Between Tears & Laughter

Play, gypsies,

Dance, gypsies,

Play while you may . . .

Thus, during a recent revival at Budapest's Fovarosi Theater of the operetta Countess Maritza (vintage 1924), sang Count Tassilo Endrodi, the impoverished Hungarian nobleman who for the first time in his life has to work for a living. His plaintive song was timely enough to make a lot of Budapest theatergoers squirm. No longer may Hungarian gypsy fiddlers play as they please, nor may Count Endrodi cry into his Tokay with impunity. The Communists have clamped down on nostalgia.

Sunset on the Bachelor's Flat. In an official directive, Hungary's Communist Council of Arts sternly observed that Hungarian popular music has become "decadent," lacking in the "dynamic rhythm of the new democracy." They express a maudlin desire to return to the "good old days." As an example of the kind of song that was out of tune with Marx ism, the council cited the following ballad:

"Time has passed, the past is no more ... A kiss does not last you as long as once upon a time and the girls are not as sweet as they used to be ... Where is the old bachelor's flat, the perfume, the diamonds? . . . The old days were so much nicer . . ."

Budapest's csardas alley was terror-stricken. If a Hungarian could not write about gypsy sweethearts, wishing wells and bachelor flats, what could he write about? Grimly, the boys buckled down to the rhythm of the new democracy. One new Hungarian song presents the revised new view of the good old days. Before the Communists took over, relates the song, a certain "have-not peasant" could not even afford to buy a new shirt or pants, while the landlord's dog grew fat on the peasant's produce. Then, the Communist land reform gave the peasant four acres, and now he alone reaps its fruits.

Hungarian songwriters caught on to this sort of thing so quickly that the Arts Council had to issue another warning against an "opportunistic trend."

Festerings in the Tanbark. While Hungarian art was thus being purified, the Communist citadel itself was polluted. Russian musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, drama critics, publishers, ice skaters and brass bands have already been purged. But the most awesome new menace to Soviet culture had festered in the tanbark of Russian circuses. It was known as "Western clownism."

Soviet Art, official organ of the Soviet Arts Committee, last week published an expose of conditions under the big top. "Only by fully unmasking ... in the arenas of Soviet circuses alien bourgeois tendencies can Soviet circus art achieve a new renaissance and become a genuine expression of the strength of our great fatherland," the article said. Circus managers were attacked for "trying to replace the healthy Soviet circus, with its ideology, optimism and purposefulness, with empty, formalistic imitations."

The worst offenders were the Western clowns. The article specifically attacked the famed Fratellinis, "reactionary and bourgeois [clowns] and classical exponents of buffoon games." A Russian critic who recently praised them was severely taken to task for "not revealing the ideological character of Western clownism."

All in all, things looked pretty bleak in Communism's domains. In Budapest, you must not cry. In Moscow, you must not laugh except at prescribed subjects. All you could do was to shut up.

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