American Journal, Part One: 1952-1967
by Sándor Márai

Already established as a novelist and dramatist in Hungary, Márai started to keep a journal (always intended for publication) in 1943 and continued to do so until his death in California in 1989.
He and his wife moved from Italy to the United States in 1952 to live in New York until 1967, where they acquired US citizenship.
The extracts here reveal mixed reactions to America, his sense of being far from Europe and Hungary, awareness of aging as he waits to take the oath of citizenship, a sense of the enclosedness of American life. Here too are his reactions to jury service for a breach of promise suit, but always in the journals are the determination to maintain himself as a Hungarian writer, reinforced in an entry devoted to the Márais' return to Sorrento in 1967: "A barber strops his razor. A baker bakes. A cobbler soles. A writer writes."
They returned to the US in 1976 to settle in San Diego. Our next issue will contain extracts from the journals, covering the period from their return to the writer's death by his own hand in 1989.

Ferenc Deák and the Habsburg Empire
by Ágnes Deák

Ferenc Deák was the architect of the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, which led to the most rapid period of economic, social and cultural development in Hungary's history. He is here placed by his namesake, who specializes in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century, within the context of the Hungarians' attempt to set a modus vivendi for themselves with the context of Habsburg power, their own desire for nationhood and their own geopolitical position. By focusing on a statesman who deliberately withdrew from public life in 1848, the year Hungary engaged in a war of independence from Austria, Ágnes Deák provides an account of a polity committed to stubborn negotiation, still not without relevance for our own days.

Poems
by István Kemény
Translated by Richard Burns and György Gömöri

In addition to ten collections of poetry, István Kemény has volumes of prose and essays to his name.

Condensed Motion:
The Art of Tibor Csernus
by Gábor Lajta

At the age of thirty-seven the painter Tibor Csernus, despite the recognition of his peers, had found himself virtually unshowable in Hungary. He settled in Paris in 1964. There he established an international reputation. The painter and art writer Gábor Lajta discusses the life and art of a truly innovative painter constantly reworking the past, most famously Caravaggio and most recently Hogarth. The article is accompanied by eight colour plates

Happy Birthday to You (short story)
by Szilárd Podmaniczky

First publication in English by this young writer.

Siberian Diaries and Letters 1957-1958 (Excerpts)
by Vilmos Diószegi

The ethnographer Vilmos Diószegi's letters and diaries concerning his 1957 -58 field work in Siberia have been published in a scholarly edition (reviewed elsewhere in this issue by the ethnologist Zoltán Nagy). The importance of these and subsequent visits to the then Soviet Union was that he was the first Hungarian scholar for many years to be allowed access to collections held in the Soviet Union and the first to be allowed to engage in work in the field.
The ethnographer was concerned with the collecting and comparing of folk cultures and belief systems which can throw light on the Magyars' origins and links on the far steppes of Siberia and Mongolia. He was principally interested in shamans.
The extracts here indicate the sheer size of the collections which he spent his days transcribing (mainly in Leningrad), the actual procedure of collecting shaman chants and the manifestations of Shamanism in the wilds of Siberia ("Is there any life more splendid than that of an ethnographer?") Accounts of perilously clinging to rock faces to trace a glyph and interpreting the shaman's chants themselves. He actually succeeded in establishing Budapest as one of the centres for the study of Shamanism but his archive was dispersed after his death in 1972.

Another Dimension
András Schiff in Conversation with Eszter Rádai

In this interview the pianist reflects on his countrymen's negative response to success (including the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Imre Kertész), the issue of anti-Semitism ("the kids next door told me that they could not play football with me any more because I was Jewish"), the artist and politics (with Bartók again as a model), his return to Schubert and his only coming to Beethoven's sonatas late in his career, despite the exhortations of his teachers at the Liszt Academy of Music ("the sort of mountain whose summit one will not attain").

Count Michael Károlyi in Wartime England
by Tibor Hajdu and György Litván

A selection of the correspondence of Count Michael Károlyi, President of the first Hungarian Republic (1918-1919), who went into exile after its collapse and spent the years from 1938 on in England, is here devoted to his contacts with the British centre-left, eventually the government and various Hungarian anti-Fascist organisations in the Americas and elsewhere. Among the correspondents included here are Arthur Koestler (from a time when he was still a private in the Pioneer Corps!) concerning publicity for a Hungary soon to be at war with the UK; Béla Lugosi greeting him in the name of one of the Hungarian exile organisations in the U.S. (he was to be accused in the McCarthy era of "premature anti-fascism"); the great modernist László Moholy Nagy inviting him to a conference of these groups in the US in 1944; the historian and his close friend A.J.P. Taylor offering advice on future stategy at the end of 1945.
These come from the Collected Correspondence which the two contributors are editing.

The Genesis of a Lasting Quarrel in Central Europe
by Géza Jeszenszky

Ignác Romsics: The Dismantling of Historic Hungary: the Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920. Translated by Mario D. Fenyo. New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, 201 pp.

The author, a professor of history who has served as Hungarian Foreign Minister (1990-1994) and Ambassador to the United States (1998-2002), provides an account in this review-article, on the background to and consequences of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon which dismantled the old Hungarian kingdom, leaving five million Hungarians outside the new borders. He would differ with some of his fellow-historian's weightings on certain areas (e.g. that the First World War was inevitable) but he feels that the mode of allievating the lot of the Hungarians living outside the country's borders is to be seen in the "everyday practices" followed in western Europe - "decentralisation, devolution, local democracy and territorial autonomy".

An Age of Unborn Children
by Miklós Györffy
Imre Kertész: Felszámolás (Liquidation). Magveto, Budapest, 2003, pp. 160; Endre Kukorelly: TündérVölgy avagy Az emberi szív rejtelmeirol (Fairy Valley or On the Mysteries of the Human Heart). Kalligram Könyvkiadó, Pozsony (Bratislava), 2003, pp. 371

Liquidation is the latest novel from the Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész: it seems to bring to an end his Auschwitz "story" and close the trilogy that included Fateless, his masterpiece on the experiences of a sixteen-year-old in the death camp. The new novel deals with an Auschwitz survivor who commits suicide after surviving the communist years and who feels that "his life has no justification unless he can decipher the code called Auschwitz."
The poet Endre Kukorelly's Fairy Valley is welcomed as his most important work in prose to date and seems to recall Esterházy in its treatment of father and family. It too is best read in relation to the author's two earlier novels and draws its title from the 19th-century Romantic poet Mihály Vörösmarty on the utopia of happy love, a reference reinforced by frequent allusion to a short story by Tolstoy on family bliss. The time frame encompasses the life of a family who lost their properties in Slovakia because of the Treaty of Trianon and whose father had become an officer in Horthy's army, with the consequences that entailed for them in the Communist era.

Vernacular Modernism
by Paul Stirton

A. Gall: Kós Károly Műhelye: Tanulmány és Adattár
The Workshop of Károly Kós: A Study and Documentation. Budapest, Mundus Kiadó, 2002, 527 pp. (Parallel text in Hungarian and English.)

The University of Glasgow-based art historian reviews this bilingual monograph on the work of one the great figures in Hungarian architecture, Károly Kós, who turned out a series of dazzling works up to the outbreak of the First World War. He was one of those who turned to vernacular and rural architecture to find an authentic model for national ideals. Along with Saarinen in Finland, Mackintosh in Scotland and Gaudi in Catalonia, Kós was one of the prodigies working towards a style that was both both 'modern' and 'national'.

Liason Dangereuse
by Péter Bozó

Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: A Correspondence, 1854-1886. Introduced, translated, annotated and edited by Pauline Pocknell. Franz Liszt Studies Series No.8, Ed. Michelle Saffle.
New York, Pendragon Press 2000.

A Liszt specialist, Péter Bozó here welcomes yet another properly edited part of Liszt's huge correspondence to replace the La Mara version. The main topic is politics: Agnes Street-Kindworth's father was working for the Imperial Russian Court at the time she arrived in Weimar during the Crimean War, ostensibly to take piano lessons. A life-long friendship seems to have sprung up from the love affair between them and there is much on the music to attract the Liszt scholar.

People and Puppets
by Tamás Koltai

Sándor Weöres: Holdbeli csónakos (Waterman on the Moon) - Frigyes Karinthy: Holnap reggel (Tomorrow Morning) - Béla Pintér: Parasztopera (Peasant Opera).

Our theatre critic here looks at three productions from the National Theatre, one of them a premiere of a piece for children by Sándor Weöres, one of Hungary's supreme poets. This production of Waterman on the Moon employs standard figures from folk puppet theatre with eclectic strands in the story background (Crete, Babylon, the Celestial Empire to name but three) and an imaginative use of the state of the art technical facilities of the National. The second to attract his attention favourably also employs the use of puppet-like characters and he finds Peasant Opera a deserved recipient of the Critics' Award in the best musical category, for its deft combination of folk and art song, imaginative direction - "a treat of parody and pastiche".

Men Overboard
by Erzsébet Bori

"We can always count on the Hungarian documentary film," says our film critic in an extended overview of some of the new work that has impressed her over 2003. She perceives new emphases now that press freedom is in place, relieving one burden from documentary makers and welcomes several outstanding works, notably Ádám Csillag's Orphans of the County on the lacunae in the child protection net and Gábor Ferenczi's Hungarian Bulletin concerning the inhabitants of a village in Transylvania and their attempts to obtain papers under the "Status" Law the Budapest Parliament passed two years ago.