World: Forget the Revolution?

Among Hungarian authors who helped stir the people to revolt in 1956, none was more famous than Novelist Tibor Dery. His Niki: The Story of a Dog, a powerful satire on Stalinism in Hungary, was published on the eve of the uprising and immediately became a bestseller. For his role in the revolution, the Janos Kadar puppet regime sentenced Dery to nine years in prison.

Two years ago Dery was released, when Kadar tried to win the support of the apathetic population by slightly relaxing his dictatorship. Today, under Kadar’s slogan “He who is not against us is with us,” non-Communist technicians have been given important industrial posts, attacks against the church have slackened, Western newspapers can be bought in Budapest hotel lobbies. But unlike most other Hungarian intellectuals, who tentatively raised soft voices of comment within the limits set down by the regime, Dery cloaked his reaction to the changing times in silence. He published nothing, was inaccessible to visiting Westerners, even remained aloof from other Hungarian writers. Occasionally he was seen in the street carrying an ice-cream cone to his wife, who edits U.S. news for the Communist Party newspaper.

Now Dery, 68, has re-emerged into print for the first time in more than five years. In a story called The Reckoning, published in the literary monthly Uj Iras (New Writing), he reluctantly comes to the conclusion that it is better to forget the revolution than to remain defiant.

Dery’s spokesman is an elderly professor who refuses to give refuge to a young freedom fighter after the rebellion is crushed, but who also refuses to hide the revolutionary’s machine gun from the Red authorities. Contemptuous of both sides, the professor allows the gun to lie openly in the vestibule of his apartment. Later, the professor travels to the frontier in a train crowded with passengers who hope to flee to the West, at the last moment decides he cannot escape the guilt for having harbored a weapon that was used to kill others.

Wandering through a bitter snowstorm, the professor is urged by a young girl to join her in escaping. The professor is dying in the cold but he refuses. His last words: “Do you suppose that by dragging me across the frontier with your frostbitten, dirty hands you are atoning for anything? . . . Nothing can be changed, my young lady, nothing. The dead cannot be resurrected; wounds only appear to be healed. The main thing is to lead an honest life now.”