Századok – 2024

2024 / 3. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Bartha Ákos: Magyarország (újra)felfedezése. Egy szociográfiai sorozat indulása a Kádár-korszakban

MAGYARORSZÁG (ÚJRA)FELFEDEZÉSE

THE (RE)DISCOVERY

OF

HUNGARY

The Launching of a Sociographic Series in the Kádár

Era

By Ákos

Bartha

SUMMARY

The study reviews the first six years of the Discovering Hungary series, which was relaunched in 1967 by the Association of Hungarian Writers chaired by József

Darvas. It

is based on the books published in the series by Ferenc Erdei, Gyula

Fekete,

Sándor

László- Bencsik, Gábor

Mocsár, György Moldova

and Antal Végh,

the

relevant archival, oral history and press sources, and the available scholarly literature. The work primarily seeks to answer the question of how the state-sponsored Kádár

era

sociographers used their own opportunities in the light of the achievements of the ‘heroic era’ of the 1930s: should their work be assessed as self-submission, or an honest effort to reflect realities, or a mixture of the two? The controversies surrounding the published volumes, which were very popular in their own time, and the documents discussing and evaluating the manuscripts that did not appear in the series, provide new insights into the structure and functioning of the public sphere of the time, in addition to the issues mentioned above.

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