"Poets have written more about homesickness than psychologists have. People infected with homesickness do not go to psychologists, for they do not believe it will heal them to have their consciousness-and what lies underneath it-picked apart. They know exactly what hurts. They know that understanding the cause of their problem is as about as helpful as a plague-infested patient being shown a picture of the bacteria that caused it."
Alexander Lenard
Alexander Lenard is one of many who pursued their careers at greater or lesser distances in time and space from Hungary. Born in 1910, he left the country when he was eight years old, graduated in medicine in Vienna, left for Italy at the time of the Anschluss (he had Jewish blood), settled in Brazil ("it looked big and green on the map") in 1951 and died there in 1972 in the back country of one its more remote states.
Lenard made the headlines with his Latin translation of Milne's Winnie the Pooh, which was a bestseller in the United States and other countries. He wrote or rewrote his works in Hungarian, English, German, Italian and was "rediscovered" for Hungarian literature by Klára Szerb, widow of the writer Antal Szerb killed by the Nazis in 1945 and now of world fame. Her first contact with Lenard was the arrival of a hand-written translation into German of Szerb's The Queen's Necklace in 1965. From this sprang a fruitful and increasingly intimate correspondence which lasted to the end of Lenard's life, extracts from which are introduced by Péter Siklós. On her encouragement Lenard wrote up a day in his life, which eventually became A Day in the Invisible House, his first truly "Hungarian" book.
Who Was Alexander Lenard?
An Interview with Klára Szerb
A hitherto unpublished interview with Antal Szerb's widow, in which she describes her initial contact with Lenard, his straightened circumstances living on the edge of the rain forests of Santa Caterina (winning a Bach competition allowed him to purchase a farm and a pharmacy), and comments on some of the books she encouraged him to bring out in Hungarian.
A Day in the Invisible House (Extracts)
by Alexander Lenard
Inspired by Klára Szerb (she asked him when they finally met in person in the United States to write about a day in his life) these extracts range over his quasi-legal status in Fascist Italy (his expired Hungarian passport could not be renewed since he fell under the Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation), the meaning of exile and his service as physician to the Hungarian College in Rome in the aftermath of the war, which allowed him to make contacts and friendships with many visitors who were to become prominent in Hungarian literary life.
Mordantly ironic on the subject of official Hungary in the Rome of 1943, painfully tender on home and exile and laconically humorous on the subject of pigs and sunburnt distinguished Hungarian scholars, the extracts display Lenard's eye for the telling detail and its formulation.
The Klára Szerb-Alexander Lenard Correspondence
by Péter Siklós
The author, who has done extensive research into Lenard's works written in German, provides a detailed background to this substantial (over a thousand items) correspondence.
The 1965 Letters: A Selection
A brief selection from the first year of a correspondence which became warmer and more confiding as it continued, culminating in Klára Szerb's harrowing account of exhuming her husband's body from a mass grave in order to have it properly reinterred in Budapest.
Annotated by Péter Siklós.
Workdays and Wonders
by András Beck
Three Antal Szerb typescripts discovered in a second-hand bookshop, the pre-war Hungarian Quarterly, Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame, Antal Szerb and the British Museum library: András Beck pulls all of this together by way of an introduction to one of the typescripts, here published for the first time.
Hungary in the Older English Literature
by Antal Szerb
". a nation is always curious, how it is considered by other nations"
Probably a response to a request for an article from the editor of The Hungarian Quarterly around 1940, this draft, written in English, is one of the fruits of Szerb's hours in the British Museum Library, a delightful skim through the references to Hungary by the author of The Pendragon Legend.
The typescript is published here virtually unedited, with no attempt to remove grammatical lapses and inelegancies of language.
Schengen Blues
by Gábor Miklósi
In December 2007, Hungary was one of a further nine EU states to join the Schengen zone, within which Hungarian citizens are allowed to travel without border controls or passports across most of Europe.
Gábor Miklósi recalls with relish some of the bureaucratic traps that were laid for his (post-communist) generation by the authorities, agreeing with Imre Kertész's story "Sworn Statement" (HQ 163), which implies "that it takes longer to change the relationship between the citizen and the state than it takes to change the political system." The Schengen border is now at Hungary's eastern and southern frontiers, making travel across these borders more difficult than before. The current implications and some of the absurdities of the borders are described.
István Hargittai, the holder of the chair of Chemistry at Budapest's University of Technology and author of The Martians of Science (O.U.P., 2006, reviewed in this issue by the physicist János Kirz) surveys the involvement of the physicist Edward Teller in the Manhattan Project, the central part he played in the development of the hydrogen bomb and his crucial role in the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Teller was the youngest of a remarkable group of Jewish-Hungarian scientists who pursued their careers first in Germany and, after the rise of Nazism, in the United States. The most political of the group, he was shunned by most of his scientific peers after testifying against Robert Oppenheimer during the latter's security clearance hearing (clearance was revoked). He devoted more and more of his time to working with the political and military leadership of the United States and is seen as the father of the Star Wars project that contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Edward Teller-Guardian of Freedom or Dr. Strangelove?
by István Hargittai
Teller's life (1908-2003) was a series of exiles. "Teller's first exile was from Hungary, from where he was driven out by anti-Semitism and the lack of prospects for building a meaningful life. Hitler and Nazism forced him out of Germany and Europe. Each of these first two exiles were involuntary and both led to an improved situation and greater opportunities. The third exile was different. It was a consequence of his own actions and it isolated him from what was most important to him, the community of physicists."
Professor Hargittai looks at the scientific and political career of a man who was later put forward by some as the model for the deranged war-mongering Nazi scientist in Kubrick's 1964 satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, a simplistic identification which Professor Hargittai rejects.
Memory and History: Visiting Edward Teller
by Tibor Frank
In 1988 Professor Tibor Frank was a Fulbright visiting professor researching the great wave of immigration of Hungarian intellectuals to the United States in the interwar years at Stanford University. He describes here a touchy meeting with Edward Teller, Teller's refusal to return to Hungary while the Communists were in power and his subsequent first visit in over sixty years in 1990.
Major Players
by János Kirz
Teller's nephew, the physicist János Kirz, reviews István Hargittai's The Martians of Science which provides parallel accounts of the lives and careers of five great scientists, Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963), Leo Szilard (1898-1964), Eugene P. Wigner (1902-1995), John von Neumann (1903-1957) and Edward Teller (1908-2003), all of whom were to play crucial roles in weapons development in their adopted country, the United States.
A Plea For Vaszary
by Ilona Sármány-Parsons
"An artist of a small nation is practically expected to be an epigone. If he should make a genuinely original contribution to any of the 'styles' that is his idiom at any particular time, he is immediately suspect to the opinion-makers. Contradictory judgments await such an artist in this part of the world: either he is accused of slavishly adopting something that is foreign and alien to local traditions, or he is faulted for not following his original mentor(s) with sufficient accuracy. The non-classifiable painter is thus branded as either unpatriotic or insufficiently progressive."
Ilona Sármány-Parsons, who has published widely on the art of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, takes the opportunity of a recent major retrospective of the work of János Vaszary (1867-1939) to reassess the prolific oeuvre of a painter who has fallen victim to this judgment. She points out that some of the critical dismissal of his work derives from the fact that, from the very outset, he was painting in different styles and genres. She follows the astonishing number of periods that can be discerned in his work, all the way from early genre paintings with rural subjects, through Secessionism, war paintings and Post-Impressionism to his final burst of work celebrating Budapest.
Why Won't He Tell a Proper Story?
Imre Kertész in Conversation with Zsigmond Sándor Papp
"People like to kid themselves that the world around them is rational, so if someone spotlights its irrationality, not everyone takes kindly to that. What's he messing around with? Why won't he tell a proper story?"
In this recent interview the Nobel Laureate discusses the responsibility of the writer in society, how he defines success, his reasons for living in Berlin ("I like the city, it provides inspiration") and his plans ("I've reached the age of seventy-eight, and I'm cautious: I limit my ambitions to a single book").
All That Fall: Upsides of the Shorter Fictions of Imre Kertész
by Tim Wilkinson
With the paucity of his work available in English translation, readers of that language "are hardly in a position to appreciate that there are several strands that run through all his writing. Impressive continuities are traceable over the last thirty years or more. In particular that Kertész's theme or message is of much wider relevance than the ghetto of 'Holocaust' literature to which, in view of the non-accessibility of important parts of the oeuvre, it has been all too easy to assign him."
Tim Wilkinson, whose translation of Kertész's Fatelessness won the Pen Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005, here invokes some of these strands to set the novelist into the mainstream of literature, pointing out parallels with the work of Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, to name but two other writers.
Eternal Operetta
by Ivan Sanders
András Gerő, Dorottya Margitai and Tamás Gajdó: A Csárdáskirálynő: Egy monarchikum története (The Csárdás Princess: The History of a Monarchicum). Budapest, Habsburg Történeti Intézet/Pannonica Kiadó, 2006, 172 pp., illustrated.
Imre (Emmerich) Kálmán (1882-1953) spent much of his life outside his native country but never wanted to be known as anything but a Hungarian composer.
". most of Kálmán's operettas were born in Vienna and were products of popular Viennese culture. Put another way, they were representative examples of a musical genre which in many ways unified the multifarious Austro-Hungarian Empire . The Csárdás Princess found its true audience in Central Europe."
Ivan Sanders of Columbia University reviews this new book to examine the abiding appeal of Imre Kálmán's operetta and to follow the history of its performance in Hungary, where it was revived in the thaw after Stalin's death.
Shane Danielsen, the former artistic director of the Edinburgh Film Festival was interviewed in Budapest while attending this year's Hungarian Film Week. He casts a critical, though sympathetic, eye on what has been happening in Hungarian cinema in recent years, pointing out that a viable industry has to produce commercially viable movies as well as arthouse movies.
A new film from Béla Tarr, a director favourably referred to by Danielsen, is reviewed by Erzsébet Bori.
Telling Stories Would Be a Good Start
Shane Danielsen in Conversation with Dávid Dercsényi
"It's an unpopular view, but communism is the best thing that ever happened to Hungarian cinema. How could a filmmaker like Miklós Jancsó have achieved his vision without the resources of the studios of the Communist party? . All these filmmakers were . forced to be cunning and clever because . they tried to make films beneath the censorship radar. suddenly you have nothing to say because everything can be said."
From a Tower, Darkly
by Erzsébet Bori
Béla Tarr: The Man From London
"The Man From London is [Tarr's] first film in which Hungarian is not spoken and the story is not quintessentially Eastern European. (Judging from the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed by foreign critics, and the slight bewilderment of domestic critics, the points of reference have shifted: from Tarkovsky to the classic film noir.)"
Based on a Simenon short story, Tarr's new film marks both a departure and a continuation from a director whose international reputation is now established. Our film reviewer explains why.
