Silenced voices, faded memories, hidden multilingualism: revisiting Vilmos Kovács’s “Holnap is élünk”

Abstract

Vilmos Kovács’s novel “Holnap is élünk” [We Will Still Live Tomorrow] — in its genesis, content, and afterlife alike — constitutes one of the most characteristic imprints of the history of the twentieth-century Transcarpathian Hungarian community. The work functions simultaneously as a literary creation, a historical document, a site of memory, and a corpus that preserves the period-specific features of minority language use.

The history of Transcarpathian Hungarian literature after the Second World War unfolded under the signs of silence, censorship, and cautious reorganization. Although shifting state borders repeatedly disrupted cultural continuity, literary creation remained an important means of preserving minority identity throughout. Few prose works survived the rigid ideological climate of the Soviet decades; among them is Kovács’s novel — the first work to openly raise the question of the fate of Transcarpathian Hungarians in the Stalinist era. Although the book was soon banned, the novel occupies a unique position as both a documentary testimony and a literary experiment, revealing the strategies through which minority authors sought to navigate the boundaries of permissible expression.

The present study examines “Holnap is élünk” from a dual perspective: that of political history and that of multilingual literary practice. The analysis situates Kovács’s work within the fragile institutional frameworks of Transcarpathian Hungarian culture, drawing attention to the difficulties of publication, editorial interventions, and the constraints of censorship that shaped the novel’s reception. At the same time, it places emphasis on the linguistic dimension: the representation of contact zones among Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian; the silence of untranslated utterances; and the stylistic use of loanwords reflecting local speech.

The central argument is that although Vilmos Kovács was compelled to write “only in Hungarian”, he nevertheless encoded the multilingual environment of Soviet Transcarpathia, thereby documenting at once the limitations and the resilience of minority expression.

By combining close textual analysis with historical contextualization, the study contributes to three interrelated fields: research on Hungarian minority literature, the study of censorship and cultural policy under state socialism, and the analysis of multilingualism as a literary phenomenon. In doing so, it demonstrates that “Holnap is élünk” is not merely a regional curiosity but an important case study of how peripheral literature reflected and questioned the structures of power in the Soviet Union.