Literary Journal 2016/2. In the shadow of the Gulag, our exiles

The new, 140-page issue of Literary Journal recalls the stories of the Gulag from Hungarian aspects, and the Hungarian exiles of the 20th century, which have been silenced or only fragmentarily told for decades. Its focus is on the problem of human suffering, which can be understood at both individual and community level. Most of the articles in this issue focus on the crime-free punishment of a significant proportion of Hungarians who were torn apart by the Trianon Peace Treaty and then, from the end of the Second World War, were subjected to Soviet occupation. The fate of prisoners of war, of those innocently convicted by Soviet courts martial as war criminals or "anti-regime" elements, of those sent to forced labour for reparation, of those deported, is recounted in the pages of the magazine.

This time the journal also includes a number of publications with a specific historical context: most of them are documentary (prison-camp) literature, i.e. works with a reference to reality, which cannot be understood without knowing their historical background. However, most of our authors – according to the profile of the journal – analyse these texts, which are of a fictional nature and deal with traumatic historical events using sophisticated poetic-rhetorical devices, from a predominantly aesthetic point of view. In this way, the authors have made known a community of memory that is characterised by the names of József Lengyel, György Faludy, István Örkény, Gyula Hernádi, Géza Páskándi and Mihály Zoltán Nagy (and, in the context of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Salamov).

The existence of this high-quality community is the clearest possible proof that intellect, culture and language have been able to overcome the irrational despotism of a power that does not shy away from genocide, even in a century that is difficult to surpass in its severity.