Representative international and Hungarian surveys leave no doubt: in no other post-communist country are people as dissatisfied, embittered, hopeless and disappointed by the outcome of the post-1989 transition as in Hungary. According to polls carried out in 2008 and 2009 (by Gallup and Pew World Polls, among other organizations) some 60 per cent of Hungarians see their country as a loser in the transition process, and three quarters of respondents claim their living conditions are now worse than they were under the communist dictatorship. Two-thirds believe the transition has only benefited the power elite. The political impact, especially on the […]

Rostock, Marburg, Bonn, Mannheim, Saarbrücken, Bielefeldt, Münster, Erlangen-Norimberk and, since 1 February, also my alma mater, Frankfurt – all these universities have closed down their departments of Slavonic studies since the unification of Germany.  The country total has gone down from thirty-five institutes to twenty-six. It all happened rather unexpectedly. Following the rise of Gorbachov, the end of the division of Europe and the subsequent integration of some Slavonic states into NATO and the EU German Slavists had hoped that a new era was dawning for our field. Our hope was that the opening of the borders would help increase […]

It was a sunny morning. A man alighted at a small railway station… This is how a short story might begin. Although, as far as I was concerned, I just could not begin at all. After all, lots of short stories begin this way.  But this is a feuilleton, not a short story, so I ought to begin as follows:  It was a sunny morning. I alighted at a small railway station. A tall, bald man met me on the platform and helped me carry my luggage to the car.  I soon discovered that the man, Alain Baton, was the caretaker at the place I was being driven to. Alain did not speak any Polish, […]

I ran a two-day writing course for teachers at a Slovak university in the Vrátna Valley in September 2010. By January 2011 I was still waiting to receive my €€216 fee (including travel costs and the per diem). Since the workshop was funded by the European Union, I had to sign three forms on the spot. I thought that had taken care of the bureaucracy and was looking forward to future cooperation. A few weeks later the organizers wrote to say they urgently needed my Europass CV. As I had no idea what that was, they provided me with a […]

It is a book that won’’t appear until March, yet it has already been hailed as the most important publishing event of 2011. Newspapers have written about it. Journalists and politicians have discussed it on television. It is enough to type the first word of its title into a search engine and hundreds, if not thousands, ofreferences come up. Internet fora are flush with comments. Some are full of indignation, outrage and hatred for the author. He has been called a traitor, a renegade, a liar, a cheat and a slave of mammon. Furious bloggers swear they won’’t touch the […]

January 27. Hard frost, snow. All the vulgar, predictable tricks winter has in store are on display: city life has slowed down and pedestrians get stuck in bothersome snowdrifts. The mind also moves at a slower pace. Winter is a provincial illusionist, who has never mastered more than a single trick: that of turning water into ice and snow and back again, turning snow into dirty water. For a while now – ever since realizing what powerful symbols share this date – I have been intrigued by a day that manages to encapsulate two key dimensions of a historical moment. […]

Daniela Kapitá?ová Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book Trans. Julia Sherwood 130pp Garnett Press London 2010 Hardback £8.99 (Video from the launch in London on 11.1.2011) Samko Tále is a physically and mentally stunted, forty-three-year-old resident of the Slovak border town of Komárno, who supplements his disability pension by collecting cardboard, and is writing his ‘book about a cemetery’ because an alcoholic at the station pub predicted it. His eddying ‘stream-of-consciousness’ takes in the period from his grandmother’s wartime acquisition of Jewish property (‘why would Jews need things like a piano in a concentration camp, right?’), the Communist period and post-independence Slovakia. […]

  Having written of Kaiserlich und Königlich ennui a little while ago, I would now like to write of sadness, melancholy, spleen or – to invoke the official language of one half of the Empire – Weltschmerz. Not far from the Serenissima’’s borders, where the Austro-Hungarian coast came to an end, Maria Theresa was gripped by the desire for her own Venice: a large, multicultural port with picturesque canals. And since the Austrian Empress approached every task in an orderly and systematic fashion, after issuing toleration edicts abolishing customs duties to attract settlers (adherents of a variety of faiths but of a single, mercantile […]

Gazeta Wyborcza (Poľsko), 25.11.2011 Určite sa ozvú hlasy, že za atentátom sú naše tajné služby. No ja odmietam konšpiračné teórie. Nazdávam sa, že kaukazské podzemie bolo schopné zorganizovať takýto atentát, hovorí Vadim Dubnov, komentátor Rádia Sloboda, špecialista na tematiku Kaukazu a terorizmu korešpondentovi Gazety Marcinovi Wojciechowskému. O čom svedčí atentát na letisku Domodedovo? O tom, že kaukazské ozbrojené podzemie v Rusku vôbec neutrpelo porážku, ako tak často tvrdí naša vláda. Od posledného atentátu v moskovskom metre uplynul necelý rok. Ak kaukazské podzemie skutočne utrpelo porážku, nedokázalo by sa tak rýchlo pripraviť na atentát takýchto rozmerov. Odkiaľ viete, že je to kaukazské podzemie? Kto […]

Vo chvíli, keď píšem tieto riadky, niekoľko hodín po výbuchu, ešte presne nevieme, kto spáchal atentát na moskovskom letisku Domodedovo. Vieme nasledovné: V Rusku sa dačo sa zmenilo. Ruský prezident Dimitrij Medvedev už predniesol príhovor v televízii, kondoloval obetiam a odložil cestu do Švajčiarska, kde má vystúpiť na konferencii v Davose. Kedysi trvalo oveľa dlhšie, kým ruské vedenie zareagovalo na katastrofy. Bývalý sovietsky generálny tajomník Michail Gorbačov roku 1986 čakal tri týždne, kým sa vyjadril k Černobyľskej katastrofe. Bývalý prezident Vladimír Putin roku 2000 čakal päť dní, kým zareagoval na katastrofu ponorky Kursk. V Rusku si z niektorých skúseností vzali ponaučenie. Ruské ministerstvo zdravotníctva spustilo horúcu […]