Gyula Illyés (1902-1983)

We mark here the twentieth anniversary of the death of a major poet of the twentieth century.
Born into an estate worker's large family, Gyula Illyés at the age of seventeen was sent to secondary school in Budapest, where he joined Béla Kun's Red Army during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. He escaped the subsequent White Terror by fleeing to Paris, where he was active in left-wing circles and started writing poetry in Hungarian and French. Some of his early poems appeared in the French publications of the Surrealists, whom he had befriended. He returned to Hungary following the 1926 amnesty, where he soon made a name for himself as a poet and through a classic portrayal of his own background, The People of the Puszta (1936), and for his life of the 19th century revolutionary poet Petöfi.
Because of his personal and political background, he was respected, courted and treated warily by the Communist regime and was able to speak up on occasion on certain taboo subjects, such as that of Hungarian identity and on the treatment of Hungarians living on the other side of the post-Trianon borders, especially in Transylvania. In 1951 he wrote his famous long poem "A Sentence on Tyranny", a devestating indictment on Soviet type socialism, which was not published until the revolutionary days of the Autumn of 1956 and was only republished in Hungary in 1988, although translated into most European languages.

Poems
(Translated by Daniel Hoffman, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner, Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri)

We offer a selection of eight of Illyés's important poems (hitherto not translated in English), including "Árpád" (in Daniel Hoffman's translation) and "Refuge" (translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri). The selection includes love lyrics not represented in What You Have Almost Forgotten (Kortárs, Budapest and Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT, USA, 1999) edited and introduced by William Jay Smith, to date the only authoritative collection of his poems in English.

East or West? Illyés's Dilemma
by Mátyás Domokos

The critic here reads "Árpád",one of Illyés's major poems in terms of its links to the Hungarian canon, the constraints under which it was published (the depths of the Cold War and the dictatorship) and Illyés's own political consciousness.
The essay describes how personal experience brought about dramatic changes in Illyés's thinking. Like many western intellectuals, as a young man he felt that redemption could only be expected from the East (where the Hungarians had come from) but he was forced to realise that his, and the Hungarians', place was in Europe - the West. He emphasizes Illyés's attachment to Paris and Europe and indicates the ambiguousness of the régime's response to his work and person.

Variations a la France
(excerpts)

In 1947 Illyés returned to Paris, the venue for the post Second World War peace settlement that affected Hungary (it confirmed the Trianon borders of 1920). On his return he published a witty travelogue which combines vignettes on the French language, literary life, with descriptions of encounters with a customs man, various writers such as Mauriac and his old friends Tzara and Aragon.

Plucked from the Abyss of Oblivion
The Collections of Miklós Jankovich, 1773-1846 (Illustrated)
by László Mravik

Art historian László Mravik, who proposed the mounting of a recent exhibition devoted to the collection, here describes how Miklós Jankovich assembled his collection and, through the agency of the Palatine, saw to its coming into the possession of the National Museum.
"Jankovich is to this day the principal support of the scholars that burrow in his collection. It is gigantic, and all together ... amounts to almost one hundred thousand items. It is difficult to appraise, but even looking at it all is more than enough for one man. Not to mention collecting, organising and paying for it!"

Virtually unknown outside Hungary, the Jankovich Collection was sold by its begetter to the (then embryonic) Hungarian National Museum, a treasure trove of books, paintings, jewellry, artefacts, coins, small plastics, weapons, whose items had a Hungarian origin or connection.
Once the collection had safely been placed in the National Museum, he embarked on a second collection which, however, was broken up after his death.

This article is accompanied by 16 pages of colour plates.

Kosovo, Gunshot Wound (Short Stroy)
by Sándor Majoros

Born in the Vojvodina, the writer has had one collection of his stories published in Yugolslavia and two in Budapest. This story focuses on a young Hungarian's experience of KFOR action around Kosovo, linking it to his family.

The Last Round of Bargaining Before EU Accession
by Gábor Lakatos

Hungary is one of the ten countries that has successfully concluded its accession negotiations with the EU and is expected to sign itself into the Union on April 2004, 16 in Athens.
Gábor Lakatos has for many years tracked EU institutions and member countries' policies. He outlines here the Copenhagen Summit of 2002 which closed these negotiations. He sees the accord between Germany and France on agriculture as crucial, and significant for Hungary (the final offer tabled split the candidate countries' unified stance). However, Hungary has managed to secure agreements on a range of other matters, including contribution to the European Investment Bank, extended restriction on the purchase of Hungarian land, tax exemptions and the number of Hungarian MEPs.

A Nineteenth-Century Glance
by Ibolya Planck

László Lugosi Lugo: Klösz György (1844-1913) élete és munkássága (The Life and Work of György Klösz (1844-1913). Vol.1, Monográfia (Monograph), Vol. 2, Fényképek - Photographs. 124 + 277 pp.

György Klösz is the photographer to whom we owe much of our knowledge of the Buadapest cityscape at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In reviewing this double-volume book by the photographer László Lugosi Lugo, the Curator of the Photo Archives of the National Office of Cultural Heritage, Ibola Planck describes the sheer size of Klösz's production and the studio and reproduction facilities in the contemporary context.
Of the major nineteenth century international exhibitions, Klösz was present at Vienna (1873), Budapest (1896) and Paris (1900). For the latter he produced a unique series on Hungary's stately homes.
She also highlights Lugosi Lugo's discussion of Klösz's attempt to record those parts of Budapest that were to disappear in the course of urban renewal at the turn of the twenti eth century.
This review article is accompanied by a number of Klösz's photographs.

Hot and Cool
by Miklós Györffy

Zsuzsa Rácz: Állítsátok meg Terézanyut! (Hold Back Mother Theresa!). Budapest, Bestline, 2002, 290 pp. - Richárd Salinger: Apám beájulna (My Dad Would Freak Out). Budapest, Ulpius-ház Könyvkiadó, 2002, 226 pp. - Andor Kárpáti: kurvajó! (frigging great!). Budapest, Kiadó Dee-sign, 2002, 192 pp.

Our fiction reviewer takes a wry look at the pressure intenational bestsellers exert on publishers trying to hit the magic figure of a print run of ten thousand for the domestic market. Here he examines three new potboilers targeted at a specific readership.
Obviously based on Bridget Jones Diary, Zsuzsa Rácz's novel reveals something of the life-style and values of the twenty-somethings, who have spent half of their lives spent in post-1989 Hungary.

Fatal Attraction
by György Litván

Lee Congdon: Seeing Red. Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 223 pp.

The historian (and contemporary of some of the individuals discussed in the book under review) comments on some of these emigrée Hungarian intellectuals "in whose lives Communism played a part" (as it did for the reviewer too), and who mostly went into exile in the twenties.
He focuses on the careers and differences between the Polányi brothers, Koestler and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (that typical child of the Cold War) and adds some personal reminiscences of Imre Lakatos and Tibor Szamuely, both held in high esteem by the British right.

Contemporary Hungarian Operas
by Tamás Koltai

Emil Petrovics: C'est la guerre - Gyula Fekete: A megmentett város (The Town That Found Redemption) - Gergely Vajda: Az Óriáscsecsemő (The Giant Suckling-Babe).

Of the three productions under review, our drama critic finds most to praise in a revival of Emil Petrovics's C'est la guerre, outlining the 1960s political climate in which it first came to the stage.

The Hungarian Documentary
by Erzsébet Bori

In this comprehensive chronological survey of documentary film-making, Erzsébet Bori provides the context and constraints under which documentaries were made.
The fifties, she points out, are the years 1948 to 1956. She describes how footage shot by the temporarily free industry on the streets of Budapest during the 1956 Revolution was later cut to provide a devious "official" version of events. The 1960s saw the crucial event: the founding of the Béla Balázs Film Studio, the nursery of so much talent in the years to come. The golden age of the 1980s continued into the 1990s, with hitherto taboo topics (such as POWs in the Soviet Union) focused on.
The danger now seems to lie in the explosion of commercial TV channels, damaging the integrity of the documentary as a genre.
The article cites in detail landmark works and film makers.

From Singspiel to Post-Modern
Two Hundred Years of Hungarian Opera
by Tibor Tallián

The musicologist provides a sweeping survey of Hungarian opera from its very beginnings (Singspiel, since Hungary was in the German orbit), through its cosy townsman's view of peasant life to which Béla Bartók stood in strong contrast.
He makes telling points on Kodály's works, in particular The Spinning Room, and traces the literary roots and dramaturgy based on the Passion of Christ.