The age of the surrendered Welsh bards

Without honesty, there is no art. And in a dictatorship, the artist, that is, the writer, cannot be honest. Can we continue to exchange views on literature in an age when there was an absolute dictatorship? Of course, talented writers still existed, but how would we know who was talented if his talent could not be fully manifested? Because being a great writer is not only a matter of talent, but also of social clairvoyance. The writer needs to be a good steward of his talent! - Albert Beke begins this book with these thoughts and substantiates with aesthetic arguments that we cannot really talk about literature from 1948, that is, from the full communist takeover. Although Hungarian writers took part in the preparation for the '56 revolution, most of them betrayed the most humiliating almost immediately after its defeat. Not only Béla Illés, József Darvas and the like did this, but also Gyula Illyés, László Németh and Zoltán Kodály. The elderly literary scholar examines this phenomenon of life and a specific form of behavior on which the reader should not be outraged, but should take note of all this after reading the book, for whether or not he acknowledges the facts remain the facts. More than thirty years have passed since the change of regime, but so far no one but the author has taken the courage to face the facts openly and account for them. After reading this summary work, the reader can get to know the so-called literature of the Rákosi and Kádár eras and deal with the false illusions so far. ALBERT BEKE (1934) is a literary historian, critic, professor, associate professor and member of the Hungarian Writers' Association. During the time of the first Orbán government, he worked as the head of a ministry department. He has been creating for more than six decades, although he was silenced for a time during the dictatorship, but his works on the history of literature have been appearing smoothly since the change of regime. Together with this book, 27 independent volumes have been published so far.