(1969-2015)
Scholar, humanist, mensch.
Hope and Scandal in Hungary
This article was recently published in Dissent, along with original photos by Róbert Pölcz [click on photo to enlarge].
© 2015 Holly Case, as first published in
Dissent.
 |
| Bust of István Bibó (1911-1979) on the Danube promenade in Budapest. Just above the inscription is graffiti directed against the current prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán [click photo to enlarge]. Photo by Róbert Pölcz. |
This year a new Hungarian film, White God, has been touring the
festival circuit. It’s about an abandoned mongrel whose trusting nature is
repeatedly tested by abuse and cruelty. The result: what had once been an
endearingly naughty pooch turns into a very bad dog.
White God could be an allegory about Hungary—a
proud creature, kicked around and abused, diminished and blamed, that
eventually lashes out in fury. Or maybe it’s about how Hungary has treated some
of its own since the second half of the nineteenth century—assimilating them,
but forever suspecting them of betrayal; marginalizing them, persecuting them
outright, or even killing them. And so, as in the film, the odd victim leaps up
to tear out the jugular of a Hungarian guard in a single snap.
This tortured sense of intractable antagonism was the
lifelong preoccupation of the Hungarian thinker and former statesman, István
Bibó. Born in Budapest in 1911, Bibó spent most of his life trying to divert
the states and peoples of Central and Eastern Europe—and, above all, his native
country—away from the extremes of enraged self-pity and self-righteousness and
toward responsibility. At the same time he sought to sensitize the Great Powers
to the miseries that fed these extremes. As he wrote in 1946, “Men are most
wicked when they believe they are threatened, morally justified, and
exonerated, and particularly when they feel they are entitled and obliged to
punish others.”
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Interview with Marci Shore--April 10, 2015
Interview with Marci
Shore, Associate Professor of History at Yale University. The
interview was conducted in Ithaca, NY on April 10, 2015. To access an mp3 of
the complete interview, click here.
Marci Shore specializes
in European—and especially East-Central European—cultural and intellectual
history is the author of 2 books, including Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’sLife and Death in
Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale, 2006)
and The Taste ofAshes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in
Eastern Europe (2013). She has
also translated Michał Głowiński’s
Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons, from the Polish (that book was
published in 2005). In addition, she has written a number of articles for
both academic and more general readership audiences, including Kritika, Contemporary
European History, and Modern European Intellectual History. She is
currently at work on two book manuscripts, one is entitled “Phenomenological
Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” and the other is an intellectual
history of the recent revolution in Ukraine.
Interview Themes
How Shore came to be
interested in history, people who influenced her, and the “susceptibility to
being transported” (1:48)
How Shore came to be
aware that she was living history in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and the
“un-grounded” and “up-in-the-air” feel of that time (8:08)
What did people like
Shore, who came of age intellectually in the 1990s, see or miss when compared
with those who came before or those who came after? (11:58)
How Shore approaches
writing: principles and idols (on “keeping the language fresh” and “setting the
scene” as opposed to “telling the reader what to think”) (16:58)
On empathizing with the
subjects of one’s work (25:20)
On what holds Shore’s
body of work together: dynamics of generation, friendship (32:40)
Going to Eastern Europe
to seek meaning: how does one arrive at the fundamental questions? (39:15)
Is there an identifiable
“Naimark school” of those who studied under Norman Naimark (45:35)
What is at stake in
considering oneself of an intellectual historian who focuses on a particular
region? (51:05)
Is Eastern Europe
becoming “real” again through events in Ukraine and on the Maidan? On the
“return of metaphysics” and knowing that—for better or worse—“anything is
possible.” (57:25)
Shore on the
“miraculous transformation of subjectivity” in Ukraine (1:05:28)
How should we be
training the next generation of scholars in the field? (1:09:00)
Interview with Dimiter Kenarov--December 29-30, 2014
Interview with Dimiter Kenarov, freelance journalist, poet and translator from Bulgaria. The interview was conducted in Istanbul, Turkey in two parts on December 29 and 30, 2014. To access an mp3 of the complete interview, click here.
Kenarov has
written on a variety of issues of relevance to contemporary Eastern Europeans,
among them a fascinating profile of Georgi Markov, the Cold War dissident from
Bulgaria who was famously assassinated in 1978; a piece on Poland since the shale gas bubble, on snowboarders in Sarajevo, as well a number of recent
articles on Ukraine and Crimea relating to politics and the environment, and
many many other topics. He has written for venues like The Atlantic, Foreign
Policy, The Nation, Esquire and Outside. He is also a photographer, poet, and translator of poetry.
Interview Themes
Part I: Dec. 29, 2014
1:15 Kenarov’s background and how he came to write on
Eastern Europe
6:15 On the American high school in Bulgaria Kenarov
attended during the 1990s
10:40 Memories of 1989 in Bulgaria
13:45 On the blowing up of the Georgi Dimitrov mausoleum
19:45 Is a heightened sense of the surreal in politics
and everyday life a useful or a demobilizing sensibility?
24:00 The case of the Serbs and self-irony
28:30 On the legacy of communism in Bulgaria
35:05 How the generation that grew up after communism
relates to its legacy
36:15 Kenarov’s own family’s experience of communism
40:55 On his parents’ approach to politics after 1989
45:25 How Kenarov imagines his audience within and beyond
the region; pieces written in English vs. Bulgarian, translated, etc.
50:40 Using the word “totalitarian”
54:25 Bulgaria as a unique vs. representative case
1:02:05 To what extent is there a cautionary tale for the
West in East European dissident literature?
1:09:15 Who is critiquing the West in Eastern
Europe/Bulgaria now; nostalgia for communism
Part II: Dec. 30, 2014
0:00 On women’s experience of communism from Kenarov’s
family history
7:05 Kenarov’s mother’s study of cybernetics and his
grandmother’s tenure as a mayor
10:50 Controversy, conflict and danger in reporting on
the region (Crimea, Belarus, etc.)
14:15 Kenarov’s favorite story and how it came into being
(via the KGB and prison)
22:05 On whether or not there is such a thing as “Eastern
Europe”
24:25 How defining was the experience of “transition” for
Kenarov’s generation?
27:15 On the post-communist period as an acceleration of
time
30:40 Confronting the narrative of Eastern Europe as an
absence of something/lacking something and what ideas resonated with people in
the 1990s
35:05 What Bulgarians see when they look to Turkey
41:25 Kenarov’s Gagauz and Romanian-speaking extended family
members
45:00 The recent events in Ukraine
47:45 Kenarov’s study of Russian literature
55:45 Contemporary Bulgarian writers doing interesting
work
1:01:20 How Kenarov sees his own work in relation to that
of academics who work on the region
Best of Kenarov
The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2009)
The Nation (May 18, 2009)
The Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2011)
Outside (Jan. 2012)
The Nation (April 7, 2014)
Interview with Ronald Suny--December 26, 2014
Ron Suny has written and edited several books on Russian, Soviet, Armenian and Georgian history, including Armenia in the Twentieth Century (1983), The Making of the Georgian Nation (1988); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993); Looking Toward Ararat: The Armenians in Modern History (1993); The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998) and edited volumes on nationalism, the Caucuses, the Russian Revolution, and the Armenian genocide. He was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (the former AAASS, now the ASEEES), and now has books on the Armenian genocide, Stalin, and the historiography of the Soviet Union and Russia’s Empires in the publication queue.
Interview Themes
01:25 How Suny came to Soviet history02:15 Suny's Armenian roots in Turkey and Russia
03:40 On how Suny's father encouraged him to think differently about the Russian Revolution
06:05 The difficulty of working out where the Russian Revolution went wrong
08:20 Russia and the Soviet Union -- a disambiguation?
10:50 Suny's first visit to the USSR in 1964
13:00 Family trip to Armenia in 1964
14:50 On seeing the Soviet experience from a non-Russian perspective
17:25 How knowing a great deal about Soviet history influenced Suny's understanding of leftism and ideology more generally
20:10 Skepticism vis-a-vis the institutionalization of leftism
21:15 Overlap between Western leftism and early dissidents
23:45 On the relationship between violence and the construction of an alternative to market capitalism
31:10 Gorbachev and the unravelling of the USSR
33:20 Soviet Union's lessons for "empires" about how to/not to collapse
35:25 Was the Armenian genocide the end or the beginning of a polity?
37:20 Nationalism and ideology as preoccupations of Soviet vs. East European historians
42:10 The impact of the war in Yugoslavia on the Soviet field
47:50 Class vs. nationalism as "imagined communities"
51:30 Suny's characterization of his own generation of scholars
55:55 Historical divisions (or not) and factions in the Soviet field - emergence of Kritika
58:15 How did the atmosphere change in the Soviet field?
59:05 What a Soviet scholar could tell a scholar of the Middle East today
1:01:55 Impact of the dissolution of the USSR on the Soviet field
1:05:25 Things to be optimistic about in our time
1:06:40 The challenge of turning "nuance" into politics
1:08:30 History vs. political science (from the perspective of someone who does both)
1:09:50 On being a leftist who studies the Soviet Union
1:10:40 Suny's views on area studies and its usefulness in our time
1:11:55 Suny's views on Turkey as a scholar of the USSR/Russia
1:14:10 What is the "European way"?
1:15:45 Will the European Union have staying power?
1:16:25 Most interesting aspects of the various fields Suny works in
1:17:50 Suny's all-time favorite books
1:19:35 How we should be training the next generation of scholars
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