Book Review: Limitele supraviețuirii. Sociologia maghiară din Transilvania după 1945, Székedi Levente, Editura Institutului pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităților Naționale, 2021

Abstract

In his study on the Hungarian Autonomous Region in Romania between 1952-1960, the Italian-Hungarian historian, Stefano Bottoni, documents the impact the development of national-communism and implementation of nationalist Romanian cultural policies had on Hungarian communities in Transylvania (Bottoni 2021). During the late 50’s these policies aimed also at cancelling Hungarian intellectual life and limit education taught in the Hungarian language with the general aim to assimilate the Hungarian population from Transylvania. It also restricted institutional autonomy of the educational system by merging Hungarian with Romanian schools. The apex of this nationalist culturalization process was the trial of Transylvanian-Hungarian intellectuals that were preparing a handbook of Hungarian literature for students in Romania and the merging in 1959 of the Hungarian Bolyai University with the Romanian Victor-Babeș University (Botoni 2021). In spite of this traumatic event for the Hungarian intellectual life in Transylvania we have very few studies that document the way the intellectual Hungarian field reproduced itself during the communist period and the role the new Babes-Bolyai University played in this. Székedi Levente’s book brings an important contribution in understanding the intellectual life in Transylvania during the Communist period and focuses on the reconstruction of how sociology survived as both within and outside academia. By including in this analysis the cultural production of the intellectuals around the periodicals Korunk and Utunk, Székedi manages to reconstruct the activity of one of the most important cultural centre of Transylvania during the communist period.