Antigone’s Brothers : The Soviet Reburial

Jákfalvi, Magdolna (2024) Antigone’s Brothers : The Soviet Reburial. THEATRON: SZÍNHÁZTUDOMÁNYI PERIODIKA, 18 (4). pp. 14-24. ISSN 1418-9941

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Abstract

During the establishment of theKádár era of state socialist Hungary and theemergence of a Hungarian ideological aesthetic that essentially internalized the Sovietcultural model—that is, in the years after the1956 revolution—retaliation was the generaltool of power. On 4 November 1956, Soviettroops marched into Hungary; by January1957 fighting had ceased in the country, andthe tabooing of revolutionary events beganimmediately. It would be a hopeless undertaking to detect, or even to look for, a moment of resistance in the acts of everydaycommunication, but an analysis of the cultural context of even a single theatrical performance reveals the human attention (andpain) present in civil situations. The tragedyof Antigone is a personal experience lived overdecades because Sophocles’ text carries thestory of the communist martyr ministerLászló Rajk, executed in 1949, and the storyof the prime minister Imre Nagy, executedtwo years after the 1956 revolution, both buried secretly and hastily, only in the technicalsense, without any ritual. The reburial of thedead of the previous eras played a decisiverole in both of the two major political upheavals of the post-war decades in Hungary. Butnothing can explain how Jean Anouilh’sdrama Antigone could have been performedat all in January 1957.

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