Revolution 1956
In this and subsequent issues, The Hungarian Quarterly will examine the events and aftermath of the revolution that broke out on the 23rd of October 1956. The Hungarian attempt to overthrow a hated regime shook cold war Europe and impinged on its national memory for the long years that followed, when reference to and discussion of the Revolution was severely restricted.
 
The section in this issue contains a remarkable diary written by a twelve-year-old boy, a memoir by a Hungarian-speaking CIA officer who was posted to the US Legation in Budapest at the time, a cool assessment of the Revolution by a specialist in international relations and poems written in response to the events by five poets (Polish, Scots, French and Anglo-Hungarian).

A wealth of illustrations and photographs are supplied.

 

Notes to My Childhood Diary
by Gyula Csics

Chief Librarian of the Tatabánya County Library, Gyula Csics was brought up in Joseph Town in the very heart of Budapest and was twelve years old when the Revolution broke out. Inspired by the example of his best friend and playmate Jancsi Kovács, he decided to keep a daily journal of what was happening around him. He classified it as Top Secret until I'm as old as Grandpa.
Here he tells us something of the backdrop to the events, which he witnessed or recorded from the accounts of his family and neighbours, and of the afterlife of the diary into which he faithfully pasted in fliers, newspaper clippings and sketched in his own drawings of what he saw and did.
His diary has just been published in facsimile, as has that of Jancsi Kovács - discovered in a flea market and also brought out in a facsimile edition.

 

God Bless the Hungarians! Part I
by Gyula Csics

Extracts from a diary kept by a twelve-year-old resident of Pest

 

This is the first of two lengthy extracts from the diary the author kept during and after the 1956 Revolution. Here the diary provides a day-by-day narrative from October 23, the day the Revolution broke out, to the New Year's Eve of that year.
The author's original drawings are included to provide something of the flavour of his manuscript.
A fascinating account of confusion and violence, hope and disappointment, of snowball fights and model-making, of the everyday and of world-shaking events.
The footnotes have been supplied by the author himself and further extracts will appear in our next issue.

Poems
by Zbignew Herbert, Adam Wazyk, Edwin Morgan, Jules Superveille, George Gömöri

This is a selection of poems written in response to the Revolution, at the time or in retrospect, by the Polish poets Zbignew Herbert and Adam Wazyk, the Scots poet Edwin Morgan, the French poet Jules Superveille and the Anglo-Hungarian George Gömöri.

 

A Major Oversight on Our Part
Geza Katona, interviewed by Zsolt Csalog

This interview was conducted in 1984 by Zsolt Csalog, one of the pioneers of the oral history method in Hungarian journalism.
Geza Katona was born in the US to Hungarian parents and was posted in 1953 to the US Legation in Budapest as, in his own words, "an assistant to the political officer, his deputy, and ... head of the Legation's translation section." (In fact he was a CIA officer.)
As a fluent Hungarian speaker, he availed himself of every opportunity to make contact in non-official surroundings with ordinary Hungarians and sensed as early as the spring of 1955 "that something now had to happen." 
He vividly describes his personal sense of frustration at the lack of guidance from Washington as events rapidly unfurled and, in particular, at their misreading of the Imre Nagy government itself.

 

Fifty Years After
by Charles Gati

 "I find it particularly telling now that Moscow and even Washington came to see the failure of the Hungarian revolt as something of a success."
The author left Hungary as a young man of twenty-one after the collapse of the revolt and went on to have a distinguished academic career in the United States.
Here he dispassionately examines the evidence as it has come to light in the intervening fifty years, provides a brief account of what he himself saw and understood of the revolution and makes some comments on American, Soviet and Hungarian conduct during those weeks.

 

Sigismundus rex et imperator: Art and Culture in the Age of Sigismund of Luxembourg

This is the title of a major exhibition which is currently running in Budapest and which will transfer to Luxembourg later in the year.
A ruler better known to history for his cunning and martial exploits, Sigismund's court in Hungary saw a flourishing of the arts whose significance is being explored and celebrated through this exhibition. Two distinguished contributors, Paul Crossley of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and Ernő Marosi, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, examine his contribution to the court culture of later medieval and early Renaissance Europe.

These articles are accompanied by colour plates featuring some of the items discussed.

 

Emperor on the World Stage
by Paul Crossley

"In the last five years, a series of spectacular international loan exhibitions have thrown a wholly new light on the artistic patronage of the great monarchs who dominated northern European art in the late 14th and the 15th centuries... All these monarchs - Henry V of England, Phillip the Good of Burgundy, Charles VI of France, Charles IV of Luxemburg - and their courts contributed to what we used to call the International Gothic Style. But one great international and royal voice was, until now, curiously silent: the voice of Hungary and of its flamboyant, cultured, and politically assiduous king and emperor, Sigismund of Luxembourg ..."

 

Sigismund's Moment in Art History
by Ernő Marosi

The author wryly reveals something of how an art historian has to approach his subject by pointing out that the rex et imperator of the exhibition title almost certainly is an unconscious echo of a famous couplet from a well-known 19th-century Hungarian poem.
But then, as he says, "Art history is just as much about the telling of stories as history itself... The intention behind an exhibition such as this is nothing less than a revision of art history's 'European' or 'universal' 'grand' narrative." To illustrate this, he examines in detail a reliquary bust of Saint Ladislas, one of the king saints of the House of Árpád

 

Pickaxe
by György Dragoman

Chapter from the novel The White King

This is from the young Transylvanian writer's second novel, structured as a loosely connected chain of (partly autobiographical) short stories, set in an unspecified East European country living under Communism. The novel is reviewed by Miklós Györffy elsewhere in this issue.

 

How Many Histories Do We Have?
by Júlia Szalai

Ágnes Losonczi: Sorsba fordult történelem (History as Turned into Personal Fate). Budapest, Holnap Kiadó, 2005. 329 pages

Júlia Szalai, who heads the Department of Social Policy, the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, reflects on a set of oral histories conducted in the early nineties by a sociologist who is noted for her "concern with the discrepancies between public and private interpretations of the world".
In her book, Júlia Szalai set out to discover if her interviewees had been able to experience a personal "regime change" after 1989. The area chosen for her fieldwork is a traditionally middle-class district in Budapest, whose older residents had lived essentially their entire lives under an undemocratic regime. The interviews reveal how the middle-class had coded and camouflaged their values and family histories, passing this attitude on to the younger generations. Equally fascinating is the older generation's blocking off of the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath: "the first period of the narratives lasts until 1955, followed by a break, then the story line is picked up again somewhere in the mid-1960s", with most respondents producing "a markedly rosy picture of the 1980s".

 

 

English Influences on Modern Sport in Hungary. Part 2
by Miklós Zeidler

 

In this, the concluding part of his description of the development of sport in 19th-century Hungary, Miklós Zeidler focuses on the rise of athletics and "the triumphal march of football".
The great proponent of "athleticism" was Count Miksa Esterházy, arguing that the wider public was excluded from regular physical exercise and the country should raise muscularity to a "national religion".
It was association football that, as elsewhere, quickly took root, at schools and factories. One early match in 1896 took place after a heavy snowfall and involved the members of a railway workers' choir: "The players were loath to undress, but after much persuasion they were finally ready to play in overcoats and boots... The big match lasted just 20 minutes because in that time three ankles were fractured. I was ostracised by all the wives... and for six months could not show myself among them because I was a murderer in their eyes."

The article is accompanied with contemporary illustrations and two supplements: one a paean of praise for the English national character as formed by sports and the other a newspaper account of a week of matches between Hungarian selections and visiting English football teams in 1901.