“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner’s words (from his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun) have been quoted and misquoted endlessly, most recently by Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign, to describe the persistence of racial antagonisms in American life and, in particular, in
Both Ukraine and Russia share the heritage of communism, which is the destruction of individual moral judgement. This may seem like a very mundane and obvious observation, even a rather irrelevant one, but this fact is the key to understanding what has happened in Ukraine and the Russian reaction to
When Vladimir Putin returned to Russia’s Presidency in May 2012, the Kremlin began to intensify its pressure on the former Soviet republics to participate in its integrationist projects. Ukraine became the keyprize in Kremlin plans to recombine the former Soviet republics in a Moscow-centred dominion styled as the “Eurasia Union”.
CENTRAL EUROPE:COOPERATION IN A COLD CLIMATE* Important though the Crimean and Ukraine crises are in themselves, they are perhaps more significant as an alarm bell for the NATO alliance and for US strategy in Europe. It is hard to conceive of a geopolitical event that would more profoundly affect the
It is hard to find one single word to describe all that happened in the eastern part of Europe twenty-five years ago when the communist regimes collapsed. Economists and political scientists tend to use the term reform for the profound changes of that time. But this term lacks clear contours.
On 19 March 1944, the day Germany occupied Hungary, I was barely more than two years old. Yet that fatal juncture of Hungarian history turned into an almost personal memory for me and became ever more firmly etched in my mind as years went by. Many in our family and
As a teenager I was fascinated by Upton Sinclair’s World’s End, translated into Hungarian under the title Letűnt világ (“A World That Disappeared”). It was published in 1940, when Hungary was still a “non-belligerent”, hoping to protect its traditional political and social system both from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
The grown-ups in my family felt about Hungary much what Talleyrand had felt about the ancien régime in France, that only those who had lived in the old days knew what douceur de vivre was. The grown-ups provided plenty of evidence, what’s more. I have in my possession a photograph
Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. (“The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing” was popularised by Isaiah Berlin, who had taken the saying from Archilocus, the classical Greek poet. It implies that there are two types of individuals, foxes, who seek knowledge in a variety
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897) It is an intriguing title, Der gelernte Österreicher (Braumüller, 2013), with its allusive irony, as in a gelernter Tischler (trained carpenter) or (like the current Mayor
HUNGARIAN REVIEW is
published by BL Nonprofit Kft.
Editorial office: 24 Eötvös Street, Budapest, 1067, HUNGARY
E-mail: hungarianreview@hungarianreview.com
Publisher: Gergő Kereki
Editor-in-Chief: Tamás Magyarics
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: István Kiss
Editors-at-Large: Gyula Kodolányi, John O’Sullivan
Managing Editor: Ildikó Geiger
