Tibor Dery

Tibor Dery (originally Deutsch) was a Hungarian writer, born in Budapest in 1894. In his early years he was a supporter of communism, but after being dispelled from the ranks of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1953 he started writing satire on the communist regime in Hungary.

Georg Lukács praised Dery as being 'the greatest depicter of human beings of our time'.

In 1918, Dery became an active party member in the liberal republic under Mihály Károlyi. Less than a year later however, Béla Kun and his Communist Party rose to power, proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic and exiling Dery. He only returned to Hungary in 1934, having lived in Austria, France and Germany in the meantime. Nevertheless, during the right wing Horthy regime he was imprisoned several times, once because he translated André Gide's "Retour de L'U.R.S.S.". In this period, he wrote his greatest novel, "The Unfished Sentence", a 1200-page epic story about the life of the young aristocrat Lorinc Parcen-Nagy who gets into contact with the working classes in Budapest during a period of strike.

In 1953, Dery was expelled from the Communist Party during a 'cleansing' of Hungarian literature. In 1956 he was a spokesman during the uprising, alongside Georg Lukács and Gyula Háy. In the same year, he wrote "Niki: The Story of a Dog", a fable about the arbitrary restrictions on human life in Stalinist Hungary. Because of his part on the uprising, he was sentenced to prison for 9 years, but released in 1960. He died in 1977.He was a German-Chatolic.