In the final two decades of communism those of us in the democratic opposition movement didn’t have time to ponder whether there was a genuine renaissance artist among us. Now it seems to me there was one among us who had the capacity to create an entirely new form in a ‘genre’ previously undiscovered by artists. Such as, for example, smuggling mimeographic devices across the iron curtain. Or, together with his friend the nomadic sculptor István Haraszthy, breathing life back into stencil machines long since decayed, the house parties held in his flat to this day, or the activities of the "Samizdat Boutique" on Galamb Street. In the communist period we were confronted at every turn with the teaching "being determines consciousness". In the case of László Rajk and the other samizdat artists, this vulgar Marxist formulation was transformed to read "being (in opposition) determined genre".
Fortunately, László Rajk’s inexhaustible energies also found a mode of self-expression in the more traditional arts: he prepared graphics and typography, he planned and built houses - at that time with his own hands, he organised urban central rehabilitation, wrote studies and, on top of all this his name is associated with countless theatre and film sets. (Let’s stop here a moment. His name was never officially associated with precisely his most successful set designs - these he could only design as a nameless extra, or with the subtitle ‘Studio Plus’ where his name should have been). The ten years that have passed since the collapse of communism provide enough distance for us to assert for once and for all that Rajk’s works are deserving of attention, not merely for the political courage of their creator and his moral stance against the dictatorship, but for their own artistic merit.
I myself was not - and am not - an art historian, and so I approach László Rajk’s work from a different angle. During the last two decades of the Kádár era I worked in the underground, or (to use the Russian word in currency at the time) samizdat publication of books. A significant number of the books I published were illustrated by László Rajk, although decades more were to pass before these illustrated samizdats appeared in Hungary. The earliest samizdats were written in the prisons of Stalinism, where it was a cause for excitement if political prisoners managed to write their messages on cigarette or toilet paper. In the camp at Recsk, for example, even that much was not possible. The book of poetry written by György Faludi during his confinement there comes down to us despite a total absence of paper - his prisonmates learned the poems by heart, trusting that one day they would emerge from the Hungarian gulag and transcribe them freely. Outside the barbed wire the only marginal increase in freedom was the availability of pens and paper. Verses and Bibles alike were written by hand - I myself have seen these notebooks which, in the hardest years, took on the aura of cult objects.
After the bloody reprisals that followed the 1956 revolution, the passage of much time was needed before uncensored publications could again appear in this country. The memory of the hundreds of death sentences was too close, the oppressive machinery too powerful. In fact this apparent power was only called up to conceal the fear of free thought and uncensored publication. The dictatorship kept jealous watch over every copying instrument. It is difficult to imagine today, but right through to the 1980s, for example, prior to each national holiday the secret police took a writing sample from every typewriter. Whenever a pamphlet appeared, or any typewritten text containing the seeds of free thought, hundreds of police specialists worked round the clock until they established where the test was produced, on what machine, and by whose hand.
In spite of all this, the number of typewritten reproductions began to multiply in the 1970s. Articles from the Western or émigré press began to appear at first, and later on, polemics written under pseudonyms or unsigned. When the Hungarian democratic opposition appeared on the scene at the end of the 1970s, the situation was altered in two ways: first, we explicitly signed our writings and publications using our real names; secondly, we began to distribute uncensored texts systematically. To begin with, most of our duplication was done by typewriter - we later realised that this was insufficient to the requirements of large-scale distribution of uncensored material. Typing is too slow - at most 2-3 copies can be produced at once using carbon sheets between ordinary pages. Using very thin paper, on the other hand, the text was barely legible. The typed sheets were neither bound nor covered - the pages easily ripped or fell apart. In spite of this, for at least ten years this was the only technical means of avoiding censorship in Hungary.
Personally I always believed that typewriters were not the appropriate means for samizdat publication. We needed to find a technology that would allow pages and books to be published in larger editions and more resilient formats. Few today probably consider that samizdat production was a costly enterprise, and the only way to recoup our money was to sell our product. I always regarded samizdat as a good, and the costs of production, storage and distribution were no small matter. Since we were looking for democratic relations and a market economy in Hungary, we also strove to make ‘market forces’ work in the diffusion of free thought. A few more years had to pass before it became clear that here too the solution lay in the emergence of professional printers at state run factories, who were willing to print up our samizdats for money. Of course this was a peculiar and crippled ‘market economy’ - no doubt the printers stole our paper, inks and bookbinding materials - and even if they were working for freedom, the money they got for it was of some consequence. We, on the other hand, were finally able to break the 100-150 copy ‘bestseller edition’ barrier set by the typewriter.
However, the great bulk of uncensored literature was not (at least to start with) produced in this way, but by means of true underground technologies. In Hungary in the early eighties, four modes of duplication existed: silk-screen printing, stencilling, the so-called ramka (which involves stretching stencil paper on a frame and impressing it by hand), and the offset technique. I myself dealt with all four of these. I knew the entire process of printing and preparation and I taught it to others. From the moment the AB Kiadó (AB Press) publishing house was founded, my aspiration was that my publications would approach as nearly as possible the standards of those produced under normal conditions. At first, of course that simply meant that AB would have, for example, its own logo (which László Rajk designed immediately), and that the cover would carry not only a title, but a graphic or two as well. At that time, this was no easy task. Again it was László Rajk who experimented with ways of etching line-drawings onto stencil paper originally intended only for typewritten duplications.
The silk-screen technique was also perfectly suitable for coloured printing under normal conditions. However, conditions in the small samizdat workshops, under constant police surveillance, could hardly be called ‘normal’. Despite this, extraordinarily demanding drawings, cover pages and graphics were produced. In Hungary this was mainly the work of László Rajk, Ágnes Háy and Béla Nóvé. All three had an unmistakably individual graphic style - as a result, disputes over who illustrated which publication could never have arisen. Whereas, using the typewriter, we could only produce our publications in editions of ten every so often, by the early eighties we were publishing editions of about 500, eventually rising to near 4,000. This was the number of copies we published of György Faludi’s novel describing his imprisonment in Recsk, Pokolbéli Víg Napjaim (published by Abacus, in English translation, as "My Happy Days in Hell"). Even at the time we knew this wasn’t bad - we saw the four tonnes of paper needed for the book, which had to be stored, transported, printed and distributed to the customers, all in concealment from the police. But the true extent of our productivity is only obvious to us now, since in Hungary today even modestly successful novels are not sold in substantially larger editions. In other words, through our samizdat publications we were able to reach and supply almost the same group (and at least the same number) of intellectuals who remain the literary shoppers of today.
In the ten years since the regime changed it has become apparent that in Hungary (too) samizdat brought authentic values to the reader. To list only a few of the better known names: Faludi, whom we have mentioned already, György Konrád, György Petri (who was the editor of the first volume of poetry I brought out and who designed the cover for his own book of poetry, as I discovered now, a mere twenty years later, in connection with this present essay), Miklós Haraszti, György Dalos. Or foreign writers such as Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, Miroslav Kusy, Solzhenitsin, and the long list of Western writers from Orwell to Koestler. Yes, samizdat relayed values and created valuable works - including many deserving of notice, such as the book illustrations by László Rajk reproduced here. And this is all in keeping with the samizdat ambition - to step out of the realm of illegality and be samizdat no longer. László Rajk, on the other hand, is doing now what he would have done decades ago had he been born in the world’s more fortunate half: designing a film emporium, a museum and a covered market in Budapest as well as a cultural institute in Vienna, exhibiting installations in Paris, and drawing up theatre and film sets in his spare time. When, on occasion, we meet, our former samizdat past often comes up. However, we don’t feel nostalgia for those times. But it is true we will never forget them.
Gábor Demszky Founder of the AB Kiadó samizdat publishing house, Mayor of Budapest
Translation by Stephen Humphreys