regularly in contact with the representatives of the city patriciate and of the bureaucratic gentry, my rejection tended to extend to them, too. Thus at a very early age violently oppositional feelings ruled in me against the whole of official Hungary. . . . Of course nowadays I regard it as childishly naÏve that I uncritically generalized my feelings of revulsion, and extended them to cover the whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately (save for Petoőfi). Nonetheless it is a matter of fact that this attitude dominated my spirit and ideas in those days. And the solid counter-weight—the only hard ground on which I then felt I could rest my feet—was the modernist foreign literature of the day, with which I became acquainted at the age of about fourteen and fifteen. 82 Lukács would eventually move from modernism to socialist realism and from a formless “revulsion” to membership in the Communist Party; only his love for Petoőfi would prove lifelong. This, too, is typical: national gods, even those most jealously guarded, were by far the most potent of the age. So potent, in fact, that their cults were taken for granted and barely noticed as various universalist creeds asserted their transcendental claims. Communists, among others, did not associate Petoőfi with the “bourgeois nationalism” they were fighting and saw no serious contradiction between the veneration of his poetry and proletarian internationalism. Petoőfi—like Goethe-Schiller, Mickiewicz, and others—stood for “culture” in his own domain, and culture (the “high” kind— i.e., the kind defined by Petoőfi et al.) was a good thing. All communism started out as national communism (and ended up as nationalism pure and simple). Béla Kun, the leader of the 1919 Communist government in Hungary, the organizer of the Red Terror in the Crimea, and a top official of the Communist International, began his writing career with a prizewinning high school essay titled “The Patriotic Poetry of Sándor Petoőfi and Janós Arany,” and ended it, while waiting to be arrested by the Soviet secret police, with an introduction to a Russian translation of Petoőfi’s poems. And Lazar Kaganovich, who probably signed Kun’s death sentence (among thousands of others), reminisced at the end of his life about beginning to acquire culture “through the independent reading of whatever works we had by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, L. Tolstoy, and Turgenev.” 83 Whereas national pantheons derived their power from their apparent transparency, family rebellions were significant because they were experienced and represented as epiphanies. Franz Boas remembered the “unforgettable moment” when he first questioned the authority of tradition. “In fact, my whole