Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1978 (6. évfolyam, 16-18. szám)
1978 / 16. szám
1 HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER BOOKS Lukacs, John. 1945: YEAR ZERO. Doubleday & Co. 501 Franklin Avenue, Garden City, NY 11531, 1978. 322 pages, maps. $8.95 cloth. Lukacs surprised us with a fascinating volume on the year 1945, which he calls “a global milestone." It marked the end of World War II, the death of Roosevelt and Hitler, the end of united Germany, and the destruction of many of the cultural patterns the world considered as permanent. It also created a new era in which Russian expansionism and intransigence changed American attitudes toward the Soviet Union and reduced mutual trust to virtually zero. Lukacs describes these events through a thorough investigation of the personalities and relationships of Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Hitler, and Stalin. In the second part of the volume he reflects on the events through his personal experience during the German and Russian occupation of Hungary. For the peoples of Eastern Europe, “1945 marked a change so profound and drastic that the Germans would invent the term of Jahr Null, Year Zero, as if that year had been the dead center, the dead end of almost all of the continuities that they had nown. So it was for my native Hungary.” He was secretary of the Hungarian-American Society at the time, and has chosen to leave Hungary with a heavy heart. His story is deeply human, yet philosophical, drawing generalizations on human behavior. The “willingness of people to deceive themselves was not especially new in 1945; but it was then that I learned how the lives of people, including some of their most essential choices, are often determined by their thoughts and by their wishes even in times when their very lives depend on enormous external events and circumstances which they cannot control.” Lukacs is a historian and author of several classics of his field, among them The Last European War reviewed in HSN no. 11, p. 1. AN ANTHOLOGY OF UGRIC FOLK LITERATURE; Tales and Poems of the Ostyaks, Voguls and Hungarians. Selected and with introduction by Marianna D. Birnbaum; translated by Michael Heim and Charlotte Rogers. Finnisch-Ungarisches Seminar, Universität, 8 München 40, Franz-Joseph-Strasse 1. 239 pages N.p. paper. Publications ol the Finnish-Hungarian Seminar of the U. of Munich, Series C, Vol. 5. The purpose of the volume is to familiarize the Englishspeaking reader with some primary Ugric source material to which he might have been denied access because of lack of linguistic skill. All pieces given have appeared before in either Hungarian, German, or Russian, but not in English. The introduction leads the reader back to the time when the Ugric and Finno-Permian people separated some time 3,000 B.C. “Although the Hungarians split off from the Ostyaks and Voguls around 500 B.C., they remained in the same general area until approximately 460 A.D., when they began migrating westward..." The Voguls and Ostyaks are still in close contact living along the Ob River and its tributaries. Hence, the name Ob-Ugrian. The selected 49 tales and poems are illustrative of the belief systems of the Ob-Ugrians. Bibliographical notes at the end of the volume describe the history of the collection of folk literature and provide a guide for further reading. Publications of the Finnish-Hungarian Seminar are edited by Gerhard Ganschow. Series “A” comprises German language volumes describing historical names of Hungarian communities; Series "B” is concerned with Ob-Ugrian languages (also in German); and Series “C", designated as “Miscellanea”, contains several volumes in English. (Review of Vol. 2 by Edward Brown can be found on page 2 of this issue.) A volume of interest to cartography enthusiasts is the reprint of Gabriel Hevenesi's Parvus Atlas Hungáriáé... Viennae 1689. (In Latin.) Birnbaum is Adjunct Assoc. Prof, in Hungarian at U. of California, Los Angeles. Anderson, Andy. HUNGARY ’56. Black & Red, Box 9546, Detroit, Ml 48202, 1976. 128 pages, maps, illust. $1.50 paper. (Originally published by Solidarity in London, 1964.) This is a reprint of an earlier edition describing the events of the 1956 uprising. An appendix contains a resolution of the Writer’s Union, brief biographical sketches of political leaders, a related chronology of the year 1957, and a bibliography of major works. “The message is that, today, the class struggle throughout the world is not between East and West or between employers and trade union leaders. It is the struggle of the working class for its own emancipation.” The author was a participant in the uprising. Boba, Imre. MORAVIA’S HISTORY RECONSIDERED: A Reinterpretation of Medieval Sources. Martinus Niihoff, Lange Voorhout 9-11, The Hague, The Netherlands, 1971.167 pages. $10.00 paper. The author, while scrutinizing original medieval sources on Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia, unexpectedly came upon grave inaccuracies in Central European medieval historiography. Especially outstanding was the widely accepted association between the principality of Moravia (A.D. 822 to c. 900) and the activities of two saintly brothers Cyrill and Methodius. Their role left an important cultural (Continued on page 2)
