The New Hungarian Quarterly Summer 1981. [antikvár]

IN FOCUS Let me assure the reader that there was no intention to place the difiicul-ties and aspirations of Hungárián society in focus when compiling this issue¦ Now that I have again read all the manuscripts before going to press I nevertheless can see it happen: we seem to have caught the essence of the situation in Hungary today. This is due not so much to editorial zeal, ingenuity or circumspection, but rather to Hungárián political and intel-lectual life which, in the early eighties, scrutinizes the seventies and sets forth, with greater care and objective understanding of the situation, and at the same time with an almost romantic patriotism, the aims of the decade ahead of us, of the next two five-year-plan periods, which can certainly not be described as romantic, When we started to shape up this NHQ 82 we knew only what every Hungárián citizen knows: important changes are taking place, and more are still to come, in the structure of the Hungárián economy* The questions to be answered by political and economic leaders, and alsó by everyone here, considering their complexity, are such as have not arisen before or had been considered solved* Indicative of how much these questions engross the attention of this country, and alsó of world opinion, is the long interview with György Aczél, published by Europaische Rundschau, Vienna. György Aczél replied to many questions, which nobody in Hungary asks any more because they know the answers* The interviewer, Paul Lendvai, a keen-eyed observer, is Hungárián by birth and showed himself aware of foreign notions and misconceptions in his questions* György Aczél's words about today's Hungárián society were meant for the foreign public but were of course published alsó in Hungárián, in the periodical Valóság¦ I stress this because readers of NHQ sometimes ask us if articles we publish on ticklish subjects appear in Hungárián as welL My answer is, of course, that far more, on many more touchy subjects,