Ideological and political horizon shifts in Transylvanian Hungarian poetry during the communist period and after the 1989 Regime Change

Abstract

Although the communist regime, in literature as well as in all areas of social life, aimed at uniformity and creating an “art” serving propaganda purposes in the entire Central and Eastern European region, the Romanian Stalinist “cultural project” differed in many respects from that of other countries, e.g. Hungary's. In this era, the discourse emphasizing revolutionary transformation and radical policy change decisively builds on the image of the enemy; and the fault-lines between past and present, old and new, and the idea of the need for continuous political struggle also prevail in both poetry and prose as eternal actualities.For the Transylvanian Hungarian community, the 1989 Regime Change was supposed to mean the end of nationalist dictatorship, of the infinitely intensified ideological/political terror, of the deliberate policy of ethnic homogenization, and the solution of minority issues as well as of internal and external conflicts. Nevertheless, after a few months of cloudless enthusiasm, in 1990, Transylvanian Hungarians had to face the rearrangement of previous power structures; they confronted national and ethnic conflicts, disguised assimilation, and economic vulnerability. This paper aims to present the ideological/political characteristics which determined Transylvanian Hungarian poetry during the Communist Dictatorship and after the 1989 Regime Change.