Hungary Enters the European Union
by Graham Avery

"In many ways, the EU's expansion in 2004 is its best prepared enlargement, and Hungary is certainly among the best prepared new members." The author, who has been working in the European Commission since 1973 and is currently Chief Advisor to the Commission, provides a personal commentary on Hungary's path to the EU, the political and psychological implications of having to be "pro-active" in EU affairs and the issues which will have to be addressed in the first years of Hungary's membership.
Indicative of what lies in store is his description of himself: "... my nationality is Welsh, my passport is British and my citizenship is European- and these three identities are not conflictual but complementary."

American Journal
Part Two: 1984-1989
by Sándor Márai

This, the third and last of our extracts from the journal the writer kept up to the very day of his death, the process that led him to stop writing, and the "disquiet when I think of dying".
These include flashes of memory of Hungary, descriptions in moving detail of the gradual physical deterioration of his wife and their reactions, his calm purchase of the gun he was to use on himself and his steadfast refusal to allow his works to be republished in Hungary under the Communist regime. All during this he reflects on his sense of America, notes his reading (increasingly the classic philosophers) and sketches Americana.
Until the last entry:
"I am waiting for the summons; I am not pressing for it, but nor am I putting it off. Now's the time."

Poems
by Victor Hatar

Long resident in England, the poet, novelist, playwright and philosopher Victor Hatar's poems are here translated by the Anglo-Hungarian poet George Szirtes.

Happy-Book
(excerpts)
by Balázs Györe

Balázs Györe's eighth novel, published in 2001, is also reviewed in this issue. This extract deals with the protagonist's attempt to fix his memories and relationship with his wife.

Letter from Brussels
by Györgyi Kocsis

"... the metaphorical distance between Budapest and Brussels is getting shorter by the day with the approach of May 1st. The Brussels correspondent of a leading Hungarian weekly reflects on her experience of not the city but of "EU Land", inhabited by Eurocrats, lobbyists, accredited journalists, MEPs and civil servants. She sketches out the implications of full membership for Hungary, in particular how MEPs have to adapt in order to exert national interests effectively.

Schools and Gypsies: Who Fails Who?
Tibor Derdák in conversation with Eszter Rádai

No section of Hungarian society has been more adversely affected by the changeover to a market economy than its sizable Gypsy community of some 600,000. For the large part unskilled and desperately poor, the statistics for educational attainment themselves tell the stark story: 5 per cent and 1 per cent of the Gypsy young acquire secondary and tertiary qualifications as against the 70 per cent and 30 per cent figures for the population as a whole.
Trained as a sociologist and now working as a teacher, Tibor Derdák here describes and promotes the setting up of self-help organisations and student hostels to help young Gypsy secondary students bridge the gulf between their own culture and the expectations of an educational system that is still largely "Prussian style".

Golden Retrievers
Sándor Kürti in conversation with Eszter Rádai

Kürt Computers is the company which put Hungarian high-tech on the map, according to Business Week. Its CEO and co-founder here reflects on their beginnings in a laundry (the only way they could get a licence to trade in 1989, his brother and co-founder had to take in the dry cleaning), the work ethos they had to develop in order to succeed in a market economy, their breakthrough (recovering data from destroyed stores in a major criminal fraud trial in London) and the company's logical and successful move into data protection.

EUROPE THE EUTIFUL

This section takes a wry look at the brave new world Hungary will find herself in from May 1st 2004.

Commission for European Standards: Literary (Draft 1)
by György Spiró

Tongue firmly in cheek, the playwright and novelist posits (through experience of socialist era regulations?) a Eurosprach position on how a piece of fiction is to be eligible for Brussels support.

In Search of Lost Fat Content
by Gábor Miklósi

A website set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year posts answers to the most frequently asked questions on the implications of Hungarian EU membership. One such question was on "pig-sticking", the traditional merry-making slaughter of the family pig in the Hungarian countryside. Gábor Miklósi casts a sparkling eye on this and on how membership will affect other traditional family fare, from chickens to geese, from poppy seeds to the fat content of milk.

The Self-Portraits of Lajos Vajda
by Nicolas Éber

A 2003 poll ranked Lajos Vajda as the second most important Hungarian painter working between 1892 and 1964.
The painter died in 1941 at the age of 35, victim of tuberculosis aggravated by service in the Labour Batallions (he was Jewish). After four years in Paris at the end of the twenties, he returned to spend his great productive years in Szentendre, a small Danube town noted for the Orthodox churches built by Serbs who had fled up-river from the Turks.
Nicolas Éber, who has written extensively on the painter, here argues that Vajda's 54 self-portaits are the pinnacle of and key to the understanding of his art. He examines the self-portraits completed in Szentendre between 1934 and 1938, culminating in Icon Self-Portrait Pointing Upwards, one of the pieces he argues for a renaming of.
This article is accompanied by 14 illustrations.

Alfréd Réth, Cubiste Extraordinaire
by Kálmán Makláry

The author of a book on the painter here provides an account of the life and the career of a key painter which began in Nagybánya ("Hungary's Barbizon"), through Cubism (he was shown in the very first Cubist exhibition in 1911) and ultimately, Abstraction. This included four and a half years of internment in France as an enemy alien during the First World War, a return to Paris and an involvement in non-figurative art during the years of German occupation (despite his Jewish origins), with a final return to figurative art in his last years.
Eleven colour plates.

Historians from the Enlightened Periphery
William Robertson and Mihály Horváth
By László Kontler

The holder of the Chair of History at Central European University brings together the contexts of two cultural revivals, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Hungarian Reform Era. Separated in time as well as geography, they both reflect the position of a minor party in a political union. To see how two countries on the periphery of Europe reacted, the work of the Scottish historian William Robertson is explored and that of Mihály Horváth is contextualized, and an avenue for further research is suggested.

Manners Maketh Magyars
by Anna Fábri

The literary historian examines some 19th century works on etiquette. She links their content to a social revolution that accompanied the political revolution of 1848, a desire to escape from a feudal society and its appurtenances of social discourse. Naturally this followed Western European models (indeed there was even one American model). She describes a salon kept by two striking independent women, the Wohl sisters, one of whom also wrote books on etiquette in this mode. Cheerful and unacknowledged plagiarism was not unusual, more importantly the problem of when and how to use the familiar second person pronoun was tackled.

Family Fortunes
by Mikós Györffy

Our reviewer here takes on three very different novels based on family sagas, one autobiographical (Júlia Láng's), one historical (Vilmos Csaplár's) and Balázs Györe's Father of the Dead . All three attempt to document the various periods and social milieus in which their protagonists are set. Happy-Book, also by Balázs Györe, and extracted here, is a gripping, first-person narrative about the hero as he attempts to nurse back to health his wife and the mother of their daughter, now a mental patient, by writing this very book.

The Golden Age of Gypsy Bands in Hungary
by Bálint Sárosi

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, the word 'Gypsy' as used in Hungary and abroad most probably referred to Hungarian Gypsy musicians rather than to the Gypsy ethnic group in general. But why specifically Hungarian Gypsy musicians, since Gypsy musicians lived and worked over the centuries amongst many peoples and do so to this day?"
Bálint Sárosi, who has written extensively on Gypsy music and on Hungarian folk music sets out here to trace the history and development of what we now call Gypsy ensembles and how they earned their living (" ... the musician carrying the plate round [the audience] had to keep a live fly in his palm, which he was to release only after the rest of the band had counted the money on the plate"). He describes the role of these ensembles in the shaping of Hungarian entertainment music and how their repertoire (and the musicians) came to be identified with the Hungarian national cause. In passing he notes the use of their music by composers such as Liszt and Berlioz.