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András Egyed (1913–1984) was a Piarist monk, teacher, and well-known psychologist of languages. He joined the Piarist Order in 1931 and was ordained as priest in 1940. He obtained a degree as a teacher of French and Latin (1940) and completed a doctoral degree (1942) at the university of Budapest. He studied philosophy in Paris (1934–1935). He was a teacher at the Pious Gymnasium of Tata (1940–1941) and in Máramarossziget (1941–1944). He was a member of the resistance against German occupation. In 1944, he helped save persecuted people in the institutes of the Swedish Red Cross. In December 1944, the Gestapo imprisoned and tortured him. Egyed was released in February 1945. He served as a teacher at the Pious Gymnasium of Budapest (1945–1948) and in Vác (1949–1951), and from 1951 until 1974 he worked as a primary teacher in Budapest. Initially, he pursued research on French literature and the history of education. Later, his interests turned to the border areas of linguistics, pedagogy, and psychology. He developed a new psycholinguistic research method founded on linguistic empirical data of Indo-European and partially Finno-Ugric languages. He was a member of the International Council of Psychologists.

Péter Egyed (Cluj, 6 April 1954 – Cluj-Napoca, 2 August 2018) was a Hungarian philosopher, writer, poet, critic and essayist from Transylvania. He was the son of the historian Ákos Egyed and the pedagogue Emese Fábián, and the brother of the literary historian, poet and university professor Emese Egyed. He graduated from high school in his home town, and after military service, between 1974 and 1978 he obtained a degree at the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. At the beginning of his career, from 1978 till 1980, he was a teacher at the Auto School Group Timișoara, and then between 1980 and 1990 he worked as an editor at the Kriterion Publishing House in Cluj-Napoca.

From 1973 he published poems, criticism and essays, at first mainly in Echinox (Equinox) and Korunk (Our Age). Between 1974 and 1978 he worked as managing editor at the Hungarian pages of the student newspaper in Cluj. He is a representative of the third Forrás (Source) generation.

As can be seen in his Forrás volume of 1978 A parton lovashajnal (Equestrian dawn on the bank) his poetry is characterised by a strong predisposition for philosophy, the parallel display of vital human issues and of the specific problems of life in Transylvania. His literary criticism and essays – among which the 1979 introductory essay to György Bretter’s volume Itt és mást (Here and other) stands out – show a sensitivity towards the collective function of the philosophical and a strong critical attitude. He was a scholar of literary semiotics, and one of the most influential creators of contemporary Hungarian literature and philosophy.

After the regime change, from 1990 he taught in the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. In 1998 he obtained his doctorate in political philosophy. Working first as assistant professor, from 2000 as associate professor, and then from 2003 as full professor, his research themes covered philosophies of freedom, philosophies of human rights and the history of Hungarian philosophy. Over the decades, besides his professional studies and professional articles, he published numerous books in various genres and he also received several literary awards.

Aleksandra Ekster (b.  Belostok, Russia in 1882, d. Fontenay-Aux-Roses, Paris in 1949) is a painter and designer of international stature, who divided her life between Kyiv, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, and Paris.  After graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Kyiv in 1906, Exter married in 1908 and moved to Paris that same year, where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Her social circle included Picasso, Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob as well as the Italian Futurists Filippo Marinetti, Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici (with whom she shared a studio in 1914). In 1909-1914, Exter travelled extensively between Paris, Moscow and Kyiv, playing an important role in disseminating Cubist and Futurist ideas among the Russian avant-garde. She participated in many important avant-garde exhibitions in Russia and Ukraine and Paris, as well as the International Futurist Exhibition in Rome (1914).

The National Art Museum in Ukraine holds an important work "Bridge at Sèvres" produced during this period. It is deeply influenced by Cubist and Futurist ideas, where the cityscape is fragmented into a system of small geometric planes, enlivened by variations of tone and color.

Márta Elbert (1950–) is an editor, reporter, producer, founding member and editor of the video periodical Black Box, and a documentarian of the changing political system in Hungary and in East-Central Europe.

Filming was destined to become her profession. In her early childhood, she was fond of watching all films, as she recollects, and instead of school she often went to the cinema from the age of ten. Later, she was enrolled in a technical institute, and her father, a furrier, wanted to pass his own profession on to her, but she felt little affinity for this line of work.

She started to work for the Hungarian Film Factory in 1970, at first as an assistant cash-keeper, which was really the lowest rank, but she was still delighted to get into the exclusive world of filmmaking. This had a great influence on her, to have the chance to come close to the celebrated actors of the age, whom before she could only watch and admire on the cinema screen. The staff hierarchy was sometimes overwhelming, but in spite of this, her compensation was having the chance to often enter into private conversation with actors and actresses. She eventually rose in the ranks of the film industry, and worked for twenty years as a recording and production manager.

In 1973, she was assigned to the television show department, then became a full-time recording tutor of Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) that had been formed as a part of Film Factory, but later became a separate entity of young Hungarian filmmakers. It was the legendary era of BBS, and Elbert herself assisted actively at the birth of a series of important films. She contributed to both documentary and feature films as a colleague of renowned directors, such as Pál Sándor, Márta Mészáros, Pál Schiffer, Gyula Gazdag, Béla Tarr, and others. During her work she realized the main challenge of documentary film, whether or not a real-life story can be presented from enough distance and strict editing work from start to finish. After she had been declined twice, Elbert in 1979 was finally admitted to the Theater and Cinema College as a student of production head training.

She recalled the atmosphere of teamwork at shootings in one of her interviews: “In 1973, we worked on the film ‘The Message of the Emperor,’ directed by László Najmányi. We badly needed some 150 extras, so Ábel Kőszegi and myself went to recruit them from the neighboring summer camps for foreigners, organized by the Hungarian Communist Youth League [KISZ]. And we managed to recruit a hell of a crowd of students of many races and ethnicities, and shoot that feature film of 50 minutes at almost no cost. And the cast was just great with all the Hungarian dissidents and young underground artists, like Péter Halász, László Rajk, Péter Breznyik, István Eörsi, and others. We camped in tents in Visegrád along the Danube bend. And at the same time I had my duties in another film shooting too, that of ‘God’s Field,’ directed by Judit Elek. So I had to keep shuttling daily between Visegrád and Nógrád County, on the other side of Danube. At the dawn I bought 150 eggs, 50 cents apiece, at the village location of ‘God’s Field,’ rushed with them back to Visegrád, and by the time the actors and staff members were waking up, I managed to fry a gigantic omlette for them.”

These years were a busy time for her, and she felt wonderful to be among people of similar interest and thought. They had house parties, a big social life, and of course worked hard, with days never ending by 8 o’clock. “My duties and responsibilities have hardened me. It is a hard job physically, as you keep running all day, and of course mentally too, since you must not forget anything in preparation for shooting. Still it was a great school, and it taught me to work hard and steadily. It bothers me a bit that I didn’t keep a diary. Incredible stories transpired during the shooting of films. And more than once I had to work on a feature and a documentary film at the same time.” In the meantime she studied sociology at the ELTE University, Budapest, which was not at all a strange choice for her, given that documentaries often involve similar subjects and expertise.

Filmmakers’ work, of course, was often disturbed by the censors. At Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) there was a system of post-censorship, not the script but the completed film was censored. Elbert also shares her memories of how it worked: “It happened several times that the Chief Director of Film Production sent his secret cops to the laboratory during the night. There they kidnapped the negatives and the working copy of a film just completed, and then locked it into one of the safes of the censorship office in its Báthori Street headquarters. And from that point on, the film did not exist anymore. I think the invention of the video has greatly contributed to the fall of communism, as this has enabled the showing of events without political manipulation. In fall of the Eastern European systems, the freeing of media played a crazy big role.’

The dissident artists’ films produced by BBS belonged in most cases to the category of “tolerated,” under the vigilance of the state security agencies. As Elbert remembers, “In 1976 we worked on the film Cséplő Gyuri. Its director Pál Schiffer was not really on good terms with ‘the comrades’ of cultural policy, nor was its scriptwriter, the dissident sociologist István Kemény. It was obvious that the secret police kept a keen eye on us. They followed us all the time, wherever we went. And when we screened our freshly shot raw materials in the Pasarét studio of BBS, strange gentlemen regularly appeared in the projection room.

A decade later Márta Elbert became an active founding member of Black Box. A new and independent documentary staff was selected at her apartment, and its clandestine editorial meetings were held there with the participation of István Jávor, András Lányi, Judit Ember, and Gábor Vági. Elbert was in close contact with Jávor during the shooting of Cséplő Gyuri. Jávor at that time had a home video camera and proposed that they start filming together. As Elbert recalls: “If someone at that time had a video camera, it was such a great thing, like a privately owned satellite would be in our day. Jávor’s was medium size with a separate recording unit of 8 to 10 kilos. For more than a year this was the only technical device of Black Box.”

In 1981, he created the Abagar Bulgarian Catholic Cultural Center in Rome, named after the first printed book in Bulgarian, published by the Catholic bishop Philip Stanislavov in Rome in 1651. It housed rare Bulgarian bibliographic publications and the personal collections of Bulgarians living outside Bulgaria closely associated with its history and culture. Eldarov was the publisher of the Catholic newspaper Abagar. He, thus, played an important role in the cultural life of the Bulgarian diaspora and was in contact with political émigrés from Bulgaria, such as Hristo Ognyanov.

Eldarov visited Bulgaria only once during the communist era, in November 1976 with diplomatic immunity as part of a Vatican delegation led by Agostino Casaroli. Eldarov was the first chargé d'affaires of the Vatican in Sofia in 1991, right after the restoration of the diplomatic relations of Bulgaria with the Holy See. After 1993 Professor Eldarov cooperated with the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad.

The literary archive of the Abagar Bulgarian Catholic Cultural Center was moved from Rome to Bulgaria in 1997. The Abagar Foundation, established at that time, took care of the archive. A year after the death of Prof. Eldarov in 2011 a woman in Sofia was arrested for trading illegally with valuables from the archive; the fate of the archive material is, therefore, unknown.

Mircea Eliade (born 28 February 1907, Bucharest, Romania - died 22 April 1986, Chicago, USA) was a Romanian historian of religions, philosopher, and writer who decided to prolong his activity in the West after 1945, where he became one of the most well-known Romanian intellectuals in exile. He was born into a middle-class family. From an early age, Eliade showed a remarkable literary talent, as well as an interest in science. His early debut took place in 1921 at the age of fourteen, with an article in a magazine for scientific popularisation. From 1926 to 1934, he published numerous articles on cultural themes in the daily newspaper Cuvântul, among those worth mentioning being “Itinerariu spiritual” (Spiritual itinerary), which appeared in several issues of the paper in 1927. The literary historian Zigu Ornea considered this text a “programme” for the young generation of intellectuals, through which Eliade prompted them to “unity and common goals” (Ornea 1995, 147). Intellectuals such as Petru Comarnescu, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran, Mircea Vulcănescu, Sandu Tudor, and Mihail Polihroniade belonged to this generation. The young group came together in 1932–1934 under the aegis of Criterion, an association that organised cultural conferences on various themes. The adherence of some Criterion members to the Legion of the Archangel Michael led to the association’s dissolution (Ornea 1995, 150–151).
From 1925 to 1928, Eliade attended philosophy courses at the University of Bucharest, where he had the opportunity to meet Nae Ionescu, professor of logic and metaphysics, who had a strong influence not only on Eliade’s intellectual development, but on the entire group he belonged to. Nae Ionescu played an important part in the shaping of both his scholarly and political interests and ideas. Furthermore, between 1928 and 1938, Eliade was an assistant to Nae Ionescu at the University of Bucharest. Influenced by Nae Ionescu, but also by his reading of James George Frazer, Eliade decided to devote his career to the history of religions. In 1927, he travelled to Italy, where he met the Italian Indologist Giuseppe Tucci. Their meeting had a major influence in his decision to leave for India to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. As a beneficiary of a scholarship offered by the Maharaja of Kassimbazar, Eliade spent the years between 1928 and 1931 in India studying Indian philosophy with professor Surendranath Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta. Based on his research there, in 1936, he published Yoga. Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne, a paper on the history of religions which put him on the map among Orientalists outside Romania. His personal experience in India inspired Maitreyi (1933 – published in English translation as Bengal Nights, 1994), the novel he would be acclaimed for in the Romanian literary world. Several other novels which appeared in Romania followed, i.e. Domnișoara Christina (Miss Christina, 1936) and Nuntă în cer (Marriage in Heaven, 1938).
During the second part of the 1930s, Eliade’s political thoughts and attitudes became radicalised. Like other intellectuals of his generation, Eliade adhered to the Legionary Movement. According to Florin Ţurcanu, one of Eliade’s biographers, his political radicalisation happened gradually from 1935 to 1937, with the intellectual influence of Nae Ionescu playing a major part (Ţurcanu 2006, 312–318). Between 1937 and 1938, Eliade wrote numerous articles in the Legionary press, some of them bearing virulent undertones of anti-Semitism, and even participated in the Iron Guard’s election campaign (Ţurcanu 2006, 347, 357–358).
In the aftermath of the Iron Guard’s rapid rise to power and its violent actions, King Carol II’s regime took repressive measures against the Legionary elite in 1938. In July 1938, Mircea Eliade was imprisoned for his political activity in an internment camp at Miercurea Ciuc, where he remained until October 1938. He was released through the intercession of some relatives. They also succeeded in getting him appointed as cultural attaché at the Romanian Embassy in London. Consequent to Romania’s entering the war on the side of the Axis and breaking its diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom, Eliade was moved to Lisbon, where he served as cultural attaché until his discharge in 1944.

Finding himself on Western European soil, Eliade had since 1943 decided not to go back to his homeland. In 1945 he moved to Paris, where the kernel of the Romanian cultural emigration was. The French capital was regarded by many Romanian intellectuals as a starting point for an international career. With the help of Georges Dumézil, Eliade managed to get access to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he taught the history of religions, although for a limited period of time. At the time of his arrival in Paris, French society was undergoing a purge of intellectuals who had sided with right-wing extremism. Eliade kept his Legionary past a secret for fear it might endanger his access to an academic career in the West (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 470–471). The descent of the Iron Curtain enabled him to conceal his past, as Eliade’s pro-legionary publications were no longer available in the West. When details of it emerged, Eliade “deliberately chose to reinvent his past rather than face it” (Ţurcanu 2006, 603). According to Norman Manea, in his autobiographical writings Eliade missed a good chance openly to face his past and to own up to his mistakes (Manea 1992, 94). Trying to explain this attitude, Laignel-Lavastine compares Eliade to Heidegger and argues that Eliade “does not seem to have understood ‘the gravity of his error’” (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 476).
During his time in France (1945–1956), Eliade published three books for which he was internationally recognised in the field of history of religions: Techniques du Yoga (1948), Traité d'histoire des religions (1949) and Le Mythe de l'Éternel Retour (1949). Thus, in 1956 he was invited to the USA by the Divinity School of the University of Chicago to give the esteemed Haskell Lectures and to be a visiting professor. He later accepted the offer to become a professor at this institution, and in the period 1957–1968, Eliade was the head of the Divinity School’s History of Religions department, where he also launched the academic journal History of Religions. There he made a fundamental contribution to consolidating the history of religions as an academic field in the USA. Subsequent to his moving to the US, several of his works were published in English: The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959; initially published in German: Das Heilige und das Profane, 1957) and A History of Religious Ideas (three volumes: 1978, 1982, 1985, initially published in French).
At first, the Romanian communist regime banned Eliade’s work on account of his political involvement in the 1930s. In February 1960, a military court in communist Romania convicted a group of twenty-three intellectuals in the so-called Noica-Pillat political trial. One of the charges was the fact that two copies of Eliade’s Noaptea de sânziene (published in English translation as The Forbidden Forest, 1978) had been brought by actress Marietta Sadova from Paris and circulated clandestinely among her acquaintances (Tănase 2009a, 370–379). However, the attitude of the communist regime towards Eliade changed in the 1960s when the regime detached itself from Moscow and shifted towards national communism. As he was one of the most renowned Romanian intellectuals in exile, Eliade was regarded in an ambivalent manner by Ceauşescu’s regime, which was interested in reclaiming the part of Eliade’s work dedicated to the “Thraco-Dacian lineage”, which could legitimate it (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 548). The greater part of his work, however, remained inaccessible to the Romanian public under communism. Eliade generally refrained from taking a critical stance towards the communist regime, apart from occasional gestures, such as taking part in the formation of a support group for exiled anti-communist General Rădescu in December 1947. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine argues that Eliade or Cioran’s muted attitude towards the communist regime could be easily explained by fear of their pro-fascist past being revealed through press campaigns in the West initiated by the communist authorities (Laignel-Lavastine 2004, 547).

Jan Eliáš was born in Olomouc on September 10^th, 1944. A year after graduation at the Slovasnke náměstí in Brno (at that time named the Secondary General Education School), he started to study archiving at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Brno (nowadays Masaryk University). The final years of his studies (1963-1969) took place in the turbulent period of the Prague Spring. Jan Eliáš was both among one the founders of the Independent FF UJEP Students' Association, and the leading members of the FF UJEP, in 1968. After the defeat of the process of revival in Czechoslovakia, in 1970, the society was dissolved and Jan Eliáš was left to the marginal sphere of historical research. He became an employee of the “Stavoprojekt“. At this time there was targeted activity against the rest of the background from the activities of the association, which Jan Eliáš gathered, organised and wrote down and catalogued. The work on the creation of the collection ended in 1971, which is the date of the handwritten catalogue. He kept his gathered and scattered collection in his possession until the early 1990s, when he agreed to store them in the Masaryk University Archives, which took place in 1993. The period after 1989 meant a great career advancement for Jan Eliáš as he became the director of the state archives in Brno. The Brno state archives has the largest collection in the Czech Republic, and owing to Jan Eliáš, it was changed to its original name, the Moravian Land Archive, despite various disagreements and financial sanctions made by the Prague forces, and in dealing with the local police forces who were running it. As Jan Eliáš failed to defend his uncompromising attitude towards the security authorities of the post-totalitarian state, the Czech archival services remained under the Ministry of the Interior, and he gave up his position in the institution. In 1994 he began working as a self-employed person as a historical researcher, focusing on buildings.

Kalle Istvan Eller studied Estonian and English philology at the University of Tartu, but never graduated. He was active in the almanac movement, publishing poetry and essays in manuscript magazines, and as an editor. From 1973, he worked as a forester. He is currently actively engaged in maintaining the Võro language, which is a minor language spoken in southeast Estonia. He is also an activist and leader of the Estonian native neo-pagan faith, and a member of the Estonian Defence League. In 2001, a collection of his poetry written during the Soviet era was published.

Elza Rudenāja (1911-1998) was born in the Madona district. She was a graduate of the University of Latvia, where she studied history and developed an interest in archaeology. After graduating, she also gained some experience in museum work. In the summer of 1944, she approached the first secretary of the Madona district Communist Party Committee with a proposal to organise a local history museum in Madona, and received support for the proposal. The museum was established in September 1944, and Rudenāja was its director until 1990, when she was forced to resign due to ill health. Although the attitude of the local authorities towards the museum from the 1940s to the 1960s was very often not supportive, Rudenāja managed to create one of the best local museums in Latvia. She was never a Communist Party member, which was rather rare for directors of museums, and she employed several people who were persecuted by the Soviet authorities for political reasons. Nevertheless, despite occasional attacks against the museum, Rudenāja managed to retain her post, which was largely due to her sociability, and her wide range of supporters and friends in cultural milieus, some of whom were respected by the authorities. The situation became easier in the 1970s, when Rudenāja established a reputation for herself as an important personality in the field of culture. Rudenāja's main interests in local history were in archaeology and pre-Soviet history in general. She was also genuinely interested in and devoted to literature and art. Thus, the preservation of the historical and cultural legacy, participation in the establishment and running of memorial museums to personalities who were important to the national culture, became the focus of her efforts. Apart from overseeing the collecting work and holding of artefacts, Rudenāja devoted a lot of energy to dissemination and educational activities. Although she never tried to challenge the Soviet regime openly, she often had to balance between the ideological demands of the local and republican authorities and supporting the national culture.

Judit Ember (1935–2007) was an independent film director, founding staff member of Black Box video periodical, and director of many taboo-breaking and banned documentary films during communist rule in Hungary

She was born in the village of Abádszalók and brought up in an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer, who was killed in Auschwitz. The rest of the family managed to survive the Holocaust and avoided being deported to the extermination camp through a fortuitous chance.

She studied Hungarian language and literature and history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest, then continued her studies at the College of Theater and Film Arts, where in 1968 she received a film director degree. She started her professional career at the Popular, Scientific, and Educational Film Studio, MAFILM, then from the 1970s she worked for Hungarian Television and the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS). As a filmmaker, she belonged to the trend of “situative documentarism,” a new genre that some young and talented artists cultivated at BBS, the essence of which was to explore or reconstruct a real-life situation by exploring the historical and sociological roots of the course of events.

Ember, with her mind and attitude, was a real independent filmmaker right from her earliest works. She preferred to choose topics that the official media neglected or misrepresented, or did not even dare to touch. As she said: “What is at stake here are the traumatic experiences of a whole society, which accumulated, stockpiled, and were never discussed publicly. It is a society which contains not a single group or layer that did not suffer from injustice and prejudice in the 20^th century, nor from being hit, humiliated, persecuted, expulsed, or even killed.”

In Hungarian film history she remains the director with the record number of banned movies, such masterly works as “Stage” (1968), The Resolution (1972), “Case Study” (1976), Pócspetri (1982), and “Let Kutrucz Talk” (1985). Critics consider most of her films to be both artistic and social scientific case studies. Her special style, original method in dramaturgy, and exciting inquiries are the main characteristics of her works, together with much empathy and a genuine talent in bringing out the feelings and thoughts of her everyday characters. It is a small wonder that she became one of the founding members of Black Box.

She felt it her moral duty to give voice those who were never asked to speak or did not have a chance to express their views. She had a special talent in bringing out difficult testimonies of her amateur characters, with a sensitive reception towards their experiences and autobiographical stories. With her empathy and psychological knowledge, she perfectly knew that without letting the patient talk there is no recovery. However, apart from empathy, something else was also needed for Ember to give voice to her characters, those peasants deprived of their small lands, and who were then frozen in fear and shame for the rest of their life, or the intellectuals who spent years in prison and were well aware of the risk of speaking publicly about the regime’s crimes. This extra factor was simply Ember’s human quality, her confidence, tactful and patient presence, expressing silently that she trusts in the speaker’s rightful cause, and thus managed to persuade everybody that it was well worth it to talk freely about those painful events after thirty years’ silence.

Éva Vass, a film preservationist at the Hungarian Film Archives, remembers Judit Ember as someone who did not seek the absolute truth, but rather preferred to reconstruct events from the viewpoints of everyday people. “Her method always follows the uncertain trail of the exploration of reality, as she drags her spectators into the story, and after a while they feel as if they were also being questioned, becoming participants of those real-life events too. And what is most fascinating in her films is the depth of this presentation.”

Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971) was a Hungarian sociologist and politician and a member of the “people’s writers’ movement.” Erdei was born in Makó to a peasant family, which grew onions. He studied law at Szeged University. He was a member of the Independent Kossuth Party in Makó and a leading figure in the March Front. Erdei was one of the founders of the National Peasants’ Party in 1939. In October and November 1944, he participated in the Independence Front in Szeged. In December 1944, he became a member of the Provisional National Assembly, and from December 1944 to November 1945, he was Minister of Interior in the Provisional National Government. He was elected vice-chairman of the National Peasants’ Party in 1945 and general secretary in February 1947. From September 1948 to June 1949, he was state minister. He the worked as minister of agriculture until July 1953, then as justice minister until October 1954, and as minister of agriculture again from October 1954 to November 1955, and a deputy prime minister from November 1955 to October 31, 1956. From October 30, 1956 he served as vice-prime minister in the Imre Nagy government. On November 2, he headed the Hungarian delegation negotiating the details of a withdrawal by the Soviet troops. On November 3, he was arrested by the KGB at the Soviet military base at Tököl, but he was released a few weeks later. In 1957, he became the general secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the director of the Agricultural Science Institute. In 1964, he became general secretary of the Patriotic People’s Front. Between 1964 and 1970, he was vice-president of the Academy. He then served as general secretary again until 1971. He wrote many books about sociology and sociography.

Architect, writer, poet, visual artist, film director, theoretician, a prominent protagonist and an important catalyst of the unofficial neoavantgarde movement appearing in Hungary with new forms of expression at the second half of the sixties.

In 1947 he began his training as sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, but he left soon due to the takeover of socialist realist approach, and continued his studies in the studio of Dezső Birman Bokros. From 1947 to 1951 he studied architecture at and graduated from the Technical University in Budapest. During the fifties and early sixties he worked as an architect at different companies, and besides he began experimenting with painting and graphic art, as well as writing poems and shorts stories.

During this period he became acquainted with the former members of the Európai Iskola (European School - among others Endre Bálint, Dezső Korniss), with the representants of the so called "surnaturalism" (among others Tibor Csernus, László Lakner) and, most importantly with the graphic artist Béla Kondor, the poet János Pilinszky and the painter Sándor Altorjai, with whom he began a lifelong friendship. In 1959 and 1963 he became enrolled at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest, but he was advised to leave before the term to began, both times.

In 1966 he published a study on montage theory, where he emphasized the role of repetition and change, introduced the principle of “meaning negation” and its admission of the role played by intuition and inspiration. Since this publication some of his theoretical writings were published in Hungary (but none of his literal works). His first recognition as a writer and poet was the Kassák Prize of the Magyar Műhely (Hungarian Workshop) magazine issued in Paris. On this occasion they published his collected poems as well in 1974 (this was his only book printed during his lifetime).

He worked out a technology to create large decorative wall-covers called photomosaic, which provided him financial independence during the seventies and the eighties. Due to his interest in natural history, philosophy and language theory he turned toward conceptual art. In the late sixties and early seventies he took part in a number of then peripheric, but later canonized exhibitions and programs (Iparterv, Chapel Studio of Balatonboglar etc.) with his “textual actions” and photo-series accompanied by texts.

His interest in scientific thinking, researches in artistic and scientific cognition and the underlying affinities he found between them, his openness to old and new traditions and his intention to reinterpret them led him to state that his artistic activity is a continuous protest against the information blockade observed by him during the seventies. In his art he aimed to reveal, make easily accessible otherwise complex, unclear relationships. He also began to make films, based on his montage theory, in the framework of the Béla Balázs Studio, although none of his films was shown officially in Hungary until the eighties.

During 1975 and 1976 he ran a series of so-called "creative exercises". From these activities grew out in 1978 the INDIGO (in Hungarian: INterDIszciplináris GOndolkodás, “interdisciplinary thought”) group, which was conceived as an experimental teaching studio, drawing on modern artistic processes, educational methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other sources. The problem-solving exercises, open to new and unusual pehnomena provided an important forum for a new generation of Hungarian artists, such as András Böröcz, Ildikó Enyedi, László László Révész, János Sugár, János Szirtes, among others.

Ferenc Erős (1946-) is a social psychologist who has done pioneering work in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and the question of Jewish identity after the Holocaust.

He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in psychology in 1969. He has been working in the Psychological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) since 1973. In 2002, he became a doctor of the HAS. In addition to his work as a researcher, he has also been an active contributor to educational work since the 1970s. The journals Thalassa and Imágó Budapest are edited by him, and he plays an important role in scholarly life in the public sphere. The primary focus of his research is the social-psychological examination of identities, social discrimination, structures of power, authoritarian systems, and the history and theory of psychoanalysis.

In an interview in 2005, he mentioned that some of his former teachers had had a significant impact on his career. His literature teacher gave him books about psychology, for example, the works of Sigmund Freud, and he also read István Bibó’s book on Jewish issue. Furthermore, his Jewish origins and his family involvement motivated him early on to learn as much as he could about the Holocaust. When he was 17 years old, he tried to do research on the deportation of his family and the local Jewish community of his birthplace, but he did not get any support, so as a very young man he saw how difficult it would be to pursue the study of the topic he had chosen.

His course of study was formed by his teacher, Ferenc Pataki, who taught social psychology, and László Garai, who dealt with Marxist philosophy at the university. In social psychology, he was interested not so much in empirical research, but rather in theoretical approaches and social criticism. These fields were not the most popular. He noted this himself: “I was a little bit on the periphery, however, I never felt that anybody would have supplanted me. Rather, I would express that I was marginalized by myself.”

A six-month scholarship at Columbia University in 1976 was an important event in his professional development. He met a group of second-generation Holocaust survivors, and this experience had a strong impact on him. He was motivated both by his personal impressions and by works about the aftermath of the trauma of the Holocaust, mainly Helen Epstein’s book Children of the Holocaust. The psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytical issues concerning this phenomenon were an essential reference point for him.

Together with psychologist András Stark, Erős began doing interviews with second-generation Holocaust survivors and researching the question of Jewish identity after World War II in the late 1970s. The history and remembrance of the Holocaust were suppressed taboos under the Kádár regime. One could talk about the Shoah with family memebrs, but it was not an acceptable topic in public discourse or scientific research. For Erős and Stark, the questions which arose in the course of this work also touched on their personal lives. As children of Holocaust survivors, they were curious to know how widespread their experiences were. 

Although Ferec Erős was not a member of an oppositional group, the focus of his research (repressed Jewish identity and social critical social psychology) led him to the oppositional cultural community of late socialism. Initially, his findings were known only to the professional audience, but then they began to become familiar the so-called second public sphere through lectures which were held at the so-called “flying university” and articles in samizdat publications. Erős and András Kovács (who was one of the main organizers of this second public sphere) published a paper together with Katalin Lévai in the journal Medvetánc, which was the most important critical, intellectual forum of the 1980s. (Erős, Ferenc, András Kovács, and Katalin Lévai. “Hogyan tudtam meg, hogy zsidó vagyok?” Medvetánc, no. 2-3 (1985), 129-144.). This paper was considered a decisive empirical analysis. Furthermore, together with Bea Ehmann, Erős devised a narrative model of Jewish identity (Erős, Ferenc, and Bea Ehmann. “Jewish Identity in Hungary, A narrative model suggested.” In Ambiguous Identities in the New Europe, 121-134. Budapest: Replika, 1997).   

In one of his lectures, Erős made the contention that to ask someone how she or he learned of her or his Jewish origins is to touch on the anxieties and discomforts of a whole generation. Doing an interview about this subject meant breaking the silence, and it also constituted a significant act of memory policy. It acknowledged the existence of a subcultural identity which was fed by a sense of belonging to a discriminated group. When Erős began to deal with the concept of identity, this was an awkward and sensitive topic, because “everybody had a type of identity which often caused shame”. This stigmatization and discrimination also exist today, according to Erős: “If someone freely accepts his or her identity, he or she can suffer discrimination.”

Péter Esterházy (1950–2016), was a Hungarian writer and an inventive, influential, and internationally celebrated author, one of the most talented ones of his generation, who managed to renew contemporary Hungarian prose both in the late communist era and after 1990.

Born in Budapest in 1950 in the darkest era of the Hungarian Stalinist dictatorship, Esterházy was a scion of one of Europe’s greatest aristocratic dynasties on his paternal side and an assimilated Hungarian Jewish intellectual family on his maternal side. He finished his secondary school studies in 1968 at a Piarist monastic church school. He then studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. For several years he worked as a mathematician in the Informatics Institute of the Ministry of Furnaces and Heavy Machinery, and at the same time he also began to write. His first stories were published in 1974 and his first book in 1977 won the critics prize as the best prose work of the year. In 1978, he began to make his living as a freelance writer.

Esterházy achieved international fame in 1979 with A Novel of Production, a hilarious pastiche of the Stalinist morale-boosting “production novel” in which an absurdist account of a young engineer’s struggles with bureaucracy is juxtaposed with an account of the everyday life of the author in the words of a fictional literary secretary.

Three years later, his A Little Hungarian Pornography was a more explicit attack on communism. The book contained little actual pornography. Rather, it was a meditation on its essence. As Esterházy later recalled in his preface to the English translation, published in 1995, “Let us imagine, if we can, a country where everything is a lie, where the lack of democracy is called socialist democracy, economic chaos socialist economy, revolution anti-revolution, and so on.” Esterházy’s most famous book, Celestial Harmonies, was written over the course of nine years following the end of communism and was published in 2001. In the first half of the book, which is a kaleidoscope of stories, previously existing texts, vignettes and mood portraits, Esterházy related the fate of his family through the central figure of “my father,” a term which he uses to refer to his father, grandfather, great-grandfater, etc. back to the dynasty’s beginnings. Meanwhile, in the second half, he evokes the trials and tribulations of the family during Hungary’s twentieth-century political upheavals through the life of his father, Count Mátyás Esterházy. Péter’s father gets by as a manual laborer and then as a translator. “No, son, we’re not poor,” he explains, “we’re just living in poverty.” Count Mátyás, nonetheless, emerges as a man whose humanist values survive the family’s decline under totalitarianism. So it came as a shock to Esterházy’s readers when in 2002 he published an addendum to the book, Revised Edition, in which he revealed that his father had been an informant for many years during the communist era.

Many of his other works also deal with the experience of living under a communist regime and in a post-communist country. His collection of essays, entitled Troublesome Delights of Liberty, was published in 2013. His later books, such as No Art, Please (2008) and his last work of prose fiction, a touching chronicle of his fatal illness entitled Pancreas-diary (2016), also testify to his heroic efforts to preserve hope and his spirit of liberty together with the joy of living in spite of painful losses and disillusionment. He died in Budapest in 2016 at the age of 66.