Washington, DC – The “Hungarian Review”, the English-language affiliate of the bi-monthly journal Magyar Szemle, edited by Gyula Kodolányi and John O’Sullivan, has published its first issue for 2019, and its 50th issue of all time.
On the cover: Tympanum over the sacristy door of St Michael’s Church, Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca), 1528. Photo by Zoltán Bagyinszki. The photo series of the Hungarian architectural heritage of Transylvania is selected by Géza Entz.
Political development is the topic of several important essays in this issue. In his editorial note entitled “Making a Virtue of Nationalism”, John O’Sullivan writes: “Political development is a phrase implying that politics is moving along a pre-determined course in the same way that a human body goes through successive stages of growth from foetus through growth and maturity to death when it proceeds to decay. The phrase also implies that this is a more or less inevitable process that we (or at least the speaker) can readily predict and map out in advance. In recent years almost all international agencies and most democratic governments in their rhetoric and planning have mapped out the stages of this development broadly as follows: human societies begin as tribes, conquer or are conquered and form empires, discover national and democratic consciousness, disaggregate into nation states, encounter problems that nation states cannot handle, and so gradually surrender (“share”) their sovereignty to larger regional bodies better able to deliver solutions to these global problems.”
The first article in this issue is the keynote speech of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the József Antall commemorative conference held at the Assembly Hall of the former Upper House of the Houses of Parliament in Budapest on December 11, 2018. In his remarks on the 25thanniversary of the death of the former Prime Minister József Antall, Prime Minister Orbán said: “He never gave up, and even in the face of adverse circumstances he never abandoned his goal of leading Hungary back to what it was before Communism. He was waiting for a new opportunity, and therefore never joined forces with the post-Communists. He rejected this political option not only because he was guided by good taste, but also because doing so would have meant him surrendering his original intellectual, spiritual and historical goal, and his personal mission: the concept of a civic and Christian Hungary and the historic opportunity to create it.”
The ‘Current’ section contains further articles by Emil Brix (“Has Austria Become a Different Country”); and Miklós Szánthó (“From Desire to Rights – Notes on Human Rights Fundamentalism”).
The periodical then continues with a ‘Histories’ section with contributions by Nicholas T. Parsons (“Judson’s History of the Habsburg Empire”); Ilona Sármány (“Art, Marginalization and the Making of the Western Canon – How Central European Painting Fell into Oblivion”); David A. J. Reynolds (“Invasion 1968 – The Intentions of Intervention and the Shadow of 1956 – Part II”); Géza Jeszenszky (“National and Ethnic Reconciliation in Central Europe – Overcoming the Patterns of a Difficult Past”) and Paul Sohár (“Hungarian Transylvanian Poets – Part II”).
Finally, ‘The Arts’ section features articles by Katalin Gellér (“The Image of Death in Hungarian Symbolism”); Gordon McKehchnie (“Prague Revisited – Part II”) and Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi (“Foreword to Machaerus III”).
Currently, 48 issues of the Hungarian Review from 2010 through 2019 can be ordered from amazon.com; or directly from the publisher; or by calling the Coalition office in Washington.