HUNGARY: Writer’s Sentence

With a reputation extending beyond his native land, Novelist Tibor Dery, ailing and aged at 64. is far and away the most famed writer in Hungary today. In his best-known book, The Unfound Phrase, Dery expounded his own political philosophy in the fictional terms of a wealthy Budapest lawyer who turned to Communism as his nation’s only hope. Too incendiary for publication in the days of the prewar Horthy fascist dictatorship, it was circulated widely in manuscript before going to press ten years later in 1946.

In later years, though still a Communist, Dery turned the power of his pen against bloodthirsty Stalinism, became a close adviser of the moderate Imre Nagy. As a leader of the potent Writers’ Union, he was a powerful voice behind the revolution that brought Khrushchev’s tanks rumbling into Hungary last year.

Last week, despite the protests of writers from all over the world, including T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and even French Communist Poet Louis Aragon,* the puppet dictatorship of Janos Kadar sentenced Tibor Dery to nine years in prison for his revolutionary activities. Sentenced along with him were three other famed members of the Writers’ Union: Playwright Gyula Hay, Journalist Tibor Tardos, Poet Zoltan Zelk, who wrote in a widely quoted poem:

Not tiger-like but human are my ways My worn heart fears and fears anew . . . So how can I be brave? I fear only that I’d be unworthy—This I fear more than the grave.

* Asked, along with other U.S. writers, to wire protests to the U.N., Novelist William Faulkner refused, adding: “Any time we stop hollering and instead organize a posse to penetrate the Iron Curtain to try to tear down a jail and save one innocent victim, I will make one.”