Kisantal, Tamás and Anna Menyhért, eds. Művészet és hatalom: a Kádár-korszak művészete [Art and Power. Art During the Kádár-Epoch]

Művészet és Hatalom. A Kádár-korszak Művészete [Art and Power. Art during the Kádár-Epoch]is a selection of papers presented at a conference under the same title on October 1 and 2 in 2004 at the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest in association with the József Attila Kör [Attila József Circle].Although the book was published a few years ago, in 2005, its importance lies in the cultural studies approach used that presents a process of memory reconstruction in contemporary Hungary.The editors of the volume, Tamás Kisantal and Anna Menyhért, organized the essays about the Kádárist era in three main categories, starting with "Irodalompolitika és irodalmi élet a Kádár-korszakban" ["The Politics of Literature and Literary Life during the Kádár-Epoch"], then "A művészi megszolalásmód és a politika-Kepzőművészet, szinház és film a Kádár-korban" ["The Modes of Artistic Expression and Politics-Fine Art, Theater and Film During the Kádár-era"], and finally "Mátyás királytól a rockzenéig-A korszak tömegkultúrája" ["From Mathias Rex to Rock Music-The Epoch's Mass Culture"], all of which orient readers to specific topics.More precisely, the topics include literature, theater, film, architecture, popular music, and aspects of mass culture.All-in-all, the material of the volume is rather heterogeneous, which alludes to, although without explicitly emphasizing, the heterogeneity of Kádár's reign from November 4, 1956 until May 22, 1988, during which period he occupied the position of the general secretary [viz.First and Chief] of the MSZMP [Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party] and also served as the Prime Minister of Hungary.The authors of the essays represent both the older generation of Hungarian academia who lived and experienced the Kádár-Epoch and also much younger scholars who most likely have encountered the era through the recollections of others.This intergenerational approach offers a fascinating perspective for the scholars involved in the creation of the volume and for the interested readers.My review offers a rather selective introduction to the volume by highlighting a few of the articles with a particular attention to literature.The title of the opening essay of the volume, "Cipő fűzővel: A hatalom és az irodalmi elit a hetvenes években" ["Shoe with Laces: Power and the Literary Elite in the Seventies"] by Éva Standeisky, a political history professor, contains a double entendre that alludes to the political and economic constraints of the era's literary scene.The laces may symbolize the bars on a prison window and a shoe that may be left unlaced, that is, left to its own worth without any enforced bind.In turn, Standeisky points to a self-propagated ambivalence in Party politics with reference to literature because, traditionally, writers and poets played a significant role in keeping the nation's conscience alive in politics and culture, which during the pre-1989 years was the domain of the government.In order to eschew a cultural crisis in literature, politicians afforded many of the literati with leniency who often had its eyes on Western and alternative influences.Standeisky explains how by luring writers and poets, such as József Darvas, Gyula Illyés, Tibor Déry, Imre Sarkadi and Erzsébet Galgóczi among others into the ranks of Party membership the Socialist Party cultural leaders admittedly shifted gear from force, fear mongering and incarceration of the challenging literary figures to the clever tactics of "ostor és mézesmadzag" ["whip and carrot"] to keep them at bay, a technique that benefited both groups (14).Divergent expressions of the cultural mode of production from alternative, avant-garde to socialist realist merits were played out in a dynamic public domain under the permissive gaze of the

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