Northern Air: A Hungarian Nova Zembla
A poem by George Szirtes

... history is death
remembered in our country. Childhood is this
frozen cloud, this vanished Nazareth

Sir John Mandeville's traveller's tale of a voyage to Nova Zembla in the far North describes how, on board ship, all the crew's conversation froze in the air and was only heard when they sailed back to warmer climes. In this long poem, the Anglo-Hungarian poet, who left Hungary in 1956, describes his own voyage from language to language, from memory to history.

 

Stories Set in Stone
by Árpád Mikó

András Kovács: Késő reneszánsz építészet Erdélyben, 1541-1720 (Late Renaissance Architecture in Transylvania, 1541-1720). Cluj-Budapest, 2006

"What we have now is a new story of what was a vernacular Transylvanian Renaissance style and also its context, one fundamentally different from the established view.
Árpád Mikó, Curator at the National Gallery in Budapest, writes on a scholarly work which has become a bestseller, describing the historical and artistic contexts in which the distinctive forms of Transylvanian architecture - urban, fortifications, manor houses and ecclesiastical - emerged, particularly during Transylvania's golden age during the first half of the seventeenth century. "Scholarly appraisals in the field will rely on this book for decades to come."
This article is accompanied by colour plates and drawings from the book under review.

Hands and Constructs-The Art of Béla Kondor
by Éva Forgács

The art historian, who has published widely on European avant-gardes, writes on a commemorative exhibition and catalogue devoted to Béla Kondor (1929-1972), "the most idiosyncratic artist of his generation and even of post-war Hungarian art". Unexpectedly she finds similarities between his oeuvre and that of Lajos Vajda (1909-1941) in certain "motifs and a palpable desire to rise above material reality". She examines Kondor's use of these motifs, in particular the hand and icons, and his success in expressing political dissent (he openly thematized the 1956 Revolution).
Illustrations covering the works discussed in the text are included.

 

The Files
by István Deák

"Interception of Internal Reactionary Behaviour and Sabotage-Field of Culture." Such was the name of the department at the Ministry of the Interior to which the informer keeping tabs on István Deák reported, when the distinguished Hungarian-American historian was a visiting scholar and exchange fellow in Budapest during the 1960s and early 1970s.
"In 1973 ... I was suddenly called in to police headquarters where two polite men in mufti ... informed me ... that being guilty of grave crimes against the People's Republic, I ought to be arrested and tried; in view of the somewhat improved relations between the United States and Hungary, I would only be expelled. When I tried to inquire about the nature of my crimes, I was told 'to examine my conscience'. This I was to do in vain for the next thirty-three years..."
Professor Deák uses his own case to explore and reflect on the workings of the informer networks the security authorities established under the Communist regime, after he managed to access his own dossier at the Historical Archive of the State Security Services in Budapest.

I N T E R V I E W S

You Cannot Integrate Everything: George Schöpflin on the Dilemmas of Diversity

"I think that further integration is both desirable and inevitable."
The Jean Monnet Professor of Political Science at the University of London and a sitting member of the European Parliament is here interviewed by Gábor Buzási of Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Orsolya Gergely of Sapientia University in Transylvania. George Schöpflin discusses the consensual nature of this integration, the role of national minorities in Europe, referring in particular to Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania, and the "victimhood discourse" prevalent in the Central European region.

 

A Leap to Faith: Mark Rylance in Conversation with László Bérczes

László Bérczes is artistic director of the Bárka Theatre Company in Budapest whose recent production of Hamlet (reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Tamás Koltai) brought the great Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance to Budapest recently. In this interview Mark Rylance ranges over the exploration of space that London's Globe Theatre demands of actors, the nature of performance ("For me at the theatre everyone is an actor. I always imagine the audience as other actors in the play. Other characters in the play"), interpretation and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

CLOSE-UP: FAMILY AND GENDER Two articles here examine aspects of social organization. Olga Tóth writes on the marked changes over the last fifteen years in family organization and attitudes, while Kata Jávor examines in detail gender roles in a traditional village in the north of Hungary.

Modern Behaviour, Traditional Values
by Olga Tóth

"...cohabitation was, up until 1990, a lifestyle common to the uneducated and those of lower social status. The one exception here was the situation of widows who chose not to marry a new partner; this would have involved the loss of their widow's pension, the only source of income for those who had not secured a right to their own pensions."

Olga Tóth's fields are family, gender and generations. She here surveys the significant changes in marriage, divorce and child-rearing statistics that have occurred over the last thirty years, while the values attached to them have not undergone a commensurate shift.

Tradition Bound-Roles and Gender in a Hungarian Village
by Kata Jávor

Remote from good transport links, the village of Varsány (with a population of 1,778) is more than usually tradition bound. Kata Jávor is an ethnographer who has been engaged in field work there since the early 1970s. She describes the gradual impact of modern life on patterns of labour, authority and the socialisation of the young: "discrimination between men and women remains a fundamental factor of social organization in the village."

 

1956
Three of the many books that came out to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution are here reviewed. George Gömöri, a participant in the events of 1956 and long since resident in England, discusses two books just published in English, while Péter Hahner, who holds the chair of History at the University of Pécs, assesses the latest publication in Osiris press's "Nation and Memory" series, a compilation of documents and contemporary views on the events of 1956.
Erzsébet Bori devotes half of her film review to the American documentary film, Freedom's Fury by the brother and sister team of Colin K. Gray and Megan Raney Aarons, whose subject is the infamous water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union played at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics after the crushing of the Revolution, when the pool ran red with blood.
Two short stories in this issue bear on 1956, both by authors who left Hungary as young men in the wake of the Revolution- György Ferdinandy (Hiatus) for Paris and, later, Latin America and Mátyás Sárközi (A Bellyful of Byzantium) for London.

Through British Eyes
by George Gömöri

Peter Unwin: 1956: Power Defied. Norwich, 2006.
Victor Sebestyen: Twelve Days: Revolution 1956. London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006.

Peter Unwin, after a previous posting to Budapest between 1958 and 1961, served as British ambassador to Hungary from 1983 to 1986. (One of his sons was baptized by Cardinal Mindszenty.). His book is thus a combination of "personal reminiscences and cool political analysis". He emphasizes the "all-important" Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and sees the Suez crisis as swinging the Soviet military over to the side of armed intervention in Hungary.
Victor Sebestyen was an infant when his family quit Hungary; his is an "informative, well constructed" day by day account of the Revolution, critical of Radio Free Europe's broadcasting during those twelve Autumn days.

A Fitting Commemoration
by Péter Hahner

Attila Szakolczai (ed.): 1956. Budapest, Osiris, 2006.

"... it will do the younger generation no harm to be given a sense of the climate of the early 1950s. And what could summon up the climate of Hungary's Stalinist era better than having Stalin's obituary passed as an Act of Parliament?" comments Péter Hahner on this selection of documents, views and comments from politicians and scholars and even people with jokes to tell.

HISTORY
The Afterlife of the Trianon Peace Treaty
by Géza Jeszenszky

Miklós Zeidler: A revíziós gondolat (The Idea of Revision), Budapest, Osiris, 2001; Archimédesz Szidiropulosz: Trianon utóélete, I-III. (The Afterlife of Trianon, I-III), Budapest, 2002, 2003, n.d.; Ágnes Beretzky: Scotus Viator és Macartney Elemér: Magyarország-kép változó előjelekkel (Scotus Viator and Aylmer Macartney: Images of Hungary with Variable Indicators), Budapest, 2005.

"...while professional historians now tend to dispute only minor details about the 1918-1920 period, politicians and the interested public tend to politicize the discussions and show little interest in historical accuracy."
The historian (and former Hungarian Foreign Minister) surveys three recent works that focus on the post-First World War peace treaty that broke up the old Kingdom of Hungary, awarding two-thirds of its territory and half of its inhabitants (of whom 3.5 million were ethnic Hungarians) to the successor states-"the most drastic dismemberment of a country in history, apart from the partition (and obliteration from the map) of Poland in 1796."
He gives a succinct account of the political responses to the treaty since 1920 and of perceptions of its consequences down to the present day.

George Kennan, Hungary and Changes in Eastern Europe
by John Lukacs

This edited text of a lecture delivered by the historian to the Central European University in Budapest is by way of an introduction to two letters written by George Kennan (1904-2005)to the author (also published here). In addition to his personal memories, Lukacs summarizes Kennan's long and productive career as a diplomatist, policy-maker, historian and commentator, a man who had imbued himself in the history and affairs of East and Central Europe, formulated the doctrine of "containment" and was highly critical of U.S. Cold War approaches to the Soviet Union and its bloc..

MUSIC Ligeti Was...
by Paul Griffiths

"Ligeti was one of the most admired composers we had. Ligeti was an extraordinary craftsman, a creator of rainbows through time, fantastical and frolicsome... Ligeti was all those things and more. There had been no new music from him since 2002 ... but there always might be. Now there will not, and we have to look at an output that is complete."
Helping us to do so is Clear and Cloudy, a four disc compilation from Deutsche Grammophon consisting of first recordings of some of György Ligeti's works alongside more recent recordings, which prompts the music critic to discuss aspects of the composer's oeuvre, including its Hungarianness.