Magyar Hírek, 1987 (40. évfolyam, 1-23. szám)
1987-04-05 / 7. szám
I ABOUT THIS ISSUE AND THE PREVIOUS ONE An interview which Ernő Rubik granted to György Halász was published in the Hungarian section of the previous issue. I should like to mention some of the details, since it casts an interesting light on the way Rubik’s mind works, as well as describing the efforts made to ensure the success of innovation in Hungary. The editorin-chief called on the inventor of Rubik’s Cube at a villa in the Városmajor, Budapest, where the Rubik Studio operates.”What is the studio’s business ?”György Halász asked and Ernő Rubik answered: “The development of inventions. 1 know that is a broad concept, but that is really our business. It covers everything from the moment an idea is born to the marketing of the finished product.” The next question was: “Could anybody call on you?” And the answer: “Indeed yes, many do. We help them with the legal formalities, the engineering problems, design, marketing, sometimes even when it comes to manufacturing.” Ernő Rubik I sometimes wonder if readers abroad consider the existence of such a studio as a key issue as we do, who live here, in the world of Hungarian realities and fully realise the difficulties which innovations based even on the most brilliant ideas have to face under present rigid and bureaucratic restrictions. To us the studio financed by some of the money made by. Rubik’s Cube appears a very important initiative. One is bound to think that the economic and technical climate needed for the transformation of the industrial structure, permitting a breakthrough towards more efficient production, may emerge from such initiatives. It was also mentioned in the interview that besides the studio Rubik also set up a foundation backed by 3 million forints worth of hard currency in order to assist young designers’ trips of travelling abroad to study and gain experience. “There are about S 10,000 available each year” he said, “providing around S 1000 each for ten young men and women but it is also possible to give S 200 to each of fifty. It makes a difference in costs whether you want to go to Japan, or to West Germany. 1 personally prefer arrangements allowing our young designers to actually work in the country they go to, they can learn the most that way. But to do that there must be jobs there, which pay them for their work.” In addition Rubik developed a third line. He deposited seven million forints in a bank and the interest assists new inventions. It proved possible to help many good ideas. Naturally the new puzzle, Rubik’s Magic, which is promising to become a world sensation, also emerged in the course of the interview. “This is another puzzle of the same type as the Cube” said Rubik. “Here there are eight squares jointed to one-another, and one can create a multitude of spatial forms folding the squares. I do hope people will come to like it, and perhaps they will also learn something.” An article on the late István Örkény appears in the Hungarian section of the present issue. He would be seventy five were he alive. He died in June 1979, at the age of 67. Örkény was born in Budapest in 1912, into a well-known Budapest middle-class family. His people owned a pharmacy at the corner of Grand Boulevard and Rákóczi át, which many older people still remember. Örkény studied chemical engineering, but writing attracted him right from the start. His first writings appeared in Szép Szó, the literary journal which published the work of progressive writers and poets. He spent months in Paris in 1939, then returned to Budapest, where he was first called up to the colours, then transfered to the forced auxiliary labour service. He became a POW in the Soviet Union during the 1942 —43 campaign. After his return home he published his first important work, “Till we reached this point” in 1946. The book included portraits of the inmates of a prisoner of war camp and also discussed the reasons and circumstances of Hungary’s drift into the war. After that his writings including “Spouses” (1951) were published in quick succession. He criticised his own work later, because of the concessions he had made to the local Zhdanovites. “My sense of humour failed me” he wrote, “I began to turn as sour as sauerkraut. My style started to turn grey and while I was writing my novel, I felt that a pledge to avoid embellishments to ensure clarity bound me, so I took every simile by the ear and flung it out of the window.” Örkény showed his strength as a writer, when after a longish silence following 1956 — he had gone back to work as a chemist - he was able to renew in the two decades that were left to him, and to produce works which are justly considered among the best in contemporary Hungary. The short stories published in his volume “Jerusalem Princess” (1966) blazed a trail in Hungarian prose with their sirnpli-Istvón Örkény city aimed at nothing but the essential. This came to full bloom in his “One minute stories”. These are neither anecdotes, nor sketches, one has the feeling that this particular form of the short-story was specifically designed to express the grotesque. “I~ tried” wrote Örkény “to have away from literature all that can be honed away, as if I were discharging ballast from an air-ship. First I thought I would be left with empty hands at the end, but finally I was left with these stories. . . They are mathematical equations: balancing a minimum of communication by the writer and a maximum of imagination by the reader.” There was good reason why Örkény’s prose, be it brief or bulky grew into plays that brought him fame well beyond those parts of the world where Hungarian is spoken. The best-known of his plays, Gats play was first a novella made up of long telephone talks, bits of letters and old writings. The Budapest production of the play is still remembered for the outstanding performance by Mária Sulyok. The Brussells production in French, came sometime later. Vercors, who adapted the play to the French stage, mentioned in a memorial note he wrote after Örkény’s death that he stumbled upon Catsplay by chance in The New Hungarian Quarterly, where it appeared in English. Catsplay was staged in London, with Elizabeth Bergner in the leading role, as well as in the United States. Another play by Örkény, The Tót family also grew out of a novella, first published in 1967. Its success was due to the authentic way in which it presented the course which drives an ordinary family to carry out the absurd orders of an irrational and cruel person. The basic conflict is between an army major, who spends his leave from the battle fronts of the Second World War in a small village in the hills somewhere in Hungary at the Tót family’s house with whom he is staying. Örkény did not intend to write an abstract, timeless allegory, he wanted to describe the syndrome of a special disease rampant in Hungary at a concrete period of time, but the maniacal officer and the attitude of the family who in a cowardly wag carried out his orders inevitably gained the wider perspective of timeless fascism. It became an allegory exemplifying the causes and circumstances of the growth of tyranny at any time. The alloy of the singular and the general, the situations he developed with an uncommon sensitivity, and the magnificient roles offered to great actors made this work a world success. ZOLTÄN halAsz The Tót family (Attila Nagy and Zoltán Latinovits) 29
