OUR AUTHORS

ZSÓFIA BOGNÁR (Szeged, 1988) got her BA in Hungarian at the University of Debrecen in 2010 before earning an MA in Art History at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2015. She worked for two years as assistant for the Collection of Pre-1800 Sculptures of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. She is the author of several critical articles on contemporary art, which appeared in various printed and online cultural magazines.

FERENC BÓNIS (Miskolc, 1932), musicologist, university teacher. He received his degree from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in 1957. His main field of research is the history of Hungarian music between the 16th and 20th centuries. He is the author of numerous books and series including Élet-Képek: Bartók Béla (2006) (Scenes from the life of B. B.), From Mozart to Bartók (2000), Hungarian Musicology, a series collecting the works of classical masters of Hungarian music from 1959, and Studies in History of Hungarian Music from 1968.

TONY BRINKLEY (Pittsburgh, 1948) is a Professor of English at the University of Maine. He has translated extensively modern Russian, German, French and Hungarian poetry. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Shofar, May Day, World Literature Today, Otoliths and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press) and the co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press). His translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandilstam, Boris Pasternak and Gyula Kodolányi were published in previous issues of Hungarian Review.

MIKULÁŠ DZURINDA was elected president of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in December 2013. He is former Prime Minister of Slovakia (1998–2006) and has held various positions in government since first entering politics in 1990. Head of a coalition government in 1998, Dzurinda introduced far-reaching reforms which enabled Slovakia to begin the process of joining the EU and NATO. Re-elected in 2002, he led Slovakia to become a member of the EU and NATO in 2004. Dzurinda also held the position of Minister of Transportation and more recently that of Minister for Foreign Affairs (July 2010 – April 2012). He is a founding member of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union – Democratic Party (SDKÚ-DS) and was its president from 2000 to 2012. He was a member of the Slovak Parliament between 2012 and March 2016.

GÉZA ANTAL ENTZ (Kolozsvár/Cluj, 1949), Hungarian art historian and politician, is a specialist of architectural history, and has been coordinating the establishment of a complete topographic catalogue of historical monuments in Hungary. He is also a specialist on the historical culture of Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania) and the Uplands (Slovakia). In 1990–94 he was State Secretary for the Affairs of Hungarians Beyond the Borders. In 1998–2002 he acted as Head of the Office for the Protection of National Cultural Heritage, and later as Deputy State Secretary of Culture. From April 2010 to July 2012 he was Senior Advisor to the State Secretary of Culture.

TIBOR FRANK is Professor of History at the Department of American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He has been doing research on transatlantic migrations, international relations, imagology, historiography, modern Hungarian and Habsburg history. A Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and UCLA (1987–90), and a recurrent visiting professor at Columbia University, NY, he was recipient of the Humboldt Award (Germany, 2002). Tibor Frank was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2013.

OTTO HIERONYMI (Budapest, 1938), economist, is Professor of International Relations and former Head (1995–2006) of the International Relations and Migration and Refugee Studies Program at Webster University, Geneva. Between 1966 and 1970 he worked as an international economist at Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York. From 1970 to 1994 he was Senior Economist at Battelle Geneva Research Centers. He earned his Licence and Doctorate in international relations and economics at the Graduate Institute of International Relations (University of Geneva). He was Economic Adviser to Prime Minister József Antall (1990–1993) and member of different committees drafting the Bank Reform and the new strategy for growth (GAM – 1991–1992). In 1989 he became Secretary of the Expert Group on the International Debt issue appointed by the Swiss Federal Government. His publications include among others: Economic Policies for the New Hungary: Proposals for a Coherent Approach (1990 – the so-called “Battelle Report”); Globalization and the Reform of the International Banking and Monetary System (editor, 2009); “Agenda for a New Monetary Reform” (1998); Global Challenges, the Atlantic Community and the Outlook for International Order (editor, 2004); Wilhelm Röpke, the Social Market Economy and Today’s Domestic and International Order (editor, 2002); The Spirit of Geneva in a Globalized World (editor, 2007); Renewing the Western Community: the Challenge for the EU, Europe and Japan (editor, 2016 forthcoming).

GÉZA JESZENSZKY (Budapest, 1941), D. Phil., historian, graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. From 1976 to 2011, he taught at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara in 1984–86, and has taught the history of international relations and of Central Europe at numerous other universities in the US and Europe. He was Foreign Minister of Hungary in the first non-Communist government (1990–94), and Ambassador to the United States of America in 1998–2002. He is Hungary’s former Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway and to the Republic of Iceland. Géza Jeszenszky is the author of numerous publications on history and foreign policy; his latest book in English is Post-Communist Europe and its National/Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2009). He is an editorial adviser for Hungarian Review.

VIIVI LUIK (Tänassilma, 1946) is an Estonian poet and prose writer. Two of her novels – Seitsmes rahukevad (The Seventh Spring of Peace, 1985) and Ajaloo ilu (The Beauty of History, 1991) – were translated into several foreign languages.

MIKLÓS MARÓTH (Budapest, 1943) graduated in Assyrian and gained his PhD at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. From 1988 to 2011 he was Head of Centre for Classical Studies of the Academy of Sciences, while teaching and researching abroad (Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, and Harvard, Boston). He has been Professor of Classical and Semitic Philology (Arabic) at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, since 1992, and for the past 13 years, has held the position of Director of the Avicenna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies. Professor Maróth is a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of numerous scientific societies, including the European Union of Arabists, the Bureau of the Union Académique Internationale, the European Academy (London), and the International Society for the Studies of the History of Sciences in Islam (Paris).

JÁNOS MARTONYI (Kolozsvár/Cluj, 1944). A lawyer by profession, he has been active in politics since 1989, first as Government Commissioner for Privatisation, then State Secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations, later Foreign Minister in the Fidesz governments of 1998–2002 and 2010–2014. He is also President of the Free Europe Centre for European Integration of the Fidesz Hungarian Civic Union, a member of the Executive Board of the Centre for European Studies, a foundation of the European People’s Party based in Brussels, and a member of the Batthyány Society of Professors.

BÉLA NÓVÉ (1956) is a Hungarian writer, historian and documentary film maker living in Budapest. Since the late 1970s he has published a number of books, essays and studies on different themes and contributed to a dozen of documentary films as scriptwriter, interviewer and director. As a devoted researcher of 20th century oral history memoirs during the past decade his interest turned more and more to minority and refugee conflicts and their personal testimonies. A recent result of this is his biography of Ödön Pásint published in Cluj (Kolozsvár, Clausenburg) in Hungarian in 2012, awaiting its English edition. Another result is a thoroughly researched monograph and a documentary film “PATRIA NOSTRA: Minor Hungarian refugees of 1956 in the French Foreign Legion”. Both will be published this year by the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and the author’s 60th birthday.

NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford, he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as Reader in English at the University of Pisa before returning to the UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some 17 books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the “system change” of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for 20 years. His recent books are Worth the Detour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, and Vienna: A Cultural History Signet (Oxford University Press; Italian edition: Vienna: Ritratto di unacitta, Odoya, Bologna).

BORIS LEONIDOVICH PASTERNAK (Moscow, 1890 – Peredelkino, 1960), Russian poet, novelist and literary translator. His education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. He studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, Germany. His first book of poems, Sestra moya zhizn (My Sister, Life), appeared in 1922 followed by Temy i variatsii (Themes and Variations) in 1923. Pasternak’s reticent autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), appeared in 1931, and a collection of lyrics, Vtoroye rozhdenie (Second Birth), followed in 1932. He translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petőfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley and others. In 1957 Doktor Zhivago, Pasternak’s only novel first appeared in Italian. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

BARBARA PIAZZA-GEORGI (Budapest, 1952) retired from the United Nations development system in June 2015, after thirty years spent mostly in Africa and the Middle East. Her latest assignment was as UNFPA country representative in Palestine and Syria, focusing on public health, gender and youth issues in complex humanitarian settings. She holds degrees in political science, international relations and development economics from the universities of Reading (UK) and Witwatersrand University (South Africa). She has published research on issues related to peace building, social capital and entrepreneurship. She is currently based in Budapest (Hungary), working for the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta and the Jesuit Refugee Service.

ANDREA RÓZSAVÖLGYI (Budapest, 1979) works at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts as associate curator of the Collection of Sculpture before 1800. She earned her PhD in art history at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and her dissertation was written about Emil Delmár’s art collection. She also conducts research on the history of the sculpture collection and the medieval and Renaissance plaster cast collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. She won several fellowships to Berne, London and now at the Center for the History of Collecting of the Frick Collection in New York.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Ilona Sármány-Parsons’ essay in the January 2016 issue of Hungarian Review is based on a contribution to the following volume, just published in Budapest: Ödön Lechner in Context. Studies of the international conference on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ödön Lechner’s death. Edited by Zsombor Jékely. Budapest: Museum of Applied Arts, 2015. ISBN 978-615-5217-21-0, 232 pp. Our thanks to Zsombor Jékely and the Museum of Applied Arts for permission to publish our version of the text, and to József Sisa for providing us with the colour photographs.