Category: Essay

REDEFINING THE CONCEPT OF THE HUNGARIAN NATION

Part II In 2010, the parties of the conservative coalition, the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz)–Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) led by Viktor Orbán won a two-thirds parliamentary majority and were able to launch a new kin-state policy that involved the redefinition of the nation on an ethno-cultural basis to

UNIVERSITY TEACHING IN HUNGARIAN AT THE NOVI SAD FACULTY OF LAW

A Retrospective after Fifty Years This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the success that launching concurrent instruction in Hungarian at the Novi Sad1 Faculty of Law meant to many of us. Alas, none of this survives today, except in memory. Yet my friends tell me that I should at

WITHIN THE GRACE OF MEANING

The study of a national culture is, in essence, a search for beauty. To believe this we need not submit to romanticism or deny the cold realities with which history confronts us. Either in concert or isolation, mankind consistently contradicts utopia’s vainglory: our efforts are ever flawed. But beauty is

AUSTRIANS AND HUNGARIANS: ENEMIES, NEIGHBOURS, FRIENDS

Mosaic of an Ambivalent Relationship In 1909, an English artist named Adrian Stokes and his Styrian wife Marianne published an account of their travels and painting expeditions in Hungary, chiefly Transylvania and Upper Hungary (now Slovakia). The prose is vivid, if a little mannered and occasionally rhapsodic. On the last