to pieces. All the greater his joy that, when he finally appeared in the street, he was hoisted on the shoulders of demonstrators. In brief, not to discuss the Jewishness of so many writers means not to discuss an issue that decisively influenced the writers' lives.

The first criticism of the regime's shortcomings appeared in 1953 after the Soviets had caused Imre Nagy to become prime minister and after he had begun a more liberal political course. The first cautious signs of yearning for free speech became a flood in the next few years; this, despite the removal of Imre Nagy from his post in 1955 and Party Secretary Rákosi's last-ditch stand against the writers. No doubt, many writers behaved very bravely at that time; they risked the loss of their income, even imprisonment.

Instead of new oppression, however, there came massive demonstrations, on October 23, 1956. Reform Communist intellectuals participated actively in these events; the non-Communists were more cautious. Many described these as "delirious days": the formerly dogmatic and now enthusiastically reformist Writers' Association met repeatedly, issuing manifestoes and watching over the moral purity of the Revolution. In general, the writers were ahead of Imre Nagy and fellow reformist Communist politicians in demanding democratic changes. Still, overall, the writers now played a secondary role. Real power lay in the hands of the newly created or re-created political parties and of a few thousand armed youngsters in the streets who had stopped and defeated the Soviet tanks.

Even those writers seemed to be happy who, a few years earlier, were more Stalinist than the worst Stalinist political leaders. The term, "miraculous revolution", flowed freely from everyone's pen; in the last days of October even the generally more cautious populist writers decided to step forward.

Standeisky is rather gentle when it comes to discussing the actions of such famous populists as Péter Veres, Ferenc Erdei, László Németh, Géza Féja, and others. These men, who claimed to represent the peasantry-considered the true Hungarian nation-had shown themselves great masters of survival. Often they were highly talented, which makes their opportunism even more reprehensible. Some of them had shared in the general anti-Semitism of the years before the Second World War. As a result, they were condemned to silence in the immediate post-war years and one, József Erdélyi, was imprisoned. But once the Communists had established themselves firmly in power, they began to favour the populist writers. Why it was so is one of the unsolved questions of Communist rule. Perhaps it was because as non-Jews, the populists were likely to serve as a bridge between the Party leadership and the people. It was another sign of the degree of Jewish assimilation that the Jewish Communist political leaders demonstrated more sympathy for the populists than for the mostly Jewish urbanist literati in whom they may have perceived their own shortcomings.

The populists were enthusiastic about the Revolution but because they were generally more interested in public welfare than in the elusive concept of freedom, they were among the first to warn, during the Revolution, against dis-mantling the welfare state created by the Communistsystem. In recognition, János Kádár's post-revolutionary regime hastened to honour László Németh, next to Gyula Illyés the most famous populist writer. Never mind that, before 1945, Németh was a militant anti-Bolshevik and, in his own peculiar way, a strong anti-Semite. Note that not a single populist writer was imprisoned either under Rákosi or under Kádár.

In praising the Revolution, the writers were, of course, not any different from János Kádár who, as head of the newly constitute democratic Communist Party, at the end of October 1956 hailed those who had fought with weapons in their hands. A few days later, however, Kádár went over to the Soviet side and returned to Budapest in a Soviet tank.

When Soviet armour appeared for the second time in the streets of the city, it was the Writers' Association that launched the country's last appeal to the free world for assistance. As Standeisky explains, the appeal was drafted by Gyula Háy, another Jewish writer of long-standing Communist past who, after 1953, belonged to the reformist opposition. For this, Háy was later sentenced to six years in prison.

[...]

The events put the populist writers in a quandary, Standeisky argues. Much less committed to Communism than the Communist writers, and profundly patriotic, the populists should have been outraged by János Kádár's betrayal of Hungary to the Soviets. Maybe they were outraged; still, in the spring of 1957, László Németh readily accepted the prestigious and highly remunerative Kossuth Prize, as did, incidentally, the great poet Lőrinc Szabó, another former right-wing writer and post-World War II outcast. It is true, however, that no populist engaged in an ideological campaign against Déry and other imprisoned writers. Rather, Gyula Illyés and others tried to help the defendants when called before the court as witnesses. Still, the populists had little to be proud of in those days.

By the summer of 1957, eighty-eight intellectuals and politicians were in prison: against them a series of trials were mounted, mostly in secret. While this went on, the country as a whole, and the writers in particular, began to accept the inevitable: on May 1, 1957, hundreds of thousands marched in Budapest in what was at least a partly genuin demonstration of loyalty to János Kádár and the the Party. Without any doubt, the marchers included many who, in October 1956, had demonstrated for an end to Communism.

The writers showed their own party loyalty, when they signed, in September 1957, a manifesto protesting the United Nations' condemnation of the suppression of the October Revolution. Among other things, they accused the United States of blatant imperialist intervention in the affairs of the sovereign Hungarian state. This was a shameful document, indeed, that few writers were willing to remember later. But, as Standeisky shows, nearly everyone signed it, including Gyula Illyés, the great old man of Hungarian letters as well as all the other populist writers. Only a handful, including such individualists as Miklós Mészöly, Géza Ottlik, János Pilinszky, and Ágnes Nemes Nagy, did not append their signature to the document, and it is questionable whether they had been asked to sign it in the first place.

Why did more than two hundred writers sign? Why did dozens of others hasten to append their signatures later, complaining that they had not been notified in time? Standeisky tries but cannot find an answer; a hope that this gesture may help those in prison may have been one reason; fear may have been another, but they could not have been the main reasons. Individual actions, good contacts in the Ministry of Interior were the way to help those in prison, and as for fear, there was no chance whatsoever that the political police would arrest a Gyula Illyés, for instance, for such a minor act of defiance. In fact, no harm came to any of the non-signers, even though they were much less well positioned than Illyés and others. Some specialists of the period feel that the writers and the regime were in silent collusion regarding the need to satisfy the Soviet leaders with meaningful gestures while preserving some freedom of action at home. I do not share this view; nor does Éva Standeisky. No doubt, such a silent collusion came into being a decade or two later, long after Imre Nagy and hundreds of revolutionaries had been executed. But by then, Kádár and friends had turned in a liberal direction.

The fact is that most Hungarian intellectuals were no less malleable than other people. Unfortunately, as Standeisky explains, the UN protest manifesto had a devastating effect on those in prison and on younger intellectuals.

Few imprisoned writers persevered in their defiance. Some at least avoided accusing themselves and others; the great majority of imprisoned literati, however, engaged in a desperate campaign to get themselves out of prison. Tibor Déry, whose nerves were frayed to begin with, and who suffered from intolerable claustrophobia, besieged the Party leadership with letters confessing his failure as a Communist and praising the Party. Zoltán Zelk, Tibor Tardos, and many, many others acted no differently.

How sincere were these letters? Again, it is nearly impossible to tell. Standeisky reminds us that Déry and others voiced the same sentiments of shame and humiliation in writing to fellow prisoners or to family members; but, then, these letters, too, may have been written for the eyes of the censor and the prosecutor.

The mea culpas did not seem to have helped the defendants. One wonders also whether worldwide protest against, for instance, Déry's imprisonment, led by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac, J.B. Priestley, T.S. Eliot, and other internationally famous writers, was of much use to him. In court, Déry confessed that he had been a "bad Communist"; he was still given nine years, of which he actually spent three in jail, always in very bad nervous condition. A few writers, such as, for instance, István Lakatos, never gave in to the police investigators. He was sentenced to less then three years which, on appeal, was changed to less than two years. But then Lakatos must have benefited from his never been a Party member: in Communist Hungary, renegade Party members were dealt with most severely.

It seems that while the Party gave general directions on who should be punished, the precise number of years in prison was left to the judges. The lay judges were generally more bloodthirsty than the professionals, although Ferenc Vida, the professional judge who sentenced both Tibor Déry and Imre Nagy, seems to have been the worst among all. Note that Vida lived and died peacefully in post-Communist Hungary.

Lest we cast a stone at these writers, let us remember that other defendants under totalitarian control rarely behaved any better. The majority of resisters involved in the German July 20 conspiracy, for instance, asserted in captivity that they were good National Socialists (which many had certainly been before joining the resistance), and they readily betrayed their fellow conspirators. Yet, as a new book on the German resistance rather effectively proves (Theodor Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler. Harvard University Press, 1997) by far not all the defendants were tortured by the Gestapo. Add to this that the German conspirators were mostly officers and aristocrats, two good reasons for them to be proud and defiant, whereas the arrested Hungarian writers were intellectuals with little other experience than fear and worry.

Conditions in János Kádár's jails were much better than in Mátyás Rákosi's prisons, at least for the writers. They could receive visitors; they were given books, and they were allowed to write. A few, like the historian Domokos Kosáry and Árpád Göncz, claimed later to have been happy in jail: no one disturbed them and they were free to work. For others, prison was hell. A few writers were freed on the day of sentencing; others, such as Zoltán Zelk, were amnestied a year later; Tibor Déry was released on April 1, 1960. For several years after he was not allowed to publish, and only in 1963 was he granted a passport. Thereafter, he published frequently, but his new writings, some of them outstanding, were permeated by sadness.

In 1961, Kádár announced his celebrated policy of "whoever is not against us, is with us." Later, Hungary's cultural tsar, György Aczél, introduced his controversial policy of recognizing three types of cultural activity: "the one we support, the one we tolerate, and the one we suppress." It seems that few of the writers who burned their fingers back in 1956, risked falling into to the third, or even into the second category. Their places in the political arena were taken by such younger intellectuals as György Konrád, Ferenc Kőszeg, János Kis, György Bence, Gábor Demszky, and László Rajk, Jr., the latter the son of the executed Communist leader of the same name. With a few exceptions, these and other dissidents were not writers but rather political philosophers, often of Marxist background. Some had been the disciples of the Marxist-Leninist philosopher György Lukács. Not untypically, quite a few among them were of Jewish origin.

A number of populist writers, especially Gyula Illyés and his circle, entered the fray earlier but restricted their activity to trying to persuade the government and the Party to speak up for the rights of the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries.

All the oppositionaries together created a quiet and bloodless revolutionary movement that contributed significantly to the collapse, in 1989, of the Communist experiment. It must be stated, however, that many Communist Party leaders did their own best to bring about this peaceful collapse.

We are to thank Éva Standeisky for her occasionally lengthy but honest, informative, superbly documented, and highly stimulating oeuvre, and we are to thank the Institute for the Research of the 1956 Revolution in Budapest for publishing this book.