Tibor Déry was a Hungarian

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 writer. In his early years he was a supporter of communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, but after being excluded from the ranks of the Hungarian Communist Party

Hungarian Communist Party

The Communist Party of Hungary , renamed Hungarian Communist Party in 1945, was founded on November 24, 1918, and was in power in Hungary briefly from March to August 1919 under Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The communist government was overthrown by the Romanian Army and driven...

 in 1953 he started writing satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 on the communist regime in Hungary.

Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...

 praised Dery as being 'the greatest depicter of human beings of our time'.

Life

In 1919, Déry became an active party member in the liberal republic under Mihály Károlyi

Mihály Károlyi

Count Mihály Ádám György Miklós Károlyi de Nagykároly was briefly Hungary's leader in 1918-19 during a short-lived democracy...

. Less than a year later however, Béla Kun

Béla Kun

Béla Kun , born Béla Kohn, was a Hungarian Communist politician and a Bolshevik Revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919.- Early life :...

 and his Communist Party rose to power, proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic

Hungarian Soviet Republic

The Hungarian Soviet Republic or Soviet Republic of Hungary was a short-lived Communist state established in Hungary in the aftermath of World War I....

 and exiling Déry. He only returned to Hungary in 1935, having lived in Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 in the meantime. Nevertheless, during the right wing Horthy

Miklós Horthy

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar years and throughout most of World War II, serving from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. Horthy was styled "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary" .Admiral Horthy was an officer of the...

 regime he was imprisoned several times, once because he translated André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

's Retour de L'U.R.S.S.. In this period, he wrote his greatest novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, The Unfinished Sentence, a 1200-page epic story about the life of the young aristocrat Lorinc Parcen-Nagy who gets into contact with the working classes in Budapest during a period of strike.

In 1953, Déry was expelled from the Communist Party during a 'cleansing' of Hungarian literature. In 1956 he was a spokesman during the uprising

Hungarian Uprising

Hungarian Uprising can refer to:*Hungarian Revolution of 1848 *Hungarian Revolution of 1956...

, alongside Georg Lukács and Gyula Háy

Gyula Háy

Gyula Háy was a Hungarian communist intellectual and playwright.Gyula Háy was born in 1900 in Abony, Hungary. He was involved in the German communist movement in the 1920s, particularly in agitprop plays...

. In the same year, he wrote Niki: The Story of a Dog, a fable about the arbitrary restrictions on human life in Stalinist Hungary. Because of his part in the uprising, he was sentenced to prison for 9 years, but released in 1960. He died in 1977.

He translated Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

's Naulahka and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies...

into Hungarian.