COLUMN: Remembering days of unspoken ideas
It is the summer after our third year at the University of Szeged, Hungary. About two dozen of us are huddled together in a small, unadorned room with whitewashed walls. Massive chunks of the paint are missing, creating a unique map of an undiscovered world. We sit on the edges of squeaky metal bunk beds you would see in World War II military barracks, four on one wall and four on the opposite wall of the rectangular room. The middle of each bed sags like a fishing net after a successful draw.
We are the catch. We are mostly unaware of our being the catch, having a grand time, completely absorbed in a debate. We argue about the quality of the food, the quality of our education, the state of our country and how much we should be getting paid for preparing high school students for their history college exams. At the end of high school, all students take the state-prescribed matriculation exam in the main subjects: math, literature, history and a language. To advance to college, students take subject-specific entrance exams at their prospective university, unique to the institution. The average college acceptance ratio is 5:1. In history, 9:1.
So, we, seasoned college students, quiz the next generation on all imaginable historical facts and teach the young ones how to think as historians. Because we know. This particular night, we end up giggling about how naive our charge is. One voice rises above the chatter.
“I mean, they don’t even know about Big Brother,” says a gaunt, bespectacled young man. The general chatter freezes. We all look in his direction. Somebody laughs a little uncomfortably, but then somebody yells out from the corner, “C’mon, don’t tell me you’ve read it. It’s blacklisted. Everything worth reading is blacklisted. That sucks, man.” The silence deepens. Somebody slaps a mosquito on his forearm. “Bloodsucker!” he says a little louder than necessary. The air fills with laughter again.
“Do we have more beer?” yells out somebody else, and a commotion ensues as those in the back try to climb over outstretched limbs to get to the stash. The general chatter picks up again. “Have you read it?” I turn to George, the future independent historian perching next to me. He smiles.
“We all want to have read it,” he says and I leave it at that. We’ll talk later.
In 1948, the Hungarian elections were fixed – a widely unreleased fact at the time, among many others – to help the Communist Party into power, and that’s how things remained for 40 years. The above event happened somewhere in the middle, in 1976. We grew up reading between the lines, understanding most things from half-finished sentences, cognizant of what we knew had been filtered by the State. It was taught to us that for our own good, we were not being subjected to petit bourgeois, individualistic filth like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” or to its sub-par cousins like “Tarzan” – one of my father’s favorites – which were called tarp novels from being sold for a few fillérs at the market, spread out on huge tarps before the Second World War.
These books were simply not published for a few decades, though we would not face persecution or jail for suspicion of possession. There was, however, a very different group of books that could easily make the owner disappear: “1984”, “Animal Farm”, “Doctor Zhivago”, “The Bible”, and any and all of Solzhenitsyn’s books, for instance. Many Hungarian authors either defected to the West or translated classics. The older, the safer: the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad” proved to pass the political correctness filter.
We all knew that somewhere there was a long list of blacklisted books we didn’t ever talk about. We lived “Fahrenheit 451.” I did hold a smuggled copy of “1984” in my hands one day, and with my heart pounding in my throat, read as much as I could on the spot before the owner, George, ripped it from my hand and shoved it under his mattress. His roommate was returning from town, a nice young man with a permanent smile on his face, whom we all knew was a rat.
As much as we considered ourselves the future intelligentsia in that crowded room in Szeged, Hungary, we, hired to cultivate young critical minds to become brave thinkers, did not have access to knowledge deemed potentially dangerous to the mainstream culture. We were taught to feel and act collectively, so we grappled – in silence – with our own questions: What were we supposed to teach, then? What were we teaching to the next generation?
Susan Nyikos is a lecturer in the english department.