Antal Hidas

Born Dec. 18, 1899, in Gödöllő. Hungarian poet. Member of the Communist Party since 1920.

Hidas lived as an émigré in the USSR from 1925 to 1959. He worked as secretary of the International Association of Revolutionary Writers in Moscow from 1926 to 1932 and was a member of the editorial board of Vestnik inostrannoi literatury and the Hungarian journal Sarló és kalapács. The verses in his first volume of poetry, In the Land of Counterrevolution (1925), are imbued with the tragic memories of the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and are filled with faith in a new revolutionary upsurge. Hidas’ volumes of verse My Aunt’s Garden (1958) and We Long for You (1968) are suffused with the poet’s pain at leaving his native land, but also with the consciousness of his communist duty. In his novels Mr. Ficzek (1936), Márion and His Friends (1959), and Another Kind of Music Is Needed (1963), Hidas sympathetically portrays the life of the urban poor in Hungary at the beginning of the century and exposes the ruling clique. He received the Kossuth Prize in 1962.