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AMONG THE DEMANDS drawn up by Budapest students in the days leading to the 1956 revolution was the removal of a massive statue of Stalin that stood on the edge of City Park. As events spun out of control on the evening of October 23, a crowd estimated at one hundred thousand converged at the monument. Their impatience soon gave way to performance , and the bronze effigy came crashing to the ground. The spontaneous destruction of the Stalin monument by an emboldened, jubilant crowd is central to the postcommunist mythology surrounding the 1956 revolution. This chapter is concerned with the rhetorical power of that absent symbol. Mikhail Yampolsky argues that the pageantry associated with the destruction of a monument and the visual retelling of such an iconoclastic moment through film and other media elevate what might otherwise be an unremarkable dot on the urban landscape to the status of a super symbol. He writes, “The moment of explosion is, from the point of view of spectacle, undoubtedly the most significant in the whole biography of the monument” (Yampolsky 1995, 101). The mythic power of the now-absent likeness of Stalin is indeed largely a function of the visceral, anarchic joy experienced, for the city was purged of its presence. The scene of its destruction bears a carnivalesque atmosphere as the roles of master and subject were reversed and retributive justice was symbolically served (Bakhtin 1984, 10–15; Stites 1985, 3). The medieval carnival involved a break in the cycle of time, a suspension of hierarchy, privileges, and prohibitions on designated feast, fair, or market days. Similarly, the destruction of a monument, because of its intended durability, is a powerful intervention into the flow of time. Cast in bronze or carved of marble, the memorial is designed to cheat history through the eternal commemoration of an individual, event, or concept. chapter two THE DESTRUCTION OF THE STALIN MONUMENT 40 chapter two As a result, images of ruins or scenes with fragments of broken, abandoned statuary take on a special poignancy. It is the hubris of the King of Kings in Shelley’s “Ozymandias” that makes the image of his “colossal wreck,” half-buried in the desert sand and long forgotten, so powerful (Berger 1969, 75). Peter Blume’s surrealistic take on Italian fascism, “The Eternal City,” likewise draws its strength from the ideals of democracy that lie broken in the form of shattered sculpture as a jack-inthe -box head of Mussolini leers over their remnants (Aradi 1974, 226; Trapp 1987, 57). Beyond its original ideological intentions—and the emotional force of exorcizing them—the Stalin monument’s “phantom existence” (Yamplosky 1995, 101) is further infused with meaning as a result of the repression of memories of that glorious moment throughout the thirty-one years of the Kádár regime. The public reconstitution of these memories in the postcommunist period is best understood as epideictic commemoration along the lines suggested by Lawrence Rosenfield. Epideictic, he writes, “suggests an exhibiting or making apparent (in the sense of showing or highlighting) what might otherwise remain unnoticed or invisible” (Rosenfield 1980, 135). It is concerned with the luminosity or radiance that emanates from noble acts or thoughts and beckons us to join with our community in recognizing and celebrating what is—grace, goodness, and courage: “Such thoughtful beholding in commemoration constitutes memorializing” (133). Rosenfield’s reference to the act of beholding is intriguing . As applied to the relationship between the Hungarian public and the monument to Stalin, it takes on a number of layers. For instance, the power of monumental art as visual rhetoric in the first place is bound up with its ability to captivate observers, a point well understood by Lenin (see Tolstoy, Bibikova, and Cooke 1990; Lodder 1993). In order to establish how the destruction of the monument has carried so much rhetorical weight over the decades, we need to explore the act of beholding in its various dimensions. The statue was conceived during the aesthetic and political era of High Stalinism, when socialist realist art served as the cornerstone of official doctrine (Milosz 1960, 10) and when Hungary’s leader, Mátyás Rákosi, reigned as “Stalin’s best pupil.” It was toppled shortly after Krushchev’s denunciation of the cult of personality at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which ushered in a period when “rigid adherence to the ‘monolithic’ Marxist theory of the arts was no longer obligatory” (Fischer 1963...

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