Category: VOLUME XIII, No. 4

OUR AUTHORS

PAUL GILFILLAN is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His major work is A Sociological Phenomenology of Christian Redemption (2014). In 2021–2022, he was a visiting senior fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. He is currently conducting ethnographic research on a number of projects, including

Along the Russian Border

A Journey in Eastern Estonia Outside the front door, a crowd of rowdy transvestites were passing by. They had bottles of beer in their hands. One of them vomited against the wall. Another told us they were from London, English lads visiting Tallinn for a stag party. We had not

Selected Poems

The Wind Has Entered My Room A szél jött be szobámba The wind has entered my room, and it talks to me.From the wind the answer comes into my labyrinth,the rustle of the leaves? The poet of old?To whom the wind talked once, and now he speaks To me, that

TO GYULA KODOLÁNYI AT 80

Words quarrel, ideas clash, truths hide, theories mislead, deadlines have seized strategic chokepoints threatening paralysis, supplies of semicolons have failed to arrive on time, metaphors and similes are suspected of being enemy agents, irony and litotes have changed the road signs sending the unwary in the wrong directions, and all

Russian Arms for Franz Joseph
in 1849

‘Warsaw is lying at Your Majesty’s feet’, declared Field Marshal Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich to Tsar Nicholas I on 8 September 1831, after the Polish capital had opened its gates to him early at dawn the same day. Paskevich did not fail to call the Tsar’s attention to the fact that

SOME DIED SLOWLY

András Tömpe and the Long War within Communism* A tall dignified man in his late fifties, whose English moustache only accentuated his military bearing, András Tömpe brought two guns to work one day at Vörösmarty Square. He wanted to be sure. The disciplinary verdict was due to be read at

A Fatal Case of Empathy

Hungary and the UN, 1956–1963Excerpt II The surface-level events and those under the surface amounted to two entirely separate stories: one written for public consumption, the other the result of raw, sometimes brutal pragmatism behind the scenes. That for some this was hard to bear is confirmed by the story

AN INTERNMENT CAMP COMMANDER’S STRUGGLE

The Story of István VasdényeyPart II ‘The train departed a second time.’1The title of István Lengyel’s conversation with the poet Erzsi Szenes, an inmate of the Kistarcsacamp. See: István Lengyel, ‘A vonat másodszor is kirobogott… Beszélgetés Szenes Erzsi költőnővel,a Hunsche-Krumey per tanújával’ (The Train Departed a Second Time … Conversation

Nation Building in Central Europe

On the Relationship between Religious and National Identity The purpose of this study is to outline the cooperation between Slovak, Czech, and Polish national movements and the Christian denominations that supported them in various forms, covering the period from the early modern era to the present day. Before describing individual

Separation of Powers
and Sovereignty

The Question of External Executive Power The title István Bibó gave to his academic inaugural address on 16 January 1947 was ‘Separation of Powers, Then and Now’. 1István Bibó, Az államhatalmak elválasztása egykor és most. Bibó István munkái (The Division of StatePowers Formerly and Today. István Bibó’s Works), Centenary Series