OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search

The text below might contain errors as it was reproduced by OCR software from the digitized originals,
also available as Scanned original in PDF.

BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 31-1-161
TITLE:             Meaning of Revisionism in Hungarian Literary Thinking
BY:                Urban
DATE:              1960-8-6
COUNTRY:           Hungary
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Hungarian Unit
THEMATIC SUBJECTS: Hungary--1956-1965, Hungary--Literature, Communist Parties--Ideology

--- Begin ---

DISTRIBUTION – 500	6 AUGUST 1960

EFE EVALUATION AND ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT

Background Report
Hungarian Unit
(Urban)

MEANINGS OF REVISIONISM IN HUNGARIAN LITERARY THINKING

"Partinost", like virtue, is an inherently dull and
difficult subject to advertise. Evil, by contrast, has a
strange fascination for the scholastic mind, providing, as in
the case of revisionism, a dialectically sound counterpoint to
an otherwise crudely un-Hegelian monody. Where Dante and Suslov
excell is their description of the torments of the damned in
Inferno - their Paradiso is smug, Victorian and big with the
tedium of those condemned to live in eternal happiness.

With "partinost" and, particularly, its literary
progeny: socialist realism being as elusive and ill understood
(even by Communist writers) as it is, the best the Party´s
literary agents can hope to do in the way of putting a face to
this non-descript notion is to say something about it by way
of contrast and a process of elimination. Setting "partinost"
against a sufficiently abhorrent background of revisionism and
allied vices seems to guarantee for regime writers its
compulsive rightness. But does it?

Can an antithesis of this kind produce a more
satisfactory synthesis in 1960 than did those earlier and admittedly
cruder designs in black-and-white which Stalinist historiography
foisted on literary scholarship? Are the wrongs castigated not
so many exciting trends in the eyes of the broad public, or at
least insufficiently black to invite anything but amused
curiosity?

There is no reason to suppose that the traditional
trends and values of Hungarian letters -- a robust and naive
patriotism, agrarian socialism and a melancholy lyricism of a
distinctly non-Western order -- are remoter from Hungarians
today than they were 20 or 50 years ago. On the contrary, there
is much to support the view that literary interest continues
to revolve around the national and international classics, many
of whom are again freely published, and that the regime´s official
poets and writers find their most attentive reading public among
Western analysts of Soviet affairs.

Having said this, however, one "still has to remember
that in a society in which the entire mechanism of publishing
and distribution is in state hands, quakes and tremors in the
national psyche have only one way of reaching the outside world:
through the graphs and tables of government seismographs. Here,

[page 2]

HUNGARIAN BACKGROUND REPORT, 6 AUGUST 1960, 

on a small scale and within the regime´s own technical jargon,
waves of fear and shook, of compromise, nonconformism and
cooperation can be read and, one hopes, followed back to their
sources.

It is as true today as it was in 1955-56 that behind
a shifting nuance or an unorthodox compound may lie hidden
unexpected ( or of ten too clearly expected) convulsions both on
the regime´s and, the nation´s intellectual and spiritual life.
If, as discussed below, "modernism" deserves to be crushed, it is
obviously powerful enough to warrant such treatment. If the
ideologues complain that Hungarian critics are reluctant to have
the tenets of the class struggle spelt out in their writings, it
is safe to assume that there is such a reluctance and usually
more than a reluctance.

Two Interpretations

It is, therefore, highly interesting to note how a
literary administrator such as Dezso Toth [l] sees the ills and
evils besetting Hungary´s recent historiography of literature
His basic complaint is a familiar one; it is wrong and (from the
"partinost" point of view) untrue to say that the national
liberation movements of the 19th Century were driven forward by national
rather than class considerations. Class is the determining factor
-- nationalism is an accretion. Not to perceive this leads to
insufferable abuses and can, as in 1954-55, help the growth of
an insidious philosophy. He writes i.a.:

"The completely unwarranted, large-scale celebration
of the 50th anniversary of the death of Jokai had at
least as much to do with the year 1954 as with the
actual occasion. This was the time when
counter-revolutionary ideas were maturing in the minds of some
people, and an outlook that gave the notion of
nation-hood a romantic slant was welcome to them. Here the
fiction of "national unity" came in handy... The
intention was clearly to revive a feeling of national pathos,
setting Jokai against the revolutionary and 
classmilitant traditions of Petofi."[2]

For Toth all common denominators other than those accepted by
Marxist analysis are inherently suspect. Thus he warns against
such non-class concepts as Janos Horvath´s [3] "Hungarianism by
a esthetic loya1ties " [4] - the idea that (in the 19th Century) the
superior ethos of truth and beaty, rather than class, cemented
the best minds into a national elite. The revival of this thought
has produced the obnoxious view:

----------------------
(1) "Irodalomtörtenet", 1960 1 No - 3-6.0.)
(2) ibid
(3) Eminent pre-war scholar and critic
(4) "Esztetikum Magyarsaga"

[page 3]

HUNGARIAN BACKGROUND REPORT, 6 AUGUST 1960, 

"... that the poetry of Petofi or Arany can be
associated with any particular class, can no longer
be seriously entertained... Today we can confidently
say that great poets and artists stand above parties." [5]

Toth´ s diagnosis of what went wrong with the Socialist reading
of Hungarian letters of the 20s and 30s is equally revealing:
voices have been raised for the rehabilitation of Dezso Szabo
on mainly nationalistic grounds. Critics tended to underline
what was allegedly soft and decadent in Attila Jozsef rather
than what was revolutionary". The West and Westernism were being
increasingly pushed into the limelight of literary attention,
bourgeois humanism usurping the place of worthier ideas.

Having got so far Toth warms to his real
subject -- revisionism with all its attendant evils. So many false trends
and misconceptions have produced a climate of opinion where even
the basic truths of Marxist literary theory were no longer
sacrosanct. "Revisionism", he writes, "questioned the very
existence of socialist realism." Objective (i.e. "partinost")
aestethic theory was gradually replaced by a subjective one;
the quest for a realistic portrayal of life was abandoned, the
artist´ s focus of attention shifting to the secret mood of
things rather than their practical significance, to the
justification of lyricism as an irrational phenomenon rather than its
accountability on a rational and social plane.

In short, poets preferred to be poets rather than party
hacks; critics saw greater value in writing about men who had
risen to eminence because they were different from their "class",
and not because they had sprung from it.

Toth´ s strictures would carry little weight were it not
for the fact that his real target is larger than "revisionism".
It is clear from his writing(In so far as anything is clear in
a language so inspissated with the fog of dialectical thinking)
that revisionism as such, i.e. a rival philosophy within the
Communist Party, is not his real problem. That would suppose an
interest to engender, and the requisite courage to put forward,
heretical interpretations of the Marxist view on historiography.
Of this we have little evidence. Toth challenges, and appears to
be challenged by, the whole climate, tone, style and assumptions
of Hungarian letters.

One is almost tempted to say that a live revisionism
within the party would, in a sense, be a blessing for the cause
of Communism as a whole in Hungary, for that would, at least, attest
to an acceptance of the Marxist-Leninist fundamentals and an
interest in bending them to local needs and traditions. As it
is, the battle against "revisionism" is a battle against most of
what is being written and read in Hungary today.

(5) "Irodalmotörtenet", 1960 1 No - 3-6.0.)

[page 4]

HUNGARIAN BACKGROUND REPORT, 6 AUGUST 1960, 

That the main trends of literary thinking continue
to be outside the confines of official theory even among the
very young transpires convincingly from an article by one of
the Party s intellectual adjudicators, Andras Dioszegi. [6]
What he says amounts to a confession that after 10 years of
Socialism Hungary´ s young writers are more removed from Socialst
ideas than were their predecessors in the 30s. He complains that
whilet short-story writers "between the two world wars had,
broadly speaking, set their sights on" Socialism", the new
generation has fallen prey to "modernism". What exactly this pejorative
noun is meant to convey is not made quite clear, but it seems to
be the cumulative product of evils such as "immaturity, lack of
social responsibility, snobbery, l´ art pour l´ art-ism, and aping
of all things Western etc. It is particularly revealing that
in Dioszegi´ s view young writers

"find much to attract them in the morbid, pathological
tendencies of Western literature. They are particularly
interested in fear and uncertainty... they are more
interested in understanding, justifying and even
propagating these things than in overcoming them."[7]

It would appear that the regime´ s (alleged) successes
in industry and agriculture have not convinced the young
generation that such achievements are really important, or if they
have, that they are sufficient to inspire that happy and socialist
mood of things in which, as Toth concluded in his article. "heroes
and giants are born". In any case the discussion is carried on.
on a wavewength with which the Party has little effective contact.
Tastes in Hungarian reading and writing are neither for nor against
the Communist Party - they are away from it.

Kadar´ s real problem would appear to be not that there
is too much, but that there is too little revisionism in his
Party.

End

------------------------
(6) "Irodalmotörtenet", 1960, 1 No.
(7) ibid

  OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search