The first volume of a three-part work. Professor Ernô Marosi, the leading authority on the period, gives an overview of the development of Romanesque and Gothic style in the Late Middle Ages. Marosi's main focus of interest was to expose the spirit behind the styles and show what the artifacts communicate about the life and mentality of the eras labelled by them. His presentation is chronological. Numerous illustrations offer additional information to readers.
The struggle for the survival of Hungarian schools in Transylvania has been a key issue for the Hungarian minority in Romania since the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 when millions of Hungarians be-came citizens of Romania. With many original documents, decrees, acts as well as personal recollections the author charts a doleful chapter of the struggle. The first phase was the demolition of the school system by unifying elementary education in 1924-1925, when two-thirds of some five-thousand Hungarian schools were forced to close. A decree in 1925 set up new administrative units, 'cultural zones', and another one in 1928 regulated secondary schools.
A zsidó iskolaügy története
Magyarországon.
[The history of Jewish schooling in Hungary.]
Ed. László Balogh.
Budapest: Országos
Pedagógiai Könyvtár
és Múzeum, 1996. 127 p. (Neveléstörténeti
füzetek. 14.)
ISBN 963-7644-48-2
Nine papers of recent original research of the conference held in Budapest in 1994 following similar sessions on Catholic and Protestant education. Viktor Karády discusses the background to the theme of 'Jewish over-schooling' in prewar Hungary, László Felkai the changes in the curriculum of Jewish schools, Béla Síró new data on Jewish secondary schools in the interwar years, and György Várhegyi presents Javne, a new type of school founded in 1990 with the support of Ronald S. Lauder, an American businessman.
The author is a noted researcher in the psychology and symbolic language of eating, and the role of food in the life and religious practices of ancient civilizations. The book is an attempt to reconstruct the diet and food preparing practices of the Magyars at the time of the Conquest (9th century), traces the origins of current characteristic Hungarian dishes by a study of common roots in the symbolic language of ancient Asian cultures (Japanese, Chinese, Mongol etc.) and pagan Hungarian religious practices.
SZOMJAS-SCHIFFERT, György:
Singing traditions of Lapp shamans.
Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,
1996. 296 p.
ISBN 963-05-6940-X
The
yoik
, a peculiar Lapp folk style
of song and singing is placed in the context of the ancient history of
European music. Szomjas-Schiffert includes the scores and text of 140
yoiks
of his own on-site collection. He relies on work done by Finnish ethnographers,
Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Bence Szabolcsi,
Béla C. Nagy, and Lajos Vargyas.
Yoiks
are songs the Lapps
handed down from generation to generation as part of a reindeer sacrificial
ritual offered up by shamans. The transcriptions are by Magdolna Kovács,
a linguist at the University of Turku. On the basis of H. Sweet's argument
that speech melody is the most stable part of a language, Szomjas-Schiffert
in his
A finnugor zene vitája
(The debate on Finno-Ugrian
music, 1976) confirmed that there is more to it than language kinship;
the basic set of Lapp folk music has Finno-Ugrian roots.
Parallel Hungarian-English texts on film personages, Hungarian or of Hungarian birth, who made their name abroad. This is an encyclopedia-filmography-handbook all in one. Entries are in alphabetic order, with articles by/on the person discussed or interviews often appended. Portraits of William Fox, Sándor Korda, George Cukor, Mihály Kertész, Tony Curtis, Miklós Rózsa, László Kovács, Vilmos Zsigmond, are included.
Végtelen kép.
Bódy Gábor írásai.
[Infinite image. The writings of Gábor
Bódy.]
Ed. Miklós Peternák.
Budapest:
Pesti Szalon, 1996. 420 p.
ISBN 963-605-145-3
A collection of Gábor Bódy's writings including studies on cinema theory, scenarios, projects for video, autobiographic texts and letters. Gábor Bódy (1946-1985) was an exceptionally talented movie director, a member of the experimental filmworkshop Balázs Béla Stúdió. His first feature film, Amerikai anzix , based on the diary of János Fiala, an Hungarian exile who took part in the American Civil War, won the top award at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1976. His research into the roots of visual communication, semantics and semiotics persuaded him to experiment. Ear-ly on, he probed the cinematographic possibil-ities of the computer ( Psycho-cosmoses - 1976) and the first ever international videomagazine titled Infermental was also launched by Gábor Bódy.
Zsigmond Jakó is the doyen of Hungarian historians in Transylvania. His first book was a monograph on County Bihar (1940). He has published many archival sources of the history of Transylvania. His range covers the beginnings of Romanian printing at Balázsfalva (Blaj), the history of Transylvanian Saxons, and Latin paleography (with Radu Manolescu as co-author). Forty-four contributions by distinguished scholars, many of them disciples of Jakó, include work by Paul Cernovodeanu, Dóra Csanak, Pál Engel, Béla Köpeczi, István Monok, Camil Muresanu and Pompiliu Teodor.
KRISTÓ, Gyula:
A székelyek eredetérôl
[On the origin of the Széklers.] Szeged:
Szegedi Középkorász
Mûhely, 1996. 167 p.
(Szegedi Középkor-történeti
Könyvtár. 10.)
ISBN 963-482-150-2
Professor Kristó's own interpretation of this conundrum is a critical summary of clues offered by various disciplines, including etymology, folk history, social history, archeology, Church history and the study of toponyms and other names. He concludes that the Széklers of Turkic origin may have been part of the eighth (Kavar) tribe that joined the Magyars in the Conquest of the Carpathian Basin.
ORBÁN, Éva:
Üzenet a barikádokról.
[Message from the barricades.] Budapest:
Kráter Mûhely Egyesület,
1996. 2 vols. 454 p. + 370 p.
ISBN 963-7583-73-4
This sequel to a volume published under the same title in 1993, is a collection of interviews with participants in the 1956 Revolution: students, workers, technicians, nurses, the unsung heroes who took up arms in the nation's cause and who have become a popular legend. These witnesses come from all sections of society, thus refuting Kádárist calumnies. Those interviewed include: János Bük, Jenô Fónay, Gyula Kugli, Bálint Németh, Péter Egehi, Gyula Obersovszky, and Ibolya Szalontay-Kovács.
PATAKY, Iván:
A vonakodó szövetséges.
[The unwilling ally.]
Budapest: Zrínyi Kiadó,
1996. 171 p.
ISBN 963-327-282-0
A chronicle of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 drawing upon hitherto unknown archival material. The Prague Spring, which preceded the invasion, was an attempt by Alexander Dubcek to create a socialism with a human face. Early on, this led to Moscow's disapproval. Schemes for a military intervention were drawn up. The unwilling ally, Kádár's Hungary, favored a political solution, yet due to Brezhnev's stance (wishing the satellites to share responsibility) Kádár gave his assent (August 12-15) during his yearly summer holiday in the Crimea. Thus, at midnight on August 20, 1968 the Warsaw Pact juggernaut including a Hungarian divison rolled into Czechoslovakia. Not only did it crush hopes entertained by many but it brought hard-line Communists back to power in Hungary as well.
Pax Britannica.
Brit külügyi iratok
a második világháború
utáni Kelet-Közép-Európáról 1942-1943.
[British documents on post-war East-Central
Europe 1942-1943.]
Ed. András D. Bán.
Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1996. 228
p.
ISBN 963-379-127-8
András D. Bán has published eight documents (seven memoranda and one bunch of comments) from 1942-1943 he had chanced across in the Public Record Office in London, in 1994. The papers originated from the Foreign Research and Press Service, an advisory body headed by Arnold Toynbee during the Second World War that was concerned with working out contingent plans for the situation at the end of the war. The documents are titled as follows: I. East-European confederacies; I/A. Comments; II. Economic opportunities and political structure in Eastern Europe; III. The future of Austria; IV. The question of Transylvania; V. The question of Yugoslavia; VI. The Danube Confederation; VII. The attitude of the Soviet Union.
SZEGEDY-MASZÁK, Aladár:
Az ember ôsszel visszanéz...
[Looking back in the fall...] Budapest:
Európa - História, 1996.
2 vols. 459 p. + 511 p.
(Extra Hungariam.)
ISBN 963-07-6123-8
The memoirs of Aladár Szegedy-Maszák, a senior Hungarian diplomatist of the 1930s-1940s, edited and selected by László Csorba with a postscript by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. They are based on diaries kept at the time as well as on notes written later, in exile. The years 1932-1936 spent at the Hungarian legation in Berlin and activities in Budapest during the war are described. Szegedy-Maszák played an important role in Hungary's attempts to establish contacts with the Western allies, futile as these were because - he concludes in retrospect - the allies refused to take the country's geopolitical constraints into account. Following the German occupation of Hungary he was dismissed, arrested and taken to Dachau in November 1944. After his liberation he was Hungary's special envoy in Washington until 1947, when the impending Communist take-over caused him to resign and settle in the U.S. Szegedy-Maszák was in charge of the Hungarian section of the Voice of America for some two decades and died in 1988.
Szovjet katonai intervenció 1956.
[Soviet armed intervention 1956.]
Eds. Jenô Györkei and Miklós
Horváth.
Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 1996.
336 p.
ISBN 963-446-030-5
Soviet occupation forces withdraw from Austria on May 15, 1955, yet the Warsaw Pact signed one day earlier gave legitimacy to the Soviet army's continued presence in Hungary. The military role of the Soviets in the course of the Hungarian Revolution is the theme of this book written from three different perspectives. The first study by J. Györkei and M. Horváth provides a summary based on sources from Russian archives open only for a short period in 1993 and closed again. The second writing is by the Russian historian Aleksander Kirov, who wrote his PhD dissertation on this theme in 1994 and had his dissertation confiscated. The third is the memoirs of Major-General J. I. Malashenko, commander of Operation Whirlwind aimed at suppressing the armed struggle in Hungary. Enthralling new data are quoted from a forthcoming book Kossuth Lajos tér - 1956 by András Kô and J. Lambert Nagy on the Kossuth Square bloodbath (October 25), which was ordered by KGB chief Serov.
Following the coronation of Stephen I in the year 1000 A.D., the Holy Crown donated by Pope Sylvester II held a unique status. For more than nine-hundred years it embodied Hungarian statehood. The Aachen-based historian Father Szigeti, drawing upon history, hagiography, knowledge of the goldsmith's craft and art history argues a novel view claiming that the Holy Crown was made in Armenia around 308 A.D. to the design of St Gregory the Illuminator. Seized by the Avars in the Battle of Awarair (451), it was supposedly given by the Avar Kagan to Charlemagne in 796, who had himself crowned with it by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. Charlemagne was buried with the crown in 814 and when Emperor Otto III early in 1000, opened the grave in Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), he presumably took the crown and gave it as a gift to Stephen through the mediation of his mentor, Pope Sylvester II.
VEKERDI, László:
"A Tudománynak háza vagyon."
Reáliák a Régi Akadémia terveiben és
mûködésében.
["Science has a Stately House..." The sciences
in the projects and activity of the Old Academy.]
Budapest: IIZ/DVV
Project Office, 236 p.
The author is a noted scholar (see his monograph on László Németh - Szépirodalmi Kiadó, Budapest, 1970), and a librarian in charge of science acquisitions in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Vekerdi in this survey published by the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association outlines the arduous course natural science and its practioners encountered in Hungary in the first half of the 19th century. Ironically enough, natural science gained full recognition during the period of Austrian repression following the 1848/9 Revolution due in part to Austrian professors en poste in Hungary. Vekerdi's volume is extraordinarily rich in source material (447 detailed notes accompany the text). The dry and dense data are presented as part of a narrative that is both fascinating and easy to read.
This facsimile edition of a book first published in 1896 is a monumental compendium of Hungarian phrases and folk-based locutions. Margalits, a great linguist of Croat origin, amassed his data over 30 years of collecting work gleaning also from earlier sources like János Erdélyi's Magyar közmondások könyve (The book of Hungarian proverbs) (1851). The idioms are arranged under some 25 000 basic headings or keywords. Although Magyar szólások és közmondások (Hungarian idioms and proverbs) by Gábor O. Nagy (5th ed. 1994) is the authoritative handbook today, Margalits' volume remains an important source and a veritable treasure-trove.
Eleven English-language studies by the UCLA-based literary historian. The theme is the Renaissance in Hungary. Her writings are informed by a complex methodology investigating across disciplinary borders. Most of her studies address the life and work of the poet Janus Pannonius, King Matthias's Bibliotheca Corviniana once located in Buda Castle is also discussed as well as the relations of the Hungarian Renaissance royal court with Croatia and Dalmatia.
Magyar író és világpolgár.
[Hungarian writer and citizen of the world.]
Ed. Ferenc Glatz.
Budapest: Europa Institut, 1996. 157 p.
(Begegnungen.
Schriftenreihe des
Europa Instituts
Budapest. 2.)
ISBN 963-04-6835-2
Volume Two of Begegnungen (Encounters), a series aimed to promote European integration in culture and science, contains the material of a conference in homage of Ferenc Molnár. Papers by many hands are an appraisal of the playwright and novelist who failed to receive the recognition he deserved in his homeland and whose successes on the world's stages continue to this day. Abstracts in German or English accompany the Hungarian texts. The second part of the volume presents the activities of the Europa Institut Budapest.
TÜSKÉS, Tibor:
Pilinszky János.
2nd ed. Budapest: Kráter Mûhely
Egyesület, 1996.
137 p. (Teleszkóp.)
ISBN 963-7583-610
János Pilinszky (1921- 1981), one of the great Hungarian poets of his age, also wrote film-scripts and for the theatre. Pilinszky's imagery reveals a persistent quest for the ultimate meaning of life. Biographical data allow us to explore possible sources of Pilinszky's inspiration. Analyses of the major poems are included.
The illustrated story of the Blues in Hungary accompanied by interviews with musicians, musicologists and media persons conducted in 1995/6. The first major Hungarian reference to the Blues was Antal Molnár's Jazzband (1928). Attempts to popularize the Blues after the war were blocked in the 1950s when all kinds of jazz were branded as bourgeois and that kind of music was cultivated only by a few devotees. Although the climate improved in Hungary in the 1960s, the Blues boom in Western Europe made only a small impact on the Hungarian music scene. The real breakthrough came only in the 1970s owing to the persistent effort of László Földes known as 'Hobo' whose creative performances made Blues widely popular.
This stunning selection from the vast amount of material in State Security archives is a shocking memento. The subtitle refers to forbidden celebrations of anniversaries of the 1956 Revolution, the 1848/9 Revolution and Fight of Independence, and the hanging of Imre Nagy (and the day of his reburial in 1989). The book contains the documents of petty police harrassment of ordinary people somehow involved in these anniversaries, as well as top secret minutes of the Ministry of Interior and various Party organs. Kenedi has done a pioneering job.
A szuverenitás káprázata.
[The mirage of sovereignty.]
Eds. Csaba
Gombár et al.
Budapest: Korridor
Politikai Kutatások
Központja, 1996. 261 p.
(Korridor kötetek.)
ISBN 963-8155-8-9
A collection of studies by prominent political scientists (László Valki, László Lengyel, György Csepeli etc.). Sovereignty with its political, legal, philosophical and other connotations is at the focus of interest because, having regained sovereignty as late as 1989, Hungary was soon to face the challenges of globalization and integration that of necessity involved limitations on it. Thus partnership in the European Union, for instance, raises compelling issues: no ready-made solutions are at hand and the experts are, naturally enough, in dispute on many points. Two case studies (Ákos Szilágyi on Russia and János Mátyás Kovács on Austria) deal with the subject's international implications.
On the history of the Baptist Church in Hungary from 1846, when János Rottmayer returned to Hungary from Hamburg, through the outstanding missionary activities of Henrik Meyer around the turn of the century, and the steady growth up to the Second World War. These studies deal also with the periods of persecution during the decades of communism directed by the State Bureau of Church Affairs when Baptist congregations diminished, as well as with the revival after 1989. The book contains a comprehensive bibliography of some 1300 items on the history of the Hungarian Baptist Church.
The authors, a married couple with degrees in medicine and psychology (M. Kopp), computer engineering and sociology (Á. Skrabski) as well as teaching experience in higher education, take the fact that the twentieth century is characterized both by "rampant individualism and cruel collectivism" as their starting point. This entails the dangers of ignoring the social consequences of individualism and the damage to the individual of thoughtless social experiments. Their aim in this English-language book reporting on original research is to diagnose the breakdown in human adaptation, to explore coping strategies and encourage "ecological" thinking and the adoption of a social attitude based on solidarity, voluntary action and trust.
The transformation of East-European economic
elites:
Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria.
Ed. György Lengyel.
Budapest: Budapest
University of Economic Sciences, Center
for
Public Affairs Studies, 1996. 178 p.
(Research reports. 4.)
The volume contains the results of parallel empirical research conducted in 1989/90 and in 1994/95 by György Lengyel (Hungary), Mladen Lazic (Yugoslavia) and Dobrinka Kostova (Bulgaria). In spite of similarities of economic elites in planned economies at the end of the 1980s, it was assumed in 1990 that features like the early emergence of reform alternatives in Hungary would result in markedly different schemes. The empirical data of 1995 and the comparative study reflect a similarity in structure, value systems and attitudes to privatization with only minor country-specific divergencies.
A centenary album to commemorate the story of Vígszínház (Gaity Theater) in Budapest. Under the stewardship (1896- 1916) of its first manager Mór Ditrói Vígszínház was the cradle of the modern Hungarian theatre as well as a stage for talented playwrights (Melchior Lengyel, Jenô Heltai, Ferenc Herczeg etc.) The career of Ferenc Molnár, the most popular author on Broadway from 1908 through 1930, also started in this theater. The Vígszínház (after 1967 also the Pesti Színház, its downtown dépendence) was a trademark of high-quality stagecraft for many decades, thanks to the manager Zoltán Várkonyi (1971-1979), István Horvai (1979- 1985), and László Marton (since 1985). The album contains numerous photographs of memorable performances by great actors like Irén Varsányi, Sári Fedák, Éva Ruttkai, Zoltán Latinovits, Iván Darvas and András Kern - to name but a few.
Compiled by ZSOLT BÁNHEGYI