Peter, L.; (2002) Old hats and closet revisionists: reflections on Domokos Kosáry's latest work on the 1848 Hungarian revolution. Slavonic and East European Review , 80 (2) pp. 296-319.

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Abstract

The publication of Domokos Kosáry's Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849 offers an opportunity to examine Hungarian historians' changing views, since the Second World War, about that brilliant apogee of their country's history: the 1848 revolution. This book offers an overview of the whole subject which no other book written on a wide scale has offered in recent years, rather more than what its title promises. Its author is fully aware of the extent to which history can be understood as historiography and he critically discusses other historians' works. Moreover, Kosáry, the eighty-eight-year-old Nestor of Hungarian historians and the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has over the years earned the reputation of being the arch-revisionist of nineteenth-century Hungarian history. A convenient way to account for Kosáry's revisionist views is to explore first some traditional assumptions and views held about the subject and also their modifications over the years, before discussing Kosáry's work and reporting on where the argument stands today. Kosáry's revisionism has preyed on (if that is not an unkind description) two (partly overlapping) vocabularies of interpretation. Again, for convenience sake (and treading in the steps of geologists) I shall start with the still visible, because more recent, Marxist Old Hat vocabulary which rests on some older inveterate Independentist Old Hat assumptions that I shall review subsequently.

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