One Minute Stories [antikvár]

introduction It is hardly surprising that Hungarians have the reputation of being great survivors. They have been obliged to learn the arts of survival throughout the turbulent history of that little landlocked European country which has experienced more than its fair share of invasion, revolution and repression. István Örkény, the author of these wry sketches, saw in his lifetime a bewildering succession of political systems replacing each other, each demanding absolute and unwavering loyalty. Örkény was born in 1912, during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time of his death in 1979 he would have experienced a brief but bloody Bolshevik uprising, a right-wing totalitarian regime under the Regent Admiral Horty (the regent of a country without a monarch or a navy) which was followed, with only a brief interlude, by a succession of brutal strongmen answering to Moscow's bidding. He lived through the futile uprising of 1956 and also, in the years just before his death in 1979, the emergence of a more benign "goulash socialism" that paved the way for the bloodless revolution of 1989 which brought Communism to an end. Like millions of his compatriots, or at least those who did not manage at one time or another to slip past heavily guarded borders, he would have heard each of these regimes insisting, with the stridency of