GEORGE G�M�RI (Cambridge, England., U.K.)

TWO �MIGR� JOURNALS: KULTURA (FROM A HUNGARIAN) AND IRODALMI UJS�G (FROM A POLISH) POINT OF VIEW

The Polish journal Kultura was started in the West in 1947 and still ex- ists, while the Hungarian Iroda!mi ujsig (Literary gazette) was founded in different circumstances (in Communist-ruled Hungary) back in 1950. It was relaunched in the West in 1957 and existed until 1989. When comparing these two publications, one has to discuss first of all their respective cultur- al backgrounds. Though there is much that is common to Polish and Hun- garian history, from shared kings to similar social structures, they have rather different traditions of emigration. ceased to exist as a sover- eign state at the end of the eighteenth century, so her emigres, struggling, writing and on more than one occasion fighting for the restoration of an in- dependent Poland played an indispensible role - indeed, a much greater role than their numbers warranted. The grouping known as the Great Emi- gration ( NVielka Emigracja), formed after the failure of the 1830-31 uprising and struggle for independence, had as its nerve centre. Without writ- ers in exile like Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Norwid it would be difficult to imag- ine modern Polish literature in its present form. During the Second World War many Poles found themselves in the West, and when the majority of them decided to stay after 1945, changing their status from refugees to emigres, there was already a continuous tradition they could look back on. I have no intention of passing any qualitative judgement on the achievements of this new Polish emigration - of which the existence of Kultura was and is certainly one - but up to 1990 it surely exerted great influence not only on the development of Polish literature in general, but also on political de- velopments in Poland proper. This was not the case with the Hungarian emigration, which had had sev- eral "waves" already by 1956. It started with the 1919/20 emigres, most of them left-wing intellectuals who fled from the White Terror and gave such distinguished people to the world as the philosopher Georg (Gyorgy) Lu- kacs, the aesthete B61a Balazs, and one of the best British film directors, Sir Alexander Korda. They were joined in the late thirties, after the rise of j Hitler in Germany, by other emigres, writers and scholars, mostly of Jewish origin, who found refuge in the United States and became famous on ac- count of their participation in the Manhattan Project (Szilard, Wigner, Teller and others) or in other scientific fields (von Neumann, Denis Gabor, Heve- sy). During the Second World War the foremost living Hungarian composer, Bela Bart6k, also decided to emigrate; he died later in New York. In the last months of the war a large number of Hungarian refugees and evacuees reached Germany and Austria. This was known later as the "D.P. wave" (displaced persons) and included, apart from some genuine Fascists and Nazi collaborators, families of people who had held some post in the pre- vious administration and those who simply feared the Russians. While ori- ginally this was a large wave (though many refu-gees returned to Hungary once the war was over), it produced very few writers or intellectuals of real distinction. In the first post-war years Hungary was ruled by a multi-party coalition which included the Communists but was still committed to democracy. The situation began to worsen dramatically after the 1947 elections, and by 1948 the country came under complete Communist control. This change, anticipated for some time, produced a new wave of refugees to the West, many of them writers (such as Sandor Marai) and politicians of different po- litical allegiances. Inasmuch as there existed a cultural or literary life in the Hungarian diaspora before 1956, it was due to the efforts of these often very isolated people. But it was really with the influx of about 200,000 peo- ple to the West, after the Soviets suppressed the Hungarian revolution of 1956, that the cultural life of the Hungarian emigration suddenly blos- somed. Let me add that amongst those refugees there was a much higher proportion of students and young intellectuals than in the numerically com- parable "wave" of 1944/45, and that when the Hungarian Writers' Associa- tion was formed in Paris (to replace the then suppressed HWA in Hungary) it had 118 members by October 1958. It was this Association which launched Irodalmi ujsag in May 1957, with substantial financial help from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As for Kultura, it was started in , but soon moved to France, where its editor, , bought a house near Paris in Maisons-Laffitte. From the very beginning Giedroyc tried hard to preserve the journal's inde- pendence; while later on he was also the recipient of various grants (in- cluding money from the Congress for Cultural Freedom), he could not be influenced politically by any one of his financial supporters. As for his cul- tural ambitions, Giedroy6 simply collected the best Polish writers available in the West and, as time went by, in Communist-ruled Poland. (Those liv- ing in Poland had to contribute to the journal using pseudonyms which were decoded only many years later. A case in point is Tomasz Stalinski, a polit- ical novelist published by Instytut Literacki, Kultura's own publishing house, who turned out to be none other than the well-known independent columnist