This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

Tibor Déry

Tibor Déry (Budapest, 18 October 1894 - Budapest, 18 August 1977)^[1] was a Hungarian writer. In his early years he was a supporter of communism, but after being excluded from the ranks of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1953 he started writing satire on the communist regime in Hungary.

Georg Lukács praised Dery as being 'the greatest depicter of human beings of our time'.

Life[link]

In 1919,^[2] Déry became an active party member in the liberal republic under Mihály Károlyi. Less than a year later however, Béla Kun and his Communist Party rose to power, proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic and exiling Déry. He only returned to Hungary in 1935,^[2] having lived in Austria, France and Germany in the meantime. Nevertheless, during the right wing Horthy regime he was imprisoned several times, once because he translated André Gide's Retour de L'U.R.S.S.. In this period, he wrote his greatest novel, The Unfinished Sentence, a 1200-page epic story about the life of the young aristocrat Lorinc Parcen-Nagy who gets into contact with the working classes in Budapest during a period of strike.

In 1953, Déry was expelled from the Communist Party^[2] during a 'cleansing' of Hungarian literature. In 1956 he was a spokesman during the uprising, alongside Georg Lukács and Gyula Háy. In the same year, he wrote Niki: The Story of a Dog, a fable about the arbitrary restrictions on human life in Stalinist Hungary. Because of his part in the uprising, he was sentenced to prison^[1] for 9 years, but released in 1960.^[2] He died in 1977.

He translated Rudyard Kipling's Naulahka and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding into Hungarian.

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b} Britannica Encyclopedia
2. ^ ^{a b c d} NY Books

This article about a Hungarian writer or poet is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e