The Literary Wardens of Hungary

...This explains how the revolutionary councils and the free radio stations drew up their demands in so similar a manner: parliamentary democracy, limited planned economy and neutrality...

...They glanced through their work and were shocked by the lies they had written, and by the silly, unconvincing, empty slogans...

...Before World War II, Hungarian literature determined by its own rules and measures what a work was worth...

...The core of the conflict is formulated succinctly by Meray and Aczel as follows: "When the young writers asked themselves the question of who was really responsible for everything that had happened in the country, they had to admit, with aching hearts and disturbed minds, that they too had been accomplices, and that they too had been responsible . . . that they had been helpers, agitators, and propagandists in all that had happened...

...Aczel, the prototype of a faithful Communist intellectual, had joined the Party in 1945, and as homage to Stalin changed his family name of Auspitz to Aczel, which in Hungarian means what Stalin does in Russian—steel...

...In the foreword of their jointly written book, The Revolt of the Mind, they say that they "were worse than Communists—they were Stalinists...

...The example to be followed was, naturally...

...Aczel, barely 26 years old, was awarded a Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest literary decoration...

...Now, Meray and Aczel write derisively about these intellectual exercises, but admit that "they did not open their eyes" until 1954...

...Imre Nagy was driven out of power and the Party turned back to the Stalinist path...

...In this atmosphere of intrigue and danger, two young Communist intellectuals called attention to themselves by their unconditional conformity: Tibor Meray and Tamas Aczel...

...Nobody thought there could be a change, nobody dared hope for anything better...

...In the March 12, 1952 issue of the leading Party paper, Szabad Nep, Meray, who had already made a successful journalistic career, published his dreadful report on bacteriological warfare in Korea...

...In March 1953, Meray was given a Kossuth Prize for "exposing (U.S...

...Reviewed by Imre Kovacs Author, "The Silent Revolution," "The Ninety and the Nine" ONE FINAL YEAR remained in the life of Stalin, whose paranoic suspicion was rising to a climax and who, in 1952, was still absolute ruler of the Soviet sphere...

...Gyorgy Lukacs, whose better self lived in European culture and who handed over only his weakest half to the Party, immediately drew a line between himself and these Muscovites...

...At the beginning of 1945, certain exiled Communist writers returned from the Soviet Union and brought with them the criterion of "socialist realism," from then on the only and absolute standard of every literary creation...

...After destroying or silencing its enemies, the regime was devouring its own children, the best elements of the Communist movement...

...These two writers had committed the most profound intellectual betrayal: Of their own volition they had submitted to the Party will and for this they received everything the Communist regime was able to provide—high honors and incomes, privileges and immunities...

...The book's greatest deficiency is that it does not concern itself with non-Communist literature...

...bacteriological warfare...

...Rajk had been hanged at the end of 1949, and hundreds of the most capable Communists shared his fate...

...As soon as the Revolt broke out Populist writers quickly filled the vacuum created by the Communist regime's collapse with a program approved by the entire country...

...The Horthy regime intervened by applying the appropriate articles of the penal code only in case a writer's work "offended the interests of the state": that is, if he "insulted the nation" or "incited against the landowner class" (which is why I was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in 1937 for my book, The Silent Revolution...

...But all this is only an intellectual Potemkin facade behind which they hide their own errors and those of their associates...

...The book lacks the internal struggles of a Koestler, a Silone or an Orwell, or even of a Milovan Djilas—the painful battle of soul and intellect over whether it was correct to break with the Party and the movement...

...It took another year—and the revelation of the unprecedented crimes in the Rajk affair—to make them at last realize the kind of system they were supporting...

...They had lied, lied, lied...

...who, since the 1930s, had looked for a Hungarian solution between the deadly doctrines of Fascism and Communism...

...This is a monumental error because the circle of Hungarian "Party-minded writers" to whom Meray and Aczel restricted their inquiry were at the most trying to reform Communism, but in no case to overthrow it...

...In February 1955...

...the Party offered them only an opportunity to make careers after the bleakness of the Horthy era, an opportunity they exploited with dreadful eagerness...

...Not because they wanted to lie, but because they had listened to the infallible and powerful party and had allowed it to tell them what their mission was...

...Hungary endured Communism with total apathy...

...Meray and Aczel do not stand before us in the role of Communists converted, of stray lambs found again...

...Their eyes were not yet opened even in the summer of 1953, when Imre Nagy announced his program to their country...

...But for a long time, a struggle had gone on inside the Party...

...Revai dictated in the name of the Party (and of Moscow), but was guided in his actions and decisions mostly by his own emotions, passions and advanced schizophrenia...

...Those who remained followed the Party with terrified servility...

...With the support of the Party and the political section of the Red Army, they quickly occupied the key positions of cultural and artistic life...

...He had been in Korea since August 1951, and in a series of articles told of "the atrocities of the American imperialists...

...It must be said to their honor that the most talented Communist writers all chose freedom...

...According to the authors, the book deals with those Communist writers who, disillusioned with Stalinism and Rakosism, "became the vanguard of the revolution...

...The well-known and respected Tibor Dery, whose Communist indoctrination took place at home in the illegal underground Party, also defended his intellectual integrity and sovereignty to the end: with contempt he turned away from the Muscovites and particularly from their cultural commissar, Jozsef Revai...

...If the Revolt of 1956 had its storm birds, they were the Populist writers (Laszlo Nemeth, Gyula Illyes, Peter Veres, etc...

...the way moods, colors, smells, anxieties, fears, resolutions, decisions and failures are rendered indicates true creative talents...

...He was shortly followed by Gyula Hay, who was more talented than the average Muscovite, and whose drama about Hussites, God, Emperor, Soldier, attracted attention even outside the Soviet Union...

...By that time, violent debates were already taking place in the Writers' Union...

...The precise exposition of the Communist regime is particularly praiseworthy...

...With professional skill they put before us tense, dramatic scenes in Party headquarters or in the Writers' Union...

...The USSR in 1952 followed suit, and gave him a Stalin Prize, the highest literary award in the Communist world, for his work in general, but primarily for his novel...

...Under Imre Nagy's "New Course" the Rajkists and Social Democrats had been freed from the prisons and internment camps, and they had started "the ferment" which alarmed Rakosi...

...They never did really believe in Communism...

...His proconsul in Hungary, veteran Communist Matyas Rakosi, kept a firm, self-assured grip on the Hungarian people...

...He called U.S...

...if not 1955...

...pilots "air bandits" who drop their bombs "indiscriminately" on innocent towns without any military importance...

...Meray and Aczel must be praised for daring finally to break with the Party leadership, and, after the uprising, for breaking with the Party...

...Those great disillusioned followers of "The God That Failed" did not, could not, easily give up the ideal, because they still believed in a "purified" Communism or Socialism, like a priest who breaks only with the church, the petrified form, but all his life keeps arguing and wrestling with God—or, what is the same thing, with his conscience...

...The older ones simply returned to the bourgeois ideals of the writer's independence and freedom of creation, which they had heedlessly deserted...

...They had been the literary wardens of their country...

...These are hard words, frank words, true words...

...Soviet literature...

...Meray and Aczel's book makes pleasant, lively reading...

...Hungarian writers learned their lesson during visits to Moscow or when Soviet writers visiting Hungary lectured them...

...As the work of trained propagandists, The Revolt of the Mind will be useful in convincing the world's Communists and fellow travelers—who might believe it only from former Hungarian Communists—of what has happened in Hungary, and what has gone on in the past 13 years of Communist power...

...What The Revolt of the Mind promises in the title it does not give in its contents...

...There were various trends, but no central guidance and supervision...

...But the writers moved forward with courage and enthusiasm and the break between the Party and literature became inevitable...

...They played their role well...

...The disillusioned ones went to the villages and factories to study the economic and social conditions of the working people on the spot...

...They not only believed in the system but they also fanatically supported it...

...Published in 1948, his novel, In the Shadow oj Freedom, which dealt with the transformation of a "country liberated by the Red Army," was praised by Party critics but ignored by the public...

...Aside from a few condescending remarks, the authors did not consider it important to discuss the writers and writing of the true Hungarian literature...

...Thousands lay in prisons and forced labor camps, others were deported to remote villages...

...And when the Revolt broke out anyway, they disappeared in a matter of days...

...Most of the young Communist writers were shocked to realize that they were the victims of literary deception, and they turned against the Muscovites...