THE CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
77
crisis just undergone by many writers seemed to them only an evidence
of a petty-bourgeois hysteria. And when one of the young poets of the
Literary Gazette
circle, the proletarian Laszlo Benjamin, was imprudent
enough to attack in an acridly satirical poem the sacrosanct person
of Rakosi himself, all hell broke loose. Censorship officials ordered the
confiscation of the
Literary Gazette,
and its editor-in-chief, Georges Ra–
mos, was removed for "displaying weakness in his dealings with writers."
This was only the beginning. The Secretary-General of the Writers'
Union, Sandor Erdei, guilty of having praised the above-mentioned poet
Benjamin, was replaced by the ambitious and detested Aladar Tamas.
Moreover, the Censorship forbade the publication of Konya's
Journal–
a superb piece of reporting on the desolation of the Hungarian country–
side--and withdrew from the repertory of the National Theatre not only
a play by Jules Hay, but also Imre Madach's
The Tragedy of Man,
a
national classic, written after the crushing of the 1848 Revolution. Re–
cently, it has blocked the publication of a long-promised series of books
by outstanding non-Communist writers like Tersanszky, Kassak,
Remenyik, etc.
These contemptuous measures, inspired by Rakosi, were the last
straw. At a meeting of the Writers' Union executive committee, on
November 18, 1955, there was a scandalous outburst. Six members of
the Executive and three of the Secretariat, all of them Party members,
refused to work with the Stalinist Tamas and resigned. At the same
time, one of them, Tibor Dery, drew up, and had an overwhelming
majority of his confreres sign, a memorandum addressed to the Central
Committee, protesting against "violation of the Union's autonomy" as
well as against manifold acts of interference on the part of authorities
in the lives of writers and artists, and calling for "a complete break
with prevailing undemocratic methods of control which paralyze the
cultural life of the country and are destroying the authority and influence
of the Party."
This document-the first real evidence of opposition in Hungary–
when transmitted to the Central Committee at the end of 1955, at first
stunned the Rakosi government, then moved it to a frenzy of indig–
nation. Rakosi, determined to put down this "lackeys' rebellion," rammed
a stem "resolution" through the Central Committee and had it in–
serted, on December 10, in the
Literary Gazette.
It pilloried Tibor Dery
and four of his friends for their "anti-Party and anti-popular views,"
accusing them of having launched a "frontal attack" against the Party.
This arch-Zhdanovian resolution lumped together art for art's sake,
apolitical poetry, pseudo-revolutionary anarchism, symbolism, and so
