Faith without Illusion [1956]

THIS REVIEW OF Mihály Károlyi’s posthumously published memoir appeared in The Sunday Times, 29 Jan. 1956, p. 6 (B&R C56.02), and was reprinted in translation as “Foi sans illusions” in a French publication backed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Preuves, 62 (April 1956): 88-9. The aristocratic socialist and statesman Count Mihály Károlyi (1875-1955) was a key figure in the nationalist revolution in Hungary in October 1918 and became president of the republic that was proclaimed a few days after the Armistice and superseded only a few months later by Béla Kun’s almost equally shortlived Communist regime. After the latter’s government collapsed, Károlyi and his wife Catherine took flight and did not return to Hungary for twenty-seven years. In 1923 he was convicted of treason in absentia by the conservative authoritarian government of Admiral Horthy, whose supporters Károlyi had antagonized with constitutional and land reforms inaugurated during his brief term of office. When in London in the mid1920s, the Károlyis made acquaintance with Russell and his then wife Dora. Contact was maintained during their long years of peripatetic exile in Europe and the United States, and both the Russells were remembered fondly in the statesman’s memoir (see Károlyi 1956, 203-4). Russell had last met the couple in Wales in 1949, some three years after Károlyi’s political rehabilitation and triumphant return to a Hungary controlled until 1948 by the anti-Communist Smallholders’ Party. He was then serving the post-war regime as ambassador to France, but was poised to resign, ostensibly on the grounds of age but really because of his opposition to the creeping Communist domination of the Hungarian Government. He spent the last years of his life as an exile once more, this time in the south of France at Vence.