The Name of the Captive, or Two Years of BUKSZ
The Name of the Captive, or Two Years of BUKSZ

Summary/Abstract: The greatest damage done to Hungarian intellectual life by communist rule was the elimination of a healthy spirit of criticism. Not that the communists did not set out to be critical: György Lukács, for one, criticized contemporary authors and books frequently and energetically. So did less grandiose characters within the party, the censorship machine, and the apparatus of dialectical materialism. “He has been criticized” was a frequendy-used term, especially in the fifties and early sixties: it implied that the person concerned had fallen out of grace, that he would not be able to publish for a while, or would have to recant in a humiliating way. This use of the term “criticize” was similar to the way terms such as “convince”, “advise”, “inform” and many others were used in totalitarian parlance, in a truly Orwellian manner.

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