Why Europe ?
by Béla Kádár

"... membership of the European Union will not only mean bidding farewell to a part of Hungary's troubled heritage. It is also a rendez-vous with the future."
The economist examines both Hungary's and Europe's heritage and this future.

A Lesson in Aspiration
(Short story)
by Pál Békés

The future Regent of Hungary takes a conversational English lesson from the future author of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake (Horthy was stationed in Pula and Joyce taught at the Berlitz school there.) Translated by the Irish writer Stephen Humphries.

Poems
by Virág Erdôs

A young poet, with a highly individual voice and with four collections already published, appears in English translation (by George Szirtes) for the first time.

A Painter Maudit - László Mednyánszky (1852 - 1919)
by Csilla Markója

"Beside the portraits and scenic views, there have also survived a group of bizarre pictures, not fitting into any nineteenth century genre, which deal with the nature of violence ... There are hundreds upon hundreds of drawings in pencil of prisoners, victims of torture and lynching, of battlefield dead. However, it was not the First World War which triggered this odd belligerent subject in Mednyánszky, he took it up when the fin-de siecle Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was basking in luxurious display."
Csilla Markója has published extensively on Mednyánszky and 19th century painting. In this comprehensive treatment of the life and oeuvre of this fine and maverick painter, she places his work in the context of his 19th century predecessors (including Millet) and contemporaries, provides an account of his self-chosen life in the gutter and, through extensive reference to the painter's notebooks, identifies the unity that suffering provides to his final works.
This article is lavishly illustrated.

One Minute Stories
by István Örkény

"There are no dim-witted readers, only badly written One Minute Stories," says the author's introduction to a collection in a genre he has made his own.
Örkény does away with narrator, story, description, and, as parody is never finicky, he may borrow from anywhere from folklore to the armoury of popular culture... What makes the collection unique is the essence of twentieth-century Central European history, memories of the world wars, revolutions, occupations, dictatorships, forced labour and POW camps, the Holocaust, failed reforms, empty slogans and all the enormous misery and suffering that this entailed, the total, unfathomable absurdity of it all exploding in our face ..." says Miklós Györffy in his introduction to
the selection by Judith Sollosy.

Post-Trianon Hungary in Foreign Affairs
by György Litván

Oszkár Jászi wrote an article for the journal Foreign Affairs in December 1923, not long after his arrival in the United States on a speaking tour. Jászi had lived in exile after the post-1918 revolutions and purges and, despite Bethlen's attempts at consolidation, saw the Hungarian state as a destabilising factor in East Central Europe.
The correspondence which is here published reveals the acrimony with which the Hungarian Legation in Washington responded to Jászi's lectures and article, delivered at a time when the Horthy government was negotiating for a substantial loan.
György Litván describes the participants in and background to this correspondence, providing an ample selection from it.

The First Printed Map of Hungary
by Katalin Plihál

Tabula Hungariae. the first printed map of Hungary, was published in Ingolstadt in Germany in 1528. The Hungarian National Library is running an exhibition devoted to the map and all its known versions. The author, a cartographer and librarian at the Library, provides a history of the map, its maker, the map-making procedure, the historical context of its content, the history of the manuscript. She describes the printing method used and gives a full account of the six maps subsequently based on it. The article is profusely illustrated.

Béla Bartók - A Memoir
by Edward Alexander

The author served in the U.S. Diplomatic Service, including a stint as Cultural Attaché in Budapest. Here he provides a memoir of Bartók's participation in a seminar on "Twentieth Century Music" at Columbia University, where he was a young graduate student of musicology in 1941, the year after the composer's arrival in the United States.

Two Women, Two Pasts
by Miklós Györffy
Zsuzsa Rakovszky: A kigyó árnyéka (The Shadow of the Snake). Budapest, Magvetö, 2002, 467 pp. Magda Szabó: Für Elise. Budapest, Európa, 2002, 417 pp.

Our fiction reviewer considers two novels by two of Hungary's pre-eminent women writers devoted to women protagonists, one by the poet Zsuzsa Rakovszky and the other by the eighty-five-year old Magda Szabó. The first, set around 1600 in Saxony and Sopron, he sees as a post-modern epic; the second (set in 192Os Debrecen) as part of an extraordinary writer's constant shifting between autobiography and fiction in her work. Both works stayed on the best-seller lists for a long time.

Bittersweet Home
by Ivan Sanders
Anna Szalai (Ed.): In the Land of Hagar. The Jews of Hungary: History, Society and Culture. Tel Aviv, Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora and the Israeli Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 304 pp., ill.

The literary historian and translator examines how this, "the third major work published in recent years on Hungarian Jewry", accounts for the history, cultures and social contexts in which the the Jewish experience of Hungary has unfolded.

Images, Perceptions, Individuals
by Steven Béla Várdy
Frank, Tibor: Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making. Studies in Hungarian Connections to Britain and America, 1848-1945. Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó,1985. 391 pp. Name index.

The Hungarian American historian outlines the literature on Hungarian responses to the Anglo-Saxon world before considering a collection of essays by "a scholar who is already in the front rank among Hungary's emigration historians."

Insult to Injury - The Children of 1956
by Johanna Granville

Zsuzsanna Körösi and Adrienne Molnár: Carrying a Secret in My Heart: Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. An Oral History. Budapest: Central European University Press. 2003. 195 pp. Illustrations and bibliography.

The Kádár regime's reprisals after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution were directed not only against those held to be "participants" but, for many long years, against their children. The American historian, herself a 1956 specialist, describes this set of interviews "virtually the only source in English" on the children of the victims of 1956.

New Liszt Letters
by William Wright

The scholar and pianist set out fourteen years ago to collect Liszt letter facsimiles from private and public collections in the U.K. He here publishes in English translation 13 letters by Liszt (12 here in print for the first time) and 2 by his mother Anna Liszt, with a commentary on the addressees and their relationship to the composer. His appendix provides the original French and German texts.

Monuments to Musical Romanticism
Two Major Compositions by Ernst von Dohnányi
by James A. Grymes

"... Dohnányi's rejection of avant-garde techniques is one of the main reasons why his musical legacy went largely ignored in the latter half of the twentieth century."
The scholar and critic here describes the history of the composition and performance of Dohnányi's symphonic cantata Cantus vita and his Symphony No. 2 in E Major, both inspired by and based on Imre Madách's 1861 dramatic poem The Tragedy of Man.