Biography Essay

The publication of Gyorgy Konrad's first novel, A latogato (1969; translated as The Case Worker, 1974), placed him at the forefront of Hungarian literature. At the beginning of the 1970s he turned against the Communist regime; as a result, he was not allowed to publish in Hungary. His novels and essays were published in translations into several other languages, however, making him the best-known contemporary Hungarian writer. His "Antipolitika" (1989), first published in English translation as Antipolitics (1984), provoked great interest in Western European and American public opinion. This book, along with the Czech author Milan Kundera's famous 1984 essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe," published in The New York Review of Books, pointed out the untenability of the situation created by the Yalta Conference and the imperative need to aid an abandoned Central and Eastern Europe. As a participant in the illegal Hungarian democratic opposition movement and then, after the...