COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

The Hungarian translation of Darkness at Noon (1940) was the result of the efforts of a university student and to-be founder of the underground Trabant band, Gábor Lukin. He was an admirer of György Petri, and in 1976, Lukin gave the typescript to the poet to have the translation checked. Petri asked the writer György Dalos to correct the text with a special regard to Soviet terminology and the spelling of Russian names. Lukin then sent the final version to Koestler in London, and the author mediated the typescript to the Münich publishing house Újváry-Griff. They published the novel as Sötétség délben in 1981.

In the meantime, the translation was circulated in Budapest as well, but it took years before a samizdat edition was printed. Gábor Demszky's AB Független and György Krassó's Magyar Október, the two major samizdat presses which regularly published international literature, were not particularly interested in the work. They opted instead for George Orwell's 1984, and they competed with each other to get it translated and published. A newcomer took the initiative in Koestler's case. Samizdat publisher Szabad Idő [Free Time] was founded in 1984 by Péter Égerszegi, József Gehér, Zoltán Kurdi, and Lajos Jakab, and they showed interest in publishing Darkness at Noon as their first book.

It was Jakab who had contacts at a printing press. The printer, however, did not work very well, so Jakab needed to give him instructions again and again as to how to correct the mistakes. It was not an easy task: relatively few people had telephones at the time, and Jakab did not have one at home. He started the calls from his workplace. In retrospect, Jakab suspected that his calls were intercepted, since the political police came to search his office. They knew from the start that he was keeping samizdat in his file cabinet. Until then, Jakab had been convinced that his samizdat collection, which consisted of more than one hundred items, was at a safer place in his office than in his home. He proved to be wrong. He was fined by the police, and the officers wanted to turn him into an agent, but he refused. His boss was also informed about the case, and Jakab had to resign from his position. He was unable to find a job as an economist after that, so he decided to continue his dissident activities openly. He gave private lessons in maths to make a living, while he had a fake position at a firm in order to avoid the charge of "közveszélyes munkakerülő" (truant perilous to the public), a particular legal category under Kádárism.

With regard to Koestler's book, the police confiscated the covers that featured Kazimir Malevich's drawing "Arrest: Man and Power.” Jakab, however, managed to save the inside and pass it on to his friends without the police noticing it. Zoltán Kurdi, with the assistance of Inconnu member Péter Bokros, printed the cover with a very simple non-offset technique. Naturally, Jakab could not take part in the production of the book anymore. It was bound by the publishers themselves under the guidance of Gábor Rózsa at his flat. Sötétség délben was soon on the underground book market.

György Konrád's novel, A cinkos (literally 'The Accomplice' but translated as The Loser), was finished in 1978, but was not allowed to be published officially in Hungary until the change of regimes in 1989. Konrád started to work on The Loser in Budapest and in the picturesque village of Csobánka, just a few kilometres from the capital. He was kept under constant surveillance by the political police, and both his flat in Budapest and his rented house in Csobánka (a former Chiming House, once a residence of Catholic nuns who moved into a new building) was bugged. This village house was the scene where Konrád and his friend, the sociologist Iván Szelényi, wrote their book entitled Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, which was considered a primary threat by the party, which sough to prevent its publication and circulation by all means. In October 1974, the secret police searched the Csobánka house for typescripts and related notes. They did not find the first chapters of The Loser hidden in an old desk, so Konrád was able to continue working on the manuscript.

The fact that the manuscript of The Loser remained safe from the authorities proved to be decisive for Konrád's career. During the process of their persecution, Konrád, like Szelényi, was offered the chance to leave the country for good as result of an international protest campaign against their arrest. Szelényi took the opportunity and emigrated to England, but Konrád decided to stay, for he wanted to finish The Loser. As he retrospectively commented on his decision, he had realized that in exile he would have to focus on his academic career and struggle with all the difficulties of establishing a new life. Such time consuming efforts would certainly threaten his ambition to finish his next literary work. Therefore, via interlocutors, he made a deal with György Aczél, the principal architect of cultural policy at the time, that he would stay in Hungary if the political police would terminate its continuous harassment and allow his previous novel, finished in 1973, A városalapító (that is The City Builder), to be published. Aczél agreed, and after significant cuts the novel was published in 1977. Beginning in 1974, Konrád received advancements from Magvető Publishing House for A városalapító, which together with payments from abroad for his translated books secured him a modest income. Konrád also worked as a ghost writer, another way to make a living. Thus, having his and his family's basic needs fulfilled, unlike so many prominent dissident writers from East Central Europe, he did not choose to emigrate.

Konrád did not become isolated from the West, however. In 1976, his three-year prohibition for applying for a passport ended, and in 1977 Konrád was granted permission to leave for West Berlin to become a writer-in-residence in the Berlin Artist Program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm) of the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, DAAD). In 1978, he spent some time in the United States with a stipend offered by his American publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). Konrád has been working on The Loser over the years, and he finished the novel in New York in autumn 1978.

He knew that the work had no chance of being published in Hungary. The novel covers five decades of Hungarian history via the narrator's visions, who is a writer incarcerated in a mental asylum along with a number of other political dissidents. It contains critical assessments of the role of the Soviet Union and a sympathetic depiction of the 1956 revolution. Upon return to Hungary, Konrád delivered a typescript to samizdat publisher Gábor Demszky, but in 1979 the secret police confiscated the copy. The Loser was first published in German with the title Der Komplize (Suhrkamp, 1980) and in French as Le Complice (De Seuil, 1980), and even the English translation (HBJ, 1982) preceded the first Hungarian samizdat edition by Demszky's ABC Független (1983). The samizdat version was reprinted by the New York Hungarian publisher Sándor Püski in 1986.