The “Hungarian Review”, the English-language affiliate of the bi-monthly journal Magyar Szemle, edited by Gyula Kodolányi, has published its second 2013 issue. This important edition gives comprehensive overview of the current political situation in Hungary in English language. As the editors of the periodical write in the introductory article:
„Of the stories meandering through extreme and absurd situations, which seem so typical of the destinies of people and buildings in East Central Europe, that of Marxist philosopher György Lukács is a harrowing example. Árpád Kadarkay, who published several books in English on Lukács, this time reconstructs the morbidly absurd situation and the crisis of conscience in which the philosopher found himself during Stalin’s Great Trials, as an inmate of the notorious Lyubyanka prison in Moscow in the late summer of 1941.
Having begun with the arts and letters, let us also mention the British poet Tara Bergin who tells us how her research of the classic translations done by Ted Hughes led her on to a fascination with major modern Hungarian poets like János Pilinszky and Ferenc Juhász. We are also publishing here one of her powerfully evocative poems, Stag Boy, written under the inspiration of a Juhász poem.
Getting nearer to current affairs, but remaining with extreme and absurd situations, we can read a chapter from Attila Balázs’s new book on Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, the Hungarian-Bolivian poet, secret communist agent and paramilitary adventurer, who was shot to death in a La Paz hotel by the security forces of President Evo Morales in April 2009.
An interview with State Secretary Zsolt Németh by Nick Thorpe gives an overview of the recently revved up foreign policy activities of the Orbán government, ranging from important trips to Brussels and Moscow to the intriguing task of maintaining good relations with difficult neighbourly governments. To illustrate the latter task, György Gyulai gives us a detailed analysis of the complexities of the second Fico premiership in Slovakia.
We hope you will find a reader’s delight in these and other offerings of the March issue of Hungarian Review – a list of which we should have started perhaps with the article from John O’Sullivan pointing to the ominous rise of threats to free media within European countries like Britain we have traditionally looked to as paragons of free speech.”
The Hungarian Review has been published since 1991 by the BL Nonprofit Kft in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, twelve issues of the Hungarian Review (from 2010, 2011 and 2013) can be ordered from Amazon.com at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aag/main?ie=UTF8&sshmPath=at-a-glance&isAmazonFulfilled=0&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&isCBA=&orderID=&asin=B005ZBLPD0&seller=A1Y47FCTFJNKMW&isPopup= or directly from the publisher at http://www.hungarianreview.com, or by calling the Coalition office in Washington.