76
PARTISAN REVIEW
practice
would always appear to them extravagant and dangerous.
They were right, it seemed, for no sooner had the reins been
loosened than the writers and journalists began to denounce certain
privileges enjoyed by the "high aristocracy" of State and Party. The
anxiety of the bureaucracy before this "spirit of anarchy" fostered by
writers was expressed with a certain verve by Joseph Darvas, one-time
novelist of peasant life and a philo-Communist, who had replaced the
sick Joseph Revai as chief of the propaganda apparatus. Darvas de–
nounced the writers, who, while seeming to confine their attacks to
particulars, "are denigrating and vilifying the whole Party achievement
in the construction of socialism, and undermining the authority of
the leaders."
This counter-attack by the Stalinist bureaucracy developed strength,
thanks to the consolidation of Mathias Rakosi's position brought about
by Khrushchev's direct intervention. When Imre Nagy was driven out
of the premiership and the Party directorate for alleged deviationism,
the reformist writers lost their main political prop. Orthodoxy appeared
to have triumphed up and down the line. And it was in threatening
accents that it reaffirmed "the absolute right of the Party to take
charge of cultural life."
Nevertheless, the threats fell for once on deaf ears. For a very
simple reason: the writers realized that, while the new line formulated
by Khrushchev called for struggle against deviationists, it also forbade
Rakosi to take
administrative
and
police
action against the "heretics."
It was at this point (May, 1955) that Jules Hay, Tibor Dery, and the
young novelist, Thomas Aczel, the only Hungarian Stalin Prize winner,
took over the leadership of a struggle against "intellectual bureaucracy,"
that is, against Party control over cultural activities. Their fight took
a more desperate turn about October, 1955, when the first findings of
the inquiry (which the Party apparatus had tried to sabotage) into
the Rajk affair began to be known. For many writers, the discovery
of the truth, that is, of the fact the 1949 trial had been a "lie from
beginning to end," came as a terrible shock, leading to despair, self–
torture, and even nervous collapse. From that crisis, as one of them,
Otto Major, wrote, was born "the moral unity of the writers, based
on a solemn commitment never to lie again, never to serve an inhuman
purpose ... to tell the truth...."
The truth? The word itself has a doubtful ring in the ears of the
dialecticians of the bureaucracy, for whom it is so easily confounded
with untruth, which serves their interests (or seems to). The moral
