Peter Unwin
Borders and Crossings
Notes by a Retired Diplomat
[...]
My next-door neighbour in England is back from four happy years in Hungary. I told her that I was trying to describe my time there for a book about the Iron Curtain. "I never knew the Iron Curtain", she said, and for a moment she took my breath away; for me life in Hungary and life behind the Iron Curtain had always been synonymous. But even nostalgic old men must keep up with the times. In today's Hungary the Iron Curtain is history.
As we talked, I realized that there were many other ways, too, in which Nina and I saw Hungary differently. Mine was the macro view, based on history, politics, society and diplomacy, leading me to broad and questionably-founded generalization. Her preoccupations had been very different: children in Hungarian schools, giving tea to Hungarian school friends, taking children to Hungarian music-teachers-a micro view. I asked her to put down her impressions, give me a view of Hungary from the school gates. This is the essence of what she wrote.
The school population-teachers, children, parents-was a far cry from the westernized Hungarians whom most foreign diplomats and businessmen naturally meet. Few of them spoke English; few of them wanted to learn it; all rejected Russian; for them Hungarian was good enough and always would be. They took pride in their language, as an academic discipline, a gloriously ingenious linguistic jigsaw puzzle and an essential part of national identity. At school meetings the teachers begged the parents to insist on its correct and punctilious use and on resisting foreign influences. This kind of concern, together with the formality of the Hungarian language (which was resisting democratic slovenliness as effectively as it had resisted Communist levelling), meant that Hungary, Nina thought, was making a better fist than its Western neighbours at holding unwelcome outside cultural and social influences at bay.
Most of the time, Nina found that she was the only parent in the gathering at the school gates waiting for Laci and his little sister Eva. Hungarians in their thirties and forties were too busy holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet. Grandparents came instead, when they could; and when they couldn't, eight-year-old Laci took five-year-old Eva home himself, right across Budapest with three changes of bus if necessary. Mum's Volvo-run was not an option in middle- and working-class Hungary.
All this meant that children were self-reliant to a degree no longer imaginable in the West. By and large they were serious, too, about their work. By Christmas the first grade were reading fluently and writing in a neat cursive hand, by the end of the year they knew their tables up to 10. By Western standards the curriculum was narrow but rigorous, and teachers put their back into their work, for pitifully small financial reward. As a result, by the end of elementary school everyone had mastered basic literacy and numeracy.
Nina found all this impressive - as one might have found English education two generations ago. She was impressed too by the efforts the school made to help a rare Gypsy child. She was gifted, but her father was a caricature of everything that underpins eastern European prejudice against the Roma. He seemed determined to frustrate the school's attempts to help Ilona keep up, as if education would threaten her Gypsy identity. Finally Ilona went elsewhere, and her teachers grieved for her.
But musical education was something else. Music gives Hungary's Gypsies a rare opportunity to break out of the mean framework of their lives, and Gypsy families put everything into supporting musically gifted children. Nina found her own violinist children competing with Gypsy children for approval and applause, and the Gypsy parents treated her and her children almost as if they were competitors for their family business.
Nina's memories reminded me of a different group of Hungarians who took their language seriously. In both the periods in which we lived in Hungary, the poets, writers and translators occupied positions in society more central by far than their confreres in the West. In Central Europe, the literati mattered.
In some ways, they always have. The nations of Central Europe have faced hard struggles to survive or to emerge from under alien rule. Their languages have played an essential role in that struggle. The writers and poets who used them had a political as well as a cultural importance. Mickiewicz in Poland, Petőfi in Hungary are figures of literary and political, and hence of heroic, stature. Their words gave expression to nationality, and so helped build nations.
Each of them wrote in languages with little resonance outside their own countries. They needed translators to convey their message to the world. At the same time, the intellectuals of Central and Eastern Europe wanted to bathe in Western culture as well. They cried out for translations of the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire and the rest. So Hungarians, and no doubt Poles and Romanians as well, will tell you that Shakespeare reads even better in their language than in English.
Translators in Central Europe share in some of the veneration accorded to poets and prose writers alike. Many writers use translations to supplement what they earn from their own writing. In the hard years of the 1950s and 1960s others, such as Hungary's first democratic president after 1989, Árpád Göncz, turned to translation when their political sins brought a ban on the publication of their original work. Then and now they form an integral part of the literary world.
When we first lived in Hungary, it was this literary world which stood out most distinctly for Hungarian values, in mute protest at the Socialist internationalism which the country's rulers wished upon their people. Some of its members lived dangerous lives, and they made the danger worse by their appetite for things Western. So even in the worst of times they took risks to keep in touch with Western diplomats, accept invitations, lay their hands on Western books.
Faced with the literary giants among them, the authorities shared something of the nation's awe and admiration. So poets like Gyula Illyés and novelists like Géza Ottlik created limited freedoms for themselves, and used those freedoms to pick away, almost imperceptibly, at the bonds that had been fastened on Hungary. Boldly daring, they used to come to our house, and talk about Hungarian literature and art; wrapped up in the parcel with the poems, novels and short stories were fragments of Hungarian politics too. And when the British Council invited them, they sought, and sometimes won, permission to go to Britain and see its cultural world.
By the time we went back to Hungary in the 1980s, everything there was easier. The cultural figures went back and forth more or less at their pleasure, doing a term at an American university here, attending a literary conference in Italy there. By now, politics was beginning to express itself without the old literary camouflage; dissenters were speaking almost openly of their political aspirations.
Some of the political zing had vanished from literary and cultural gatherings. What had once been whispered among friends now appeared, suitably modulated, in the literary magazines. Still, the writers wrote, the poets sang their songs, the translators filled the bookshops with the work of Western writers. Still the state subsidized this cultural world, accepting that in some ways it reflected the aspirations of ordinary Hungarians who did not open books from one year's end to the next. We saw the way things worked through the lives of many of our friends: materially cramped, living in two-roomed flats on the scrapings of a literary income, but free of the whole world's ideas, and confident that they spoke for the true Hungary.
1989 brought them real freedom to replace the limited, cloistered freedom their reputations had won them under the Communists. It also brought them a sudden bruising acquaintance with the costs of capitalist freedoms. Now ordinary readers were free to back their preferences, and more often than not they chose the easily accessible, the meretricious. The people we had known winced at the changes that came over the Budapest bookshops. At the same time their state subsidies vanished and they were thrown back on what they could earn. The value of their state pensions diminished with inflation. Beside the new rich their status, once unchallenged, dwindled. They worked harder to scrape a living.
They continued to read widely, and their judgement and taste, as much for foreign as for Hungarian work, remained sound. To talk to Hungarian writers was to be reminded of how much valuable new work in English was passing one by, and of how much time one was giving to things that were less than first-rate. I gave one of Patrick O'Brian's novels to one of them, suggesting he consider translating it, telling myself that the language of topgallant staysails in a force nine gale would take some rendering into Hungarian. A week later he returned it, saying thanks but no thanks; and he explained himself not with the problem of interesting Hungarian readers in Nelson's navy but with a wonderfully shrewd analysis of O'Brian's deficiencies in such particulars as plotting, literary pace and character development.
As long as Hungarians worship their language, Hungary's writers will be people of national importance. I see no sign of them ceasing to be men and women of taste, judgement and literary ability, bravura performers in their own right as well as mainstays of their country. But in a free Hungary their role is going to be less central, less political, in the end less zestful than it was under Communism. By and large, the writers of Central Europe enjoyed the curse of living in interesting times. Now they have to come to terms with the curse of living in easier ones.
Peter Unwin
served at the British Embassy in Budapest 1958-1961, and was ambassador 1983-1986. He was also British minister in Germany and ambassador in Denmark.
Of his four books to date, Imre Nagy - Voice in the Wilderness, was reviewed in No. 128.
