Hunkies in Toledo

Imre Oravecz's new novel, Californian Quail takes the reader into the world of Eastern European guest workers in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The author spoke about the traumas and the predicament of Hungarian workers in America at a press breakfast in Budapest.

Copywriting and literature

While in some parts of the world writers often appear in the media, and even lend their faces to ads, Hungarian writers rarely seem to descend from the ivory tower. So a poet advertising a dish soap still causes consternation for many.

Bans and taboos: censorship in the Kádár era

According to Communist ideology, literature shapes consciousness. This explains why the regime was so much interested in literature. – A discussion on censorship in Communist Hungary.

Literary lovers: Miklós Radnóti and Fanni Gyarmati

Their love was not an idyll without tensions as the textbooks would have it, yet that is precisely what made it an indissoluble bond, still alive today. Fanni Gyarmati, who was 100 last year, is still living in the apartment that the couple used to share.

Teenagers in focus – classic/popular Shakespeare?

A case study of present-day Hungarian reception

Shakespeare is an appealing cultural commodity in present-day Hungary. Even today, however, teenagers mostly face an archival and canonical view of Shakespeare’s plays, though there has been a shift towards a more up-to-date appreciation.

Literature and censorship in the Kádár era in Hungary

This paper examines reader's reports in the archives of a Hungarian publishing house, and provides a glimpse into the elaborate ritual of tacit negotiations and the exercise of self-censorship in the Kádár era.

Confrontations and interactions

With its objects and its environment, St Stephen's Park in Budapest encapsulates the ways in which recent history was monumentalised in Hungary by various ideologies. - This introductory essay is a fitting hors d'oeuvre to the essays revolving around cultural memory, edited by a team of scholars at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

The Memory Room

The Translators’ House in Balatonfüred, like so many other institutions of its kind, is dependent on both private, institutional and government largesse. The largesse, it seems now, may run out. Or is in danger of running out.

The internal and unremitting exile of Sándor Márai

Márai’s diary, begun in Budapest well before the gathering storm of Fascist Arrow-Cross occupation and the subsequent deadly seige, can certainly be read as the narrative of an internal emigration. - Ottilie Mulzet's essay on Márai and emigration.

Literary spies

Writers and poets were intensively spied upon in the forty years of the Kádár era. After his book on agents on the rock music scene, Tamás Szőnyei has written a monumental study on informers who specialized in literary life.