Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)

Three articles and an interview to mark the centenary of a writer who maintained contacts with his native Hungary to the end of his days, despite leaving it at the age of eight.

In the first, András Zoltán Bán deconstructs a famous photograph taken of the thirty-two year old Koestler, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette just after being captured by the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War. The photograph was taken by the Captain who had already publicly promised to shoot Koestler 'like a dog" if he managed to find him.

The next two are concerned with Koestler's most important contact with the Hungarian literary scene, in the person of Andor Németh, a relationship so important to him that he devoted a full chapter in his autobiography to its ending.

Finally, we publish the transcript of a Voice of America interview with Pál Ignotus, himself an important figure in that inter-war scene.

The Mentor : Andor Németh
by János Boris

"Andor Németh, poet, novelist, critic and essayist was ... a central and highly regarded figure in the literary life of Budapest in the interwar period, as editor, reviewer, friend, man of letters at large and a 'character'." So begins János Boris's wry account of the man, probably best remembered now as the friend and biographer of the great poet Attila József, who was Koestler's essential link to Budapest and its literary life, as Koestler himself describes in his autobiography. It was through Németh that Koestler met Attila József, some of whose poems he translated together with Laurie Lee. The relationship, as János Boris says, was obviously more important to Koestler than to Németh.

Memoirs of Koestler
by Andor Németh

These extracts from Németh's (largely dictated) memoirs cover some of his encounters with Koestler in Budapest and abroad, touching also on his (vain) attempt to persuade André Gide to encourage his publisher to bring out a French translation of Tibor Déry's great novel The Unfinished Sentence.

"The Contact Has Always Remained"
A Conversation between Arthur Koestler and Pál Ignotus

Pál Ignotus was another central figure in Budapest literary life before the Second World War, among other things co-editing the important literary journal Szép Szó with the great poet Attila József; after 1956 he edited the leading Hungarian literary journal in the West, Irodalmi Újság. (In between he had worked at the press section of the Hungarian mission in London after the war, was recalled to Hungary and imprisoned.) In this interview Koestler describes how he and Laurie Lee worked on translating some of József's poetry and how he tried to encourage W.H. Auden to take on a translation of some of the Hungarian poet's verse. He finally outlines his latest theory that evolution has produced genetically mad, murderous and self-destructive homo sapiens.

Poems
by Anna T. Szabó

The young poet, herself a translator of English poetry, appears here in translations by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. The poem we print is a gripping report on the emotions in the experience of motherhood.

Four Short Stories
by János Háy

The latest of János Háy's fourteen books is a collection of his plays, most of which are based on his short stories. He is published in English here for the first time, in Eugene Brogyányi's translation. We publish here two of these laconic vignettes of life at the fringe.

Letters to a Fellow Historian from Dalmatia
by Ignác Romsics

Ignác Romsics here supplies, in the form of seven letters, an afterword to his acclaimed Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest, Corvina, 1999). In the first of these he likens the function of a historian to that of a "court reporter", obliged to recount what both sides in a case have submitted in evidence and to summarize any ensuing verdict.

His second is largely devoted to the 19th century chimera of a Hungarian nation state capable of assimilating its ethnic minorities, an unresolved problem that led to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the aftermath of the First World War, which he describes in his third letter.

The assessment on the Horthy era he published in 1979 (by which he stands) and the professional reaction to it are treated in the next letter. The sixth is a clear-eyed assessment of the Kádár period and "homo kadaricus" as he still lives.

He concludes with a glance at some of the post-1989 changes and some of the political personalities involved.

Painting the Nude (Illustrated)
by Ilona Sármány-Parsons

A modell. Női akt a 19. századi Magyar müvészetben (Female Nude Imagery in 19th-Century Hungarian Art) Exhibition Catalogue. Budapest , Hungarian National Gallery, 2004.

A specialist on the visual arts, particularly painting, of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Ilona Sármány-Parsons here contextualizes the stylistic trends that related to the nude in Hungarian painting in a period largely coinciding with the Victorian era.

After describing where the visual arts stood in Hungarian society at the time of the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 and the issue of patronage, she touches on the early attempts to present the female nude and the first generation of modernist painters, such as Vaszary and Rippl-Rónai.

She traces the changes in social behaviour that the rapid urbanization of Budapest had brought about, with a younger generation looking to Berlin and, especially, Paris in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War, as examples in taste and the arts.

Of the studies and articles in the catalogue, she remarks on the increased opportunity the younger generation of art scholars to re-evaluate individual painters and careers, as a result of access to travel funds and scholarships since 1989.

This article is lavishly illustrated.

Looking Again at the Canon (Illustrated)
by Éva Forgács

Modern Hungarian Painting 1892-1919.
Modern Hungarian Painting 1919-1964.
Edited by Tams Kieselbach. Kieselbach Gallery Budapest , 2003, 2004.
The Hidden Treasures of Hungarian Painting.
Selection from Hungarian Private Collections, Volume I. 1853-1919
Edited by Judit Virág and István Törő, Budapest , Mű-Terem Gallery, 2004.

The art historian, who has written extensively on the avant-gardes of Central Europe , reflects on the canon and collecting in reviewing these two books, the first of which is illustrated on a scale never seen before in Hungarian publishing, with almost 2,500 in the two volumes.

Bartók Interpretation and National Music
Zoltán Kocsis Talks to Zoltán Farkas

"Péter Eötvös [recently said] that, right to this day, musical style still develops according to nations and languages, and that you can hear very quickly where a contemporary work was written. He also mentioned that Bartók is often conducted strangely abroad because he is not understood nor is his idiom understood." This is how Zoltán Farkas leads into a fascinating interview with Zoltán Kocsis, who approaches the topic not only as a pianist (one of the few who plays all three Bartók piano concertos) but as a conductor. Kocsis is adamant on the importance of Bartók's markings of tempi and, where possible, of the study of Bartók's own playing.

Bartók in Hungarian Poetry
by Péter Laki

"... poets (like the rest of us) have felt Bartók's music to be like his gaze: inescapable." No composer has had as many poems written about him as Béla Bartók. Citing the editor of the most recent anthology devoted solely to poems written about Bartók in Hungary , Péter Laki points out there are more than 300 of them, written by some 200 poets. The earliest that Professor Laki knows of is in English and by Amy Lowell in 1914, whose violent imagery is to be echoed by many other poets who knew their subject more intimately than she could have. The author, who is Visiting Professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, connects various poets' responses to individual Bartók works and to the iconic status Bartók has held in Hungary, not just because of his music but for his moral integrity.

The Second Wave
Speaking Out on the Holocaust
by Erzsébet Bori

Péter Muszatics: A folyamat (The Process) - Éva Pataki Herzl - Zoltán Buzási: Csönderdő (Forest of Silence) - János Zelki: Le hájim (For the Life) - Ágota Varga: Porrajmos (Gypsy Holocaust), Fekete lista (Black List) - Tivadar Fátyol: Út a halálba (Road to Death) - Irén Kármán: Szép, sima kő (A Fine Smooth Stone) - László Martinidesz: Mauthasentől a Dob utcáig (From Mauthausen to Dob Street) - Barbara Spitzer: Ami megmaradt belőle (Memories of a Journey)

Our regular film critic points out that, after the first surge of documentaries devoted to the Hungarian Holocaust after 1989, there is a distinct second wave of film-making on the fate of Hungarian Jews and Gypsies. The first wave found itself dealing with a topic that had largely been neglected for many years; she describes ten documentaries entered for this year's Film Festival and welcomes them as part of this second wave. Within it the form and genre varies greatly, from educational through reportage and portraiture to a personal approach, all of which are exemplified by the films the article here describes.

A subscription will bring you all this and much much more!