My research focuses on small Hungarian periodicals in Yugoslavia, in the period between 1945 and the disintegration of the state during the 1990’s. I define small periodicals as literary or art journals, which lasted from a single issue, up to five years the most. I analyse them as one of the manifestations of local art worlds, and intra-urban coproduction networks. These publications were mostly edited and written by teenagers and young people in their early twenties, but under close surveillance of the socialist authorities. Local officials made it possible to publish articles, poems, short stories, thus enabling local cultural production and critical reception, constructing a discourse of a local pseudo-freedom of speech, and partly omitting the need for samizdat on one side, but, creating the circumstances for control, supervision and sanctions on the other. These local periodicals usually lasted no longer than one or two years, some of them appearing for only one or two issues.
Yugoslav cities or towns with a Hungarian majority or a significant Hungarian urban community such as Senta (Zenta) or Subotica (Szabadka) produced several periodicals ranging from only one issue, to really successful ones appearing for several decades. The research however, focuses only on journals being published up to five years at most. In this sense, long term literary, art or cultural magazines were more of an exception, and less the rule. The teams of young people comprising the art worlds were highly motivated and creative, their efforts were however, often slowed down or obstructed from the municipal authorities. Accordingly, local journals were also alive until they became too critical, and thus posed a threat to the local elite. This happened often after a few issues, and sometimes after a few years, but the procedure was always the same. On the surface, the local cultural or youth organisations, such as the Vojvodinian Federal Youth Socialist Organisation, or the respective cultural committee of the local government financially supported these initiatives. This created a social climate of free speech, liberal youth media and independent artistic environment. In reality, these local art worlds and the journals within them, were more determined by municipal decisions, censorship and auto-censorship, than the editors and staff could have ever imagined.
These art worlds were supported by local pools of resources and coproduction networks rarely extending beyond municipal borders. They were usually centred around a few individuals, who built the core of the editorial, with a varying number of people appearing on a more irregular basis. The journals were just the focal points of these ties connecting young writers and artists; journalists who published humorous, but polemical articles and essays on local matters. These personal ties were linked to local institutions of culture, connecting museums, concert halls and theatres directly to the periodical. With these relations on site, the journals had almost every predisposition to develop into something much larger than the local community. Local authorities or municipal officials of the League of Communists supported these initiatives. Scarce but sufficient funding was made available, thus starting journals like these was usually not a problem. Maintaining them was. However, since funding was tied to governmental structures, restrictions were also connected to them. When the voice of the periodical became too critical, or the editors refused to hand in the upcoming issue for inspection before releasing it into print, the funding channels dried up without further notice. This way, in congruence with higher strata of party hierarchy and daily politics of the state, local elites created finely tuned mechanisms of surveillance and control. They constructed a quasi-free environment for social and political criticism, art and literature. Almost every first issue of these journals started with a text celebrating freedom of speech, but as soon as this freedom had been used even in the most remote or naive fashion, the journal was abolished. Despite stating, that the local periodical serves the local community by informing it truly and in accordance with the “revolutionary processes”, that it was established in order to nurture freedom of expression, this freedom was maintained only in the explicit vocabulary, but much less in practice. The developing art worlds sustaining these journals with events, human resources and overall material were left without a periodical. They would have to wait for another group to establish another periodical, and only after could the work continue where it stopped a few months, a few years or even a decade before.
In comparison to the Eastern bloc however, these periodicals proved to contribute sufficient manoeuvring space for future intellectuals, of whom several are significant figures in literature, politics, music and art even today. Samizdat was not as widespread in Yugoslavia as it was in the Soviet Union or its satellite states in Central-Eastern Europe. This practice of establishing/abolishing, writing under surveillance and delimitation of freedoms proved to be just enough not to launch outer-institutional or illegal publishing alternatives. These journals, although having an artificially short lifespan could somewhat contribute to the ongoing debates in the public sphere, while maintaining the legal framework granted by the local authorities. Every time funding was withdrawn, thus disabling future publishing, a new periodical emerged in a few months time. Publishing essays, poems or prose underground was never an option in these communities.
As tomorrow is shaped by today, they are both shaped by the past. My aim is firstly to digitalize these small periodicals and to preserve them for the future, and secondly, to put the censorship process into a historical and political perspective. It is essential to disseminate the development of these local art worlds, and local public spheres and compare them with one another. They did not exist in a vacuum, but in a specific political and cultural context. This research is based on a material attributed to literary or art history, but the analysis combines the theoretical framework with sociological theories and cultural studies in order to look into power relations, the strength of weak ties, political objectives, the public sphere, coproduction networks or encoding mechanisms.
Oszkár Roginer, Joint International MA in Cultural Sociology, University of Zadar