COURAGE

connecting collections

László Lajtha received the national Kossuth Prize for his work as an ethnographer and folk music collector. This gesture did little to offset the fact that in 1948, upon his return from London, the Hungarian government denied him a passport, thereby forcibly keeping him in Hungary where he was blacklisted. He refused any connection with the Communist Party, and had to sell his belongings to make ends meet. Lajtha was a world-famous composer, and without a doubt, it was extraordinary that he was prohibited from traveling. The Kossuth Prize was a symbolic gesture, one that permitted him to travel within the country collecting folk music and songs without allowing him to leave.

In 1952, László Lajtha coauthored a play entitled The Exiled Maid: A Chronicle from 1764 (Bujdosó Lány, Krónika 1764-ből), which was performed nine times but which within a year had been prohibited by the regime. His coauthor was Áron Tamási, an ethnic Hungarian author from Transylvania. The story of the play is very simple. It is a monologue based on the story of the Massacre at Mádéfalva (Siculeni, Romania). The play consists of four folksongs in Lajtha’s adaptation. Lajtha collected these songs during his collecting trips in Transylvania between 1911 and 1914 and in 1943. Tamási wrote texts before, between, and after the songs. They finished the work in 1952, and the main actress was the also unheeded Márta Mezey (1909–1983). The monologue must have been extraordinary and bold. First, it was based on Transylvanian songs instead of Soviet ones, and the writers, Lajtha and Tamási, were so-called déclassé elements (meaning people who earlier had been members of the middle class but who had lost their social positions and were regarded as enemies by the socialist state). Within a year, it had been banned by the regime. Seven years later, as the Kádár regime began to adopt a different cultural policy, Bujdosó lány was performed again, with Mezey in the role again.
Tamási moved to Hungary in 1944 and stayed in the country until his death. In the bequest, one finds many documents in connection with him, since he and Lajtha were friends.

On 9 March 1952, a grandiose exhibition was opened about the life of the communist leader, Mátyás Rákosi.
It was organized on his 60^th birthday. The party was held at the Munkásmozgalmi Intézet (Institute of the Labour Movement), in the building that housed the Museum of Ethnography until 2018, and which had previously housed the Supreme Court that sentenced Rákosi to years-long imprisonment in 1937.
The exhibition had two parts: an eight-room presentation of Rákosi’s life, and twenty-five rooms of gifts given to Rákosi. These gifts were extraordinary because they showed the new form of Hungarian folk art, in which folk art symbols were mixed with the symbols of socialism. After the exhibition closed, the objects were not inventoried in the collections of the Museum of Ethnography. The museologist ignored them until the 1960–70s. In 2012, the Museum of Ethnography put the folk-art exhibition of the collection on display under the title Rakosi60@neprajz.hu. Curators worked to ensure that this exhibition presented the original objects in a memorial context to reflect the previous conception; they thought it important to show more interpretations of an exhibition that was surrounded by unspoken rejection.  
Here you can find a list of the exhibited objects: http://rakosi60.blogspot.hu/