72
PARTISAN REVIEW
Moscow
emigres
connected with the local tyrant, Mathias Rakosi, was
excluded from the executive committee. On the other hand, admitted
in a body, along with heterodox Communists (Laszlo Benjamin, Tibor
Dery, Jules Hay, Lajos Konya), were non-Communist libertarians, so–
cialists, and independents: Paul Ignotus, the most brilliant essayist and
critic in the country; the great poet and proletarian novelist, Louis
Kassak; E. Kolozsvari-Grandpierre, a descendant of Huguenot exiles,
who contemplates the astonishing complications of Hungarian reality
with an amused skepticism; and nationalist-populists whose racist ide–
ology, tinged with Marxism and oriented to the cult of the peasant,
recalls that of the Russian
Esser
at the turn of the century: Jules Illyes,
who is in process of raising a poetic structure that is worthy and original,
despite the freakish political gusts blowing through it; the uneven auto–
didact Peter Veres, a writer booted and spurred, continually carrying
on an armed flirtation with intellectuals; even Lorinc Szabo, who is
perhaps the most gifted poet in contemporary Hungary, but whose
street-comer anti-Semitism and decadent's susceptibility to the attrac–
tions of open brutality led him to range himself alongside the Nazis in
1938; and Laszlo Nemeth, the Hungarian Drieu la Rochelle, a poly–
graph of confused nationalist, cosmopolitan, and Spenglerian tendencies,
but at the same time the incisive chronicler of the Magyar middle class,
to which he belongs.
I give this lengthy roll call of names of somewhat barbarous
resonance, of which two or three at most do not ring strangely in
Western ears, to show the diversity of this new "Directorate" of Hun–
garian writers, within which all intellectual tendencies were henceforward
to be represented, save one: that of the Stalinist inquisitors. It was a
kind of coalition government, based on a "defensive alliance" to which
the old Communist Jules Hay alluded at the Congress, as having been
"concluded among Hungarian writers regardless of political or philo–
sophical divergencies for the purpose of mutually assuring freedom of
speech, freedom to tell the truth." The alliance was directed against
the Party-to be exact, against the ideological monopoly claimed and
exercised by the Secretariat of the Central Committee.
Even before the Congress, however, the Hungarian writers, led by
the oldest Communist veterans among them (this fact must be em–
phasized: non-Communists have been followers not moving spirits of
these events), had rejected the authority of the Party not only in
literary matters, but also in the domain of organization. They had
practically killed the censorship and made good their claim that litera–
ture is something too serious to be entrusted to bureaucrats.
