Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The endless promenade dedicated to persons in the labour movement

■ The Béla Kun Monument by Imre Varga, ig86

atrocities of the Red Terror, himself later becoming a victim of Stalinist terror in his turn.

The sculptor placed the bronze, chromium, steel and copper sculptural group on an artificial mound covered with cobblestones. What the composition highlighted was the relationship between orator and masses, simultaneously narrating, from left to right, a historical process suggested by the transformation of bourgeois-looking demonstrators armed with no more than umbrellas and hats into a bayonet-charge mounted by the Red Army of the proletariat. What Varga was doing "with his sophisticated devices was to problematise, rather than celebrate, the part played by Kun in the country’s history” (art critic András Rényi).

The sculptor himself later told a reporter: "This monument was the first ever to display a critical approach to history. It is about a man who, at the moment of taking his leave, is confronted by the spirits or ghosts of those who were executed by himself. There they float around, above the earth, and there stands a man waving good-bye with hat in hand below the gallows awaiting him. There is a Hungarian poem that was written by Petőfi when Count Latour was lynched in Vienna. The man was hanged on a lamp post during the Vienna uprising of 1848. And Petőfi sets this line to paper: 'Latour, your neck is in the noose’. Well, it was a lamp post where that rope was fastened, and from that time the

35