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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 31-2-228
TITLE:             Young Hungarian Writers Strain at Party Leash
BY:                Urban
DATE:              1961-1-4
COUNTRY:           Hungary
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Hungarian Section
THEMATIC SUBJECTS: Hungary--1956-1965, Cultural Policy, Hungary--Literature

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BFE  EVALUATION AND
ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT
Hungarian Section

F-127

News Background
X/l80 Euro - "YOUNG HUNGARIAN WRITERS STRAIN AT PARTY LEASH"

Munich, January 4 (Urban) - The article,here reprinted (in part)/[**]/see footnote

summarises the debate "Elet as Iradalom" has been conducting on the problems
young writers face in Hungary today.  It is about the most revealing admission
of the Party's failure to make its propaganda effective among the young
intellegentsia and to make it toe the official line,  Admissions of this kind
 have been made before in a more fragmentary manner but the present breast-
beating is almost unique in giving the scope of the Government's troubles
in literature.  The article makes an interesting distinction between party and
non-party writers.  It observes with some dismay that the brunt of criticism
is borne by the party men and that those who are outside the Communist party
are comparatively free to indulge in unorthodox, often even dangerous,
ideological fancies.  The phenomenon is not new,  In the more strictly
circumscribed political field, too, heresy has always been the main crime whereas
those who never subscribed to the faith have been relatively free from official
strictures.  "Many young writers think", the article says, that "...to be
a Communist writer is equal to being constantly criticized, to being the
whipping-boy of literary life".  It adds that the demands constantly made on
Communist writers and the publicity given to their imperfections have created
an atmosphere in which it is tacitly understood that the main threat to
Socialist literature comes from imperfections within the Communist medium,
whereas the real danger is not this at all but a host of bourgeois and other
evils, of which the article then prodedes to draw up a list.
These evils are as numerous as they are spectacular.  If Hungarian
literary life really suffers from all these shortcomings there would seem to
be little danger of Communism letting down lasting roots in the tastes and
consciousness of the present generation.  The paper makes no bones about
admitting that "shortcomings" and opposition to the Communist brief affect the
majority of young writers.  They are subject to bourgeois ideological influences
which comprise "populist" views, variants of Western bourgeois thinking and
"ethical endeavors" by which it is probably legitimate to understand support
of a civilized code of moral values not tied to Communist expediency.  We are
told that such culpable views are cultivated in a more organized fashion than

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X - EURO - (l) - YOUNG HUNGARIAN WRITERS STRAIN-AT PARTY LEASH F 128
    
we have so far been led to believe, for the article mentions a "New Moon"
circle where these rumblings have found a permanent home.   To boot there are
those who suffer from a curious intellectual schizophrenia - one young writer
is mentioned who writes nothing but short stories with an anarchist and
bourgeois message while with his second self he is extremely active in the
film studios hacking "socialist" and even "schematic" plays for the camera.
Then there is that old and well-tried tag:  objectivism i.e. aloof news to
everything that goes on in the building of socialism.  One section of writers
belabours subjects which are timeless or too distant to be of use, others
deal in foibles, e?centri  cities or issues that are incidental to social life
and do not organically flow from it.  Then there are those who still think
that love is a central subject of literature; many are wrong-headed enough to
feel that a writer is not a writer unless he can depict a
shifting nuance or a fleeting mood and leave it at that, unrelated to the
society in which these things occur.

The article has been produced by a dogmatically inclined brain-trust
within the writers' Uniono  It is therefor® not surprising that 'Elet as
Irodalom' itself is accused of pampering some of  the young writers.  The
article does not approve of subjecting these young men to harsh or
unconstructive types of criticism - but it thinks that they should be gently shown
the right path.  Such efforts have already been made but it admits that the
majority of critics refused to support the operation.
The picture we get from the article as a whole is as confused (hence
truthful) as Hungarian literary life itself would appear to be.  For over and
above those who reject Communism and all its works, the guilty include
sectarians and revisionists as well.  The manuscripts, we are told, that reach

Hungarian publishers/nowadays are as diverse but typical as excursions into existea-
tionalism, modernist verse, Stalinist cliches and revisionist books of all
kinds.

Finally the article poses a very pertinent question indeed:  what are
the sources of bourgeois and Western influence?  The "New Moon" circle is
apparently not the only hot-bed of these criminal fermentations.  There would
appear to be other bourgeois circles and salons, too, which "retard the socialis
development of young writers."  But the principal causes given are twofold
"immediate surroundings and the example of the older writers who have
entrenched themselves in bourgeois positions or ...smuggle bourgeois views into
criticism in a superficially Marxist garbo"

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X - EURO - (2) -  YOUNG HUNGARIAN WRITERS STRAIN AT PARTI LEASH F 129

This is a formidable indictment - is there., one may ask, anything that
has not gone wrong in Hungarian literature?  The remedies offered are neither
new nor are they likely to be more effective than they were in the past.  The
fatusus advice that "we should make sure that the party 's policy has an
increasing and organized influence on the thinking of the young writers" is
surely about the most empty thing the brain-trust could have thought out
during its many sessions.


In 1905 Lenin wrotes  "Down with non-party writers!  Down with literary
supermen!  Literature must become...a wheel and a screw of the single great
party mechanism".  In Hungary today non-party writers are certainly back in
print and are far from toeing the party line.  The regime's complaint is that
with these writers  about it is difficult to reduce literature to a state
where it would act as a "wheel and screw of the single great party mechanism".


Would it be too far fetched to assume that a kind of revisionism but certainly
a lack of iron control, has confounded the counsels of the party at the very top
and that as long as non-party writers are "up" and not "down" as Lenin demanded
"the wheels and screws" of literature will never fit into the party mechanism?
But one can go even a step further and say that in Hungary at least party
literature itself has proved an unreliable instrument.  It is to be doubted
whether the sectarians,  condemned by the dogmatist -enough authors of
the present complaint, carry any weight within party literature but there is
every sign to indicate that Dery, Zelk, Hay and Lukaca are not without a
following.

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**  See Hungarian Press Survey No. 912 of 4 January 1961.
# jon 2145

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