This issue celebrates the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Imre Kertész for "... writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of fate."
We here publish a short story by the Nobel Laureate, along with articles on him and his work by two fellow writers, György Spiró and Péter Nádas, and by the translator Tim Wilkinson.

The Union Jack
by Imre Kertész

"He introduced himself in 1975, with a masterpiece as his very first work. Once his reputation had slowly begun to be established, he began publishing, bit by bit, the various notes ... that had occurred to him while he had been struggling to put Fatelessness into shape," comments György Spiró in his article on the Hungary's first Literature Laureate .
Here we publish a story by Imre Kertész's, encompassing the post-war Communist dictatorship up to the glimpse of a Union Jack bedecked car (with a kid glove waving to the crowd) on the streets of Budapest during the 1956 Revolution.

In Art Only the Radical Exists
by György Spiró

György Spiró writes on how he came upon the work and friendship of Imre Kertész, and considers the implications of his novels. "One of the premises of Fatelessness is that the peacetime and the wartime world are structurally identical. and thus Auschwitz, far from being a tragic twentieth-century slip-up on the part of 'normal' society, was its logical consequence ..."

Imre Kertész's Work and His Subject
by Péter Nádas

"... from the standpoint of the continuity of dictatorships Auschwitz can be looked back on as if it were a treasured memory. In a dictatorship every content of consciousness is distorted from the start. It is a painful insight to see continuity where others wish to see only a short-circuit in civilisation ..." says the author of the internationally acclaimed novel, Book of Memories.

Kaddish For a Stillborn Child?
by Tim Wilkinson

As well as being a novelist, Imre Kertész turned himself into a major translator of German philosophy into Hungarian during the years when he was not able to publish his own fiction. His own work achieved critical and popular acclaim in German translation, many years before the Nobel Prize brought him wider international fame. Tim Wilkinson, himself a translator, here describes the horrors of an English language version of one of Kertész's novels.

Hungary and the Construction of Europe
by Géza Mezei

"Few people would have thought at the end of the Cold War that within a decade the EU would still have no new members from beyond the Iron Curtain." Géza Karsai here surveys the processes that brought about the European Union from the end of the Second World War, contrasting these with the developments within the Soviet imperium of East and East Central Europe. He outlines the Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan, the beginnings of federalism in Western Europe; he examines the impact of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the economic crisis of the 1980s. He examines the EU's response in terms of aid to the new democracies after 1989 and the latest round of EU accession. He draws on his long years of experience working at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg to predict the effect that the accession of East Central European states will have on the Union and on their own domestic affairs.

On the Long March to the EU
by Gábor Karsai

Gábor Karsai, who heads the Budapest economic think tank GKI, describes how the economic crisis of the 1990s in the post-communist countries originated in their planned economies and not in their transition to market economies. He outlines the general crisis in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1980s and 1990s and the construction of new legal and institutional systems in Hungary. He examines economic performance and warns against a trend towards returning a broader role in economic affairs to the state, in the context of EU accession

Metamorphosis Transylvaniae
by Péter Apor

In 1736 Péter Apor, a Translvanian baron, completed a charming memoir of the Principality of his boyhood, before it fell under direct rule from Vienna in 1686. With Central Hungary under Turkish occupation and Western Hungary claimed by the Habsburgs, Translvania was for 180 years the repository of Hungarian culture and autonomy. Apor's work is one of many fine memoirs by Transylvanian aristocrats written in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bernard Adams, whose English translation of Metamorphosis will be published (by Kegan Paul, London) in 2003, calls it a commemoration of "social practices familiar to him in the last years of the Principality, which, he fears, the influence of the neue mode brought in by the Austrians may cause to be forgotten." The excerpts here include an account of the magnificence of his kinsman Count István Apor and a splendid description of a wedding feast.

Poems
by Ágnes Nemes Nagy

Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922-1991), a major poet of the second half of the twentieth century, has so far appeared in two collections in English. A third is due to be published by Bloodaxe in 2003, in the translations of the Anglo-Hungarian poet George Sirtes.

The Esterházy Fairyland
by Ferenc Dávid and János Malina

The Esterházy palace at Fertöd. "the Hungarian Versailles", is inextricably linked to Joseph Haydn, who lived and worked there from 1768 to 1790. In this illustrated article, Ferenc Dávid, a writer on architecture, and János Malina, Artistic Director of the Haydn at Eszterháza Festival, describe the history of the palace and its grounds, along with the Esterházy family's patronage of music.

The Genius of the Place
by László Somfai

"An inspirational workshop atmosphere pervades Fertöd-Eszterháza," writes the musicologist László Somfai, a leading Haydn expert, in his review of the Fifth Hungarian Haydn Society Festival, involving Hungarian and foreign musicians. He praises the venue and audiences, describes the orchestral trouvailles and highlights the chamber music concerts.

Dreaming Peace, Making War
by Tibor Frank
The Budapest Conversations of U.S Minister John F. Montgomery 1934-1941

Tibor Frank has discovered an unexpected source for the history of the preliminaries of the Second World War and (Hungary's involvement in it) among the papers of John F. Montgomery, the last US minister in Budapest before Hungary declared war on the United States in 1941. The historian has prepared for publication the minister's copious records of conversations with the conservative Hungarian political elite. Here he introduces Montgomery and the Budapest circles in which he moved and provides samples of his conversations with, among others, the former Foreign Minister Kálmán Kánya (December 1939) and the Regent Miklós Horty (November 1940), in which they make clear their secret distrust of Nazi Germany.

Yours Sincerely, János Kádár
by Tibor Hajdu

Tibor Huszár (ed.): Kedves, jó Kádár Elvtárs! Válogatás Kádár János levelezésébol 1954-1989 (Dear Comrade Kádár! A Selection from the Correspondence of János Kádár, 1954-1989.). Budapest, Osiris, 2002, 871 pp.

The historian Tibor Hajdu reviews this selection of János Kádár's correspondence, prepared for the press by Kádár's biographer, finding in it revelations of the narrow personality of the man who dominated Hungarian politics for longer than anyone else in the 20th century.

Elsewhere in this issue we publish an exchange of letters between Kádár and the composer Zoltán Kodály, taken from the book under review, iniatated by Kodály in protest against politically motivated interference in music education and drawing a lengthy reply from the addressee.

Carl Lutz - A Righteous Gentile
by László Karsai
Theo Tschuy: Becsület és bátorság (Honour and Courage). Miskolc, Well-Press 2002, 224 pp.

László Karsai has written the afterword to Tschuy's book, which describes the role played by Carl Lutz, Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest from 1942 to 1945, in saving the lives of many thousands of Jews.

A Screen Moralist
by András Gervai

József Marx: István Szabó. Vincze Kiadó, 2002. 434 pp.

"In Marx's opinion ... his art constitutes one of the most characteristic and yet loneliest values in Hungarian culture." So concludes the critic on this book (surprisingly only the first in a quarter of a century) on one of the handful of Hungarian film makers to achieve an international audience.

Cavalcades of Metaphors
by Tamás Koltai
Our theatre reviewer highlights an ingenious new production by the Krétakör Company, which will be touring Western Europe in the first half of 2003.