Béla Illés (Born: Béla Lipner from Kassa, Austria-Hungary; now Košice, Slovakia), March 22, 1895 – Budapest, January 5, 1974) was a Hungarian left-wing writer and journalist who spent much of his life in exile in the Soviet Union.

Illustration of Béla Illés in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1933

In the now communist Hungary, he was not particularly appreciated by the Minister of Culture, József Révai, nor by György Lukács. However, he was used as a writer of the mass articles glorifying the communist system and the Soviet Union.[1] He himself took the model role for literary Socialist realism. In 1948, he (found) the story of the Belarusian cavalry captain Alexei Gusev, who had opposed the tsarist intervention in the suppression of the 1848 revolution in Hungary in 1848, and had been executed for it. This story was now to put the Soviet-Hungarian relationship on a new footing at the Centennial commemoration, which was celebrated in Hungary on a grand scale. His writing was printed en masse, and streets were named after Goosev.[2]

Publications edit

  • Illés, Béla (1987). Karpats'ka rapsodiia : roman, opovidannia [Carpathian rapsody] (in Ukrainian). Uzhgorod: Karpati. OCLC 224121020. Carpathian Rapody was fst published in English in 1963 by Corvina, trans. Grace Blair the wife of Emil Gardos

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