István Eörsi

Eörsi was part of the Hungarian minority that welcomed the Red Army, when the Russians invaded his country.

Although most of these Russian supporters were disillusioned after the rise to power of Stalin, Eörsi found new opportunities in this time of uncertainty.

After his release he was banned from publication, because of which he concentrated on translating works of Goethe, Heine, Brecht, Shakespeare, Ginsberg, Shelley, Keats, Pushkin, Jandl and Lorca.

Eörsi's literary style was marked by his ideological stance, and it often bore his political zeal in the form of sarcasm.

But his work always bore the mark of two things: First, a revisionist form of Marxism he learned from his teacher, György Lukács; second, his experiences of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, which got him in jail.

During his trial two anti-Soviet poems, which had appeared in the clandestine journal Elunk (We Are Alive) some weeks earlier, were used as evidence.