¹ Bakhtin, M. M., “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, 84–127 (Austin, 1996)Google Scholar. Bakhtin is primarily interested in the centrality of chronotopic patterns to “the literary image of man,” but the category is arguably no less useful for historical understanding.

² The complex processes leading to the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria have been reconstructed by Andreas Oplatka in Der erste Riss in der Mauer. September 1989–Ungarn öffnet die Grenze (Vienna, 2008)Google Scholar.

³ Borhi, László, “A Reluctant and Fearful West: 1989 and Its International Context,” The Hungarian Quarterly (Autumn 2009)Google Scholar. Accessed 1 December 2009. http://www.eurozine.com/journals/hq/issue/2009-04-06.html.

⁴ The Central European revival began with Milan Kundera's essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984. For a retrospective survey see Timothy Garton Ash, “The Puzzle of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999.

⁵ The idea of a Danubian confederation was first proposed to the Hungarian revolutionary government of 1848 by Romanian minority delegates. Having opposed the aspirations of other nationalities until the last months of the revolution, in 1862 the former regent-governor Lajos Kossuth came around to espousing the confederation model in his Turkish exile and formulated a more radical variant of it. The Budapest-born Jewish Austrian progressive Adolf Fischhof advocated an Austrian version of the federative model in his anonymously published 1869 work Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes. In his 1918 treatise, The Future of the Monarchy: The Demise of Dualism and the Danubian Confederation, Oszkár Jászi revived Kossuth's Hungarocentric ideal of a Danubian confederation as an alternative to Friedrich Naumann's Germanocentric Mitteleuropa; and in his major study from 1929 on The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, written and published in American exile, Jászi wrote appreciatively of Fischhof's proposal. In Endre Ady's 1908 poem “Magyar jakobinus dala” [Hungarian Jacobean's Song], as well as in Attila József's poem “A Dunánál” [By the Danube] from 1936, the Danube becomes a metaphorical stand-in for the brotherhood of nations in the region. For Danubian meditations of more recent vintage, see Claudio Magris's 1986 book Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, Péter Esterházy's 1991 novel The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn: Down the Danube, as well as the 1998 film Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River by director Péter Forgács.

⁶ Kemény, István, “Komp-ország, a hídról [Ferry-Land, From the Bridge],” Holmi 18, no. 2 (2006/2): 220-226, at 226Google Scholar.

⁷ Adorno, Theodor W., “Schubert,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, trans. Livingstone, Rodney, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf, 299–313 (Stanford, 2003), at 312Google Scholar.

⁸ A quick summary of the prehistory of Austrian-Hungarian relations may be in order. Hungary was a sovereign state from 1000 until its defeat by the Turks in 1526, following which its southern parts (including the capital) came under Ottoman rule, and the Hungarian Crown, along with the northwestern regions, fell to the Habsburg dynasty; the eastern part, which retained its independence, became the Principality of Transylvania. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Holy League led by Austria had succeeded in driving out the Turks, and the previously Turkish-occupied parts were incorporated into the Habsburg-ruled Kingdom of Hungary. Following protracted independence struggles, Transylvania, too, lost its sovereignty to Austria in 1711. With the exception of a brief period during the 1848–49 war of independence, the entire country remained under Habsburg rule until 1918, when defeat in World War I resulted in the disintegration of the monarchy into several nation-states.

⁹ Even today, interest in contemporary Hungarian literature is stronger in Germany than in Austria. For artists and writers from Hungary, the stepping-stone to the world at large today is typically not Vienna but Berlin. This bypassing of Austria in favor of Germany has a distant precedent in the late nineteenth century. R. J. W. Evans points out that “Magyars looked to a ‘modern’ Germany, and took Austria for a province of it, thus finding in Bismarck's Reich a guilt-free focus for Hungary's Teutonic traditions and increasingly imagining themselves sovereign at home.” See Evans, R. J. W., “Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1840–1867: A Study of Perceptions,” in Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867, 245–65 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar, at 264.

¹⁰ Bibó, István, “Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsákutcás fejlődés [Deformations of the Hungarian Constitution and the Dead End of Hungarian History],” in Demokratikus Magyarország: Válogatás Bibó István Tanulmányaiból [Democratic Hungary: Selected Studies of István Bibó], 356–400 (Budapest, 1994)Google Scholar. There is, as far as I know, no English translation of this essay.

¹¹ The influential conservative historian Gyula Szekfű (1883–1955) celebrated the Compromise as the culmination of a centuries-long process by which Hungary became integrated into the “Christian-Germanic culture” of modern Europe. Steering a middle course between Bibó's critical and Szekfű's positive assessment, Ignác Romsics claims that the Compromise benefitted Hungarians from an economic and cultural, but not from the social and political point of view. Romsics, Ignác, Magyarország története a XX. Században [The History of Hungary in the Twentieth Century] (Budapest, 2005), 17Google Scholar.

¹² This point is emphasized by philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás in the essay “Magyarok voltunk [We Were Hungarians],” Élet és Irodalom, 31 July 2009.

¹³ “Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsákutcás fejlődés,” 373.

¹⁴ R. J. W. Evans, “Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1840–1867: A Study of Perceptions,” 265.

¹⁵ Bibó's dialectically astute diagnosis also pinpoints the opposite pitfall, which almost by necessity awaited the intellectuals who rebelled against such false realism: an “overstrained vision of the essential truth” (“túlfeszített lényeglátás”).

¹⁶ Bibó, István, “A kelet-európai kisállamok nyomorúsága [The Misery of the Small States of Eastern Europe],” in Demokratikus Magyarország: Válogatás Bibós István Tanulmányaiból [Democratic Hungary: Selected Studies of István Bibó], 141–214 (Budapest, 1994)Google Scholar, at 159.

¹⁷ There is little if any justification for this view. The Communist republic of 1919 actually launched a daring military campaign to protect Hungary's territorial integrity from invasion by Romanian and Czech forces, whereas Miklós Horthy's counterrevolutionary regime was installed by the Entente Powers on the condition that it accept the Trianon Treaty—which it promptly did. According to István Bibó, the irredentism of Horthy's regime was in no small part an attempt to compensate for this “birth defect.” “Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsákutcás fejlődés,” 381.

¹⁸ While the criminal role played by Hungarian leaders and countless citizens in the murder of Hungarian Jews is beyond dispute, it would be somewhat inaccurate to say that this catastrophe was caused by the alliance with Nazi Germany. Hungary's governor Miklós Horthy did not prevent the pogroms during the counterrevolutionary “White Terror” of 1920, and the government he appointed was the first in modern Europe to pass numerus clausus laws in 1921. However, the Horthy regime's pronounced anti-Semitism never took a turn toward eliminationism. The officers who killed nearly four thousand Serbs and Jews in the Novi Sad raid of January 1942 were subsequently court-martialled in Horthy's Hungary (though later allowed to escape to Nazi Germany). In part because the country's economy depended on its Jewish bourgeoisie, Horthy resisted German pressures to deport Hungarian Jews. Paradoxically, it was Horthy's reluctant servility toward Hitler that allowed him to postpone large-scale deportations until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944. See Deák, István, “Mindless Efficacy,” The Hungarian Quarterly (2008/4)Google Scholar. Accessed 25 July 2009. http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no192/9.shtml.

¹⁹ See Lendvai, Paul, Hungary: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism, trans. Chester, Keith (London, 2012)Google Scholar, 56.

²⁰ This point was made, again, by Bibó in his major 1948 essay on “The Jewish Question in Hungary after 1944.” See Bibó, István, “A zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után [The Jewish Question in Hungary After 1944],” in Válogatott Tanulmányok [Selected Studies] Vol. 2 [Editor not identified], 621–797 (Budapest, 1994)Google Scholar, at 746–47.

²¹ This connection was first noted by Jászi, Oscar [Oszkár], The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar, quoted by Lendvai, 58.

²² On the popular movement, see Gyurgyák, János, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok: A magyar nemzeteszme és nacionalizmus története [This Is What Your Hungarian Fatherland Has Come To: A History of the Hungarian Idea of Nationhood and Nationalism] (Budapest, 2007), 387–461Google Scholar.

²³ The most important statements of this position were Gyula Illyés' “Pusztulás” [Extinction] from July 1933 and László Németh's “Kisebségben” [In Minority] from April 1939. Among the most important polemical responses from the urban side were those by Béla Zsolt, Lajos Hatvany, and Ignotus (born Hugó Veigelsberg).

²⁴ The latter were the “urbánus” writers. That archaic and Latinate-sounding designation often functioned as a euphemism for “Jewish” and retained that valence after 1989.

²⁵ This remark is quoted by poet István Vas (1910–1991), who discusses the dispute in the third volume of his absorbing essayistic autobiography from 1981. Vas, István, Miért Vijjog a Saskeselyű? [Why Is the Eagle Screaming?], vol. 1 (Budapest, 2002), 76–145Google Scholar.

²⁶ The Right's lingering sense of unjust persecution is only partly explained by the fact that the Communist regime routinely tarnished its patriotic-conservative opponents as Fascists. It must also be said that some of the prominent successors of the popular movement who defined the discourse of the post-1989 Right did little to preempt suspicions along these lines. In general, they were no match to such formidable figures of the 1930s populist movement as Gyula Illyés, László Németh, and István Bibó. János Gyurgyák, a historian who writes sympathetically about the populist movement, claims that it had no genuine heir after 1989, since the post-transition Right appropriated only its most retrograde aspects. János Gyurgyák, “A magyar népi mozgalomról [On the Hungarian Populist Movement]” Népszabadság, 8 November 2008. Accessed 25 July 2010. http://nol.hu/velemeny/lap-20081108-20081108HV-1.

²⁷ This aspect of the conflict between the Right and the Left-liberal side was brought to a head in the controversies provoked by the opening in February 2002 of the so-called House of Terror established by the outgoing Fidesz government. At least in quantitative terms, this exhibit's showcasing of Communist oppression outweighed its portrayal of the evils of Fascism, on the ostensible grounds that Communism lasted longer than Szálasi's Fascist regime.

²⁸ This issue first surfaced in the wake of the semilegal Lakitelek Meeting held on 27 September 1987, the founding event of the Right. Although this meeting was intended as a roundtable discussion among all progressive forces, members of the older liberal dissident movement were not invited. The fact that many of the latter were known to be of Jewish origin, along with the ideological orientation of the participants, led to charges of anti-Semitism, picked up (to conservatives' outrage) in a New York Times article published the next day. Conservatives who later tried to justify the exclusion of the dissidents argued that they wanted to negotiate with reformists from the Communist party, who could not have attended the meeting if the notoriously confrontational liberal dissidents had been present; this sounds plausible enough, inasmuch as the pre-1989 nationalist Right was more inclined toward compromise with the party state than were the firmly anti-Communist liberals. These resentments crystallized in 1990, first by playwright István Csurka's venomous radio address against the machinations of a “tiny minority,” and then by poet Sándor Csoóri's claim, made in a tortuous two-part essay published in August and September, to the effect that the Alliance of Free Democrats had become a vehicle of liberal Hungarian Jewry's effort to “assimilate” Hungarians to itself.

²⁹ Support for MDF, the largest party of the coalition formed in 1990, had dramatically dropped as a result of unpopular austerity measures and internecine struggles between moderate conservatives and far-right populists within the party. The death in 1993 of prime minister József Antall, who was also the leader of MDF, left the party rudderless.

³⁰ Thus Bibó's observation from 1948 still holds true today: “Again and again, the key issues dividing the nation were formulated in terms that landed the community in futile, pointless struggles, leaving it blind to the real task and problems confronting it.” (István Bibó, “Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsákutcás fejlődés,” 359).

³¹ “Orbán Viktor beszéde 2002. május 7-én a budapesti Dísz téren” [Viktor Orbán's Speech On Dísz Square, 7 May 2002]. Accessed 7 February 2013. http://www.fidesz.hu/index.php?Cikk=1922.

³² Szilágyi's observation was made in the wake of the 2006 riots, when the final agony of the Third Republic had already begun, but the process he described had started much earlier. See Ákos Szilágyi, “Interregnum (2),” 2000 (2006/12): Accessed 25 July 2009. http://www.ketezer.hu/menu4/2006_12/szilagyi.html.

³³ Accounts diverge on the distribution of responsibility for this outcome. According to one version, the far-right mob “pulled” the police along into the peaceful Fidesz demonstrators; according to another, it was the police that deliberately “pushed” violent provocateurs into the peaceful crowd; yet another version suggests that the Fidesz leadership deliberately allowed the two groups to mingle.

³⁴ The full report and an English-language summary are available at http://www.gonczolbizottsag.gov.hu/esotr.html. In December 2011, the Fidesz supermajority set up a parliamentary committee whose report concluded that the Gyurcsány government had perpetrated an “act of terror” in autumn 2006.

³⁵ Ákos Szilágy, “Interregnum” (1). 2000 (November 2006): . Accessed 25 July 2009. http://www.ketezer.hu/menu4/2006_11/szilagyi.html.

³⁶ Rudolf Ungváry, “A jobboldal kormányzása felé [Toward the Governance of the Right],” Népszabadság, 14 March 2008. Accessed 25 July 2009. http://www.nol.hu/archivum/archiv-485035.

³⁷ Rudolf Ungváry, “A felkészülés mint remény [Preparation As a Form of Hope],” Népszabadság, 15 June 2009.

³⁸ On the ways in which the regimes led by Miklós Horthy (1920–1944) and János Kádár (1956–1988) eroded social responsibility, see Lengyel, László, A halál kilovagolt Magyarországról [Death Rode Out of Hungary] (Budapest, 2008), 228–32Google Scholar. Following the reforms of 1968, economic enterprise was permitted within narrowly defined bounds. It was initially assumed that this peculiarity of Hungary's “goulash Communism” would make the transition to capitalism easier. Subsequent developments showed, however, the opposite to be the case. The Kádár regime encouraged an egotistic mentality while paying lip service to a hollowed-out notion of the common good, fostering a cynical culture of corner cutting, tax evasion, and corruption. A deep-seated tendency to retreat into an apolitical private sphere is the other extremely corrosive legacy of the Kádár regime, which offered its subjects freedom and contentment in private life in return for abstinence from politics.

³⁹ Orbán openly declared this strategy in his January 2010 meeting with United States Ambassador Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis according to a U.S. Embassy cable dated 22 January 2010, published by Wikileaks: “Handicapping the political race, Orban said he was hoping for a low turnout, which had traditionally favored the Right.” See “Viewing cable 10BUDAPEST34, OPPOSITION LEADER VIKTOR ORBAN CONFIDENT OF,” Wikileaks, 30 August 2011. http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10BUDAPEST34.html.

⁴⁰ As Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian member of parliament and the president of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, complained recently: “Man kommt kaum nach, diese Änderungen zu beobachten, geschweige sie zu bewerten und mit europäischem Recht zu vergleichen.” Hannes Swoboda, “Wohin steuert Ungarn Viktor Orbán?” 19 November 2012. Accessed 25 November 2012. http://hannes-swoboda.at/?p=6189. Apologetes of the regime are quick to pinpoint the slightest technical inaccuracy in critical reports.

⁴¹ Jenne, Erin K. and Mudde, Cas, “Can Outsiders Help?” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (2012): 147–155CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 148.

⁴² For a succinct and comprehensive overview of this operation and the new constitutional order created by Fidesz, see Bánkuti, Miklós, Halmai, Gábor, and Scheppele, Kim Lane, “Disabling the Constitution,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (2012): 138–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ See Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven, 2011)Google Scholar, 146ff.

⁴⁴ Recently, Orbán claimed that Fidesz had not signed the 1989 Constitution on the grounds that it was not the outcome of a democratic process. In fact, what Fidesz, along with the Liberal Party SZDSZ, refused to sign in 1989 was the agreement concluding the roundtable discussions. What they objected to was not the constitutional revisions resulting from the talks, which they endorsed, but the provision that the president of the republic would be chosen through direct elections, a plan that would have favored the popular reform-Communist Imre Pozsgay (vitiated in the end through a referendum). Another argument that has been made to justify the push for a new constitution is that the 1989 Constitution was supposed to be provisional. As the example of Germany's Grundgesetz shows, however, through legislative and juridical practice a provisional constitution may gradually acquire considerable authority and endure over decades. There is very little support, if any, for the suggestions that the problems besetting post-transition Hungary can be attributed to the 1989 Constitution.

⁴⁵ For an analysis of a key ruling that was typical in this respect, see Kim Lane Scheppele, “How to Evade the Constitution: The Hungarian Constitutional Court's Decision on Judicial Retirement Age, Part II,” Verfassungsblog—On Matters Constitutional, 9 August 2012. Accessed 22 November 2012. http://www.verfassungsblog.de/how-to-evade-the-constitution-the-hungarian-constitutional-courts-decision-on-judicial-retirement-age-part-ii/#.UKl47o5aEdo.

⁴⁶ One of them was Imre Pozsgay, the prominent Communist functionary of the 1970s and 1980s, who had perfected the art of political survival by rebranding himself as a national conservative and whose cleverly engineered, if in the end unsuccessful, bid for the presidency in 1989 nearly compromised the transition to parliamentary democracy.

⁴⁷ Kim Lane Scheppele, “The New Hungarian Secret Police,” The Conscience of a Liberal, The New York Times, 19 April 2012. Accessed 22 November 2012. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/the-new-hungarian-secret-police/.

⁴⁸ This conclusion is shared by a wide range of experts who have leveled detailed and devastating criticism at the Basic Law. These include such liberal theorists as János Kis, Imre Vörös, Gábor Halmai, László Majtényi, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Andrew Arato; former head of the Constitutional Court and president of the republic László Sólyom, a legal scholar sympathetic to Fidesz; and legal theorist Péter Tölgyessy, who was active in the liberal party in the early nineties but later supported Orbán. To this day, no substantial attempt has been undertaken to rebut these objections and defend the legitimacy of the Basic Law.

⁴⁹ This key argument was advanced by former Constitutional Court judge Imre Vörös (“Államcsínytevők? [Putschists?]” hvg, 8 March 2012), as well as in a 28-page constitutional complaint that was submitted to the Constitutional Court on 1 March 2012 by members of the small and battered liberal-conservative party MDF (see previous section). The Court refused even to consider the complaint on the putative grounds that the matter it raised, that is, the possibility that a constitutional coup had taken place in Hungary, did not directly affect the citizens who submitted it (which, if it had been true, would have indeed disqualified the complaint according to the new, highly restrictive, cardinal law on the Constitutional Court).

⁵⁰ This was the position adopted by Princeton constitutional law expert Kim Lane Scheppele, who has conducted extensive research on Hungarian constitutionality since the 1990s. See her guest entries in Paul Krugman's New York Times blog The Conscience of a Liberal: “Hungary's Constitutional Revolution,” 19 December 2011. Accessed 22 November 2012. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/hungarys-constitutional-revolution/; “Hungarian Diplomatic Protest,” 31 December 2012. Accessed 22 November 2012. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/hungarian-diplomatic-protest/; and “The Unconstitutional Constitution,” 2 January 2012. Accessed 22 November 2012. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/the-unconstitutional-constitution/.

⁵¹ “National Integrity Study 2011,” Transparency International, 8 March 2012. Accessed 21 November 2012. http://www.transparency.hu/National_integrtity_study?bind_info=index&bind_id=0). See also “Post-Communist Institution Failing to Stop Corruption in Visegrad Countries,” Transparency International, 26 July 2012. Accessed 21 November 2012. http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/20120726_post_communist_institutions_failing_to_stop_corruption.

⁵² Entitlement to unemployment aid is now conditional on participation in the public works scheme, in which participants have to work forty hours per week for a net monthly pay of a little under HUF 40,000 (around EUR 140 in November 2012). One may be assigned to work on a project far from home, necessitating long commutes or accommodation in containers. The projected cost of the program for 2013 alone exceeds half a billion euros.

⁵³ The half-million figure was given in February 2013 by György Matolcsy, the economy minister known for wildly optimistic predictions, so the actual numbers may be higher. See also “Csúcson a migrációt tervezők aránya [Number of Those Planning to Emigrate At a High],” TÁRKI, 23 May 2012. Accessed 25 November 2012. http://www.tarki.hu/hu/news/2012/kitekint/20120523_migracio.html.

⁵⁴ This odd spectacle culminated in the autumn of 2012, when the leading right-wing daily furnished Orbán with a convenient pretext for rebellious posturing by leaking a list of harsh dictates attributed to the IMF. The list soon turned out to be fictitious, as the IMF explicitly denied that it had pushed for further austerity measures. Although the government attempted to mend fences by proclaiming its earnest wish to reach an agreement with the IMF, these assurances coincided with the publication of full-page newspaper ads paid by the government (costing approximately 700,000 euros in taxpayers' money) in which “respect and trust” was demanded of the IMF in the name of the Hungarian people.

⁵⁵ The extradition in August 2012 of “axe murderer” Ramil Safarov to Azerbaijan, Hungary's zealously courted new business partner, was a particularly glaring case, whose aftermath briefly threatened to reignite the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

⁵⁶ As a model case of how this coordination works, one might consider the tabloid weekly Helyi Téma (“Local Theme”), published by oligarch Tamás Vitézy, a faithful supporter of Orbán. Characterized by shoddy editing, pronounced pro-Fidesz bias and racist anti-Roma innuendo, Helyi Téma has a weekly circulation of nearly seven-hundred thousand copies, giving it by far the highest market penetration in print media. The paper receives generous subsidies and advertisement monies from Fidesz-run municipalities, which have its local edition delivered to every single household. Citing business confidentiality, the Hungarian Post refuses to disclose how much it charges for its distribution.

⁵⁷ Rupnik, Jacques, “How Things Went Wrong,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 2 (2012): 132–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 137.

⁵⁸ The concessions I have in mind include the appointment of two well-known anti-Semites to run a Budapest theater and various attempts at revising the cultural canon to include marginal irredentist and anti-Semitic writers from the 1930s. For an example of how the recklessness of Jobbik has enabled Fidesz to play “the good cop,” one might consider the parliamentary session of 26 November 2012, when a Jobbik MP declared that national security considerations called for a registry of the Jews living in Hungary. The secretary for foreign affairs responded with a half-hearted rejection, and the next day the government issued a bureaucratically worded statement of disapproval. Amid the predictable international uproar triggered by this Nazi provocation, hardly any attention was given to something else that happened on the very same day in the parliament: the Fidesz supermajority passed a highly restrictive election law introducing mandatory voter registration. I discuss the consequences of this legislation below.

⁵⁹ In a talk leaked in 2010 Fidesz party director Gábor Kubatov boasted about the party's cutting-edge database, claiming that campaign officials knew by name, age, phone number, and email address everyone who could be expected to vote for Fidesz. Although this form of data collection is against Hungarian law, a court ruled that there was no evidence for the implementation of the scheme described in the leaked speech. See “Last-Minute-Skandal: Hat Fidesz illegal Daten über die Gesinnung von Wählern in Ungarn gesammelt?” Pester Lloyd, 9 April 2010. Accessed 23 November 2012. (http://www.pesterlloyd.net/2010_14/14lastminute/14lastminute.html).

⁶⁰ In fact, although the new legislation restricts the campaign period to fifty days, the ruling party already began campaigning in November 2012, fifteen months ahead of the next scheduled elections. Only a few weeks after Gordon Bajnai joined Together 2014, a pro-government “civilian” organization launched a huge campaign to “inform” citizens about the danger posed by Bajnai. Ostensibly funded by small donations, the countrywide campaign involved prominently placed posters and pamphlets sent to every household.

⁶¹ Kis János, “A hazug konstrukció [The Mendacious Construction],” Bibó István Közéleti Társaság, 10 April 2011 [István Bibó Society For Public Affairs]. http://bibotarsasag.blogspot.com/2011/04/kis-janos-beszede-jatekszinben.html.

⁶² Endre Ady (1877–1919), the key figure of Hungarian literary modernism, famously described Hungary as a “ferry-land” shuttling between East and West. His poem “The Lost Rider” is an uncannily topical allegory of collective disorientation, while his political commentary can serve as a valuable compass to this day. Composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) forged an uncompromising modernist idiom guided by “the ideal of different nations uniting into brotherhood” and “did not shrink from any influence, be it Slovak, Romanian, Arab, or any other source.” Although the figures named here enjoy canonical status in the country, Hungarian society as a whole has yet to absorb the questions and lessons suggested by their works.

⁶³ Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Wilkins, Sophie (New York, 1996), 30–31Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ This convergence has been noted by Jacques Rupnik. See “Hungary's Illiberal Turn: How Things Went Wrong,” 136.

⁶⁵ “Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsákutcás fejlődés,” 397–99. Although, for the sake of fluency, my translation of the last sentence relies on the words “character” and “characteristic,” Bibó's use of the words “jelleg” / “jellegzetes” (whose closest equivalent would be “peculiarity” / “peculiar”) is clearly meant to avoid the essentialist connotations that became attached to the cognate word “jellem” (“character”) in the interwar-era discourse of national characterology.