Persistent Illusions is an engaging analysis of the cultural milieu of Miklós Horthy’s Hungary during the interwar period. Nóra Veszprémi offers us a nuanced account of irredentist preoccupations with the meaning of history and the politics of memory as illustrated in civic performances, artistic creations, and scholarly debate in the 1920s and 30s. Her rich portrayal of the complexities characterizing this period serves as a valuable antidote to the current highly selective use of interwar symbols and political rhetoric. Throughout Veszprémi adeptly contrasts the regime’s officially sanctioned accounts with contemporary artworks mounted as leftist critiques. She discusses visual culture in terms of cartographical imaginaries and irredentist spacetime, demonstrating that crafting a novel historical consciousness necessarily entails restructuring spatial and temporal coordinates. Crucial events and iconic figures from the past are incorporated into new cultural configurations, denoting continuity while altering their meaning. Veszprémi insists that her study is not about modernism or modern art, but about visual culture in modern Hungary. This is an important caveat, since depictions of the era tend to emphasize feudal trappings and neglect modern elements.

The book is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Each of the five chapters is devoted to describing a series of events, work of art or scholarly debate as a means of explicating the central themes of Veszprémi’s analysis. Chapter 1 examines a series of mass public spectacles, beginning with May Day celebrations held during the Soviet Republic in 1919, followed by Horthy’s procession into Budapest marking the military success of the counterrevolution and the start of a new era. She discusses several less well-known public events organized by political factions and the Catholic Church in the coming years that solidify the historical narrative of the regime. To complicate the story of public memorializations mounted by the regime, Veszprémi presents Mihály Biró’s series of sketches illustrating the gruesome violence of the White Terror. Although drawn in 1920, these lithographs could only be printed abroad; they appeared in a left-wing Viennese paper in 1930.

Chapter 2 centers on a discussion of the Irredentist Sculpture Group, four sculptures mounted in Freedom Square that were meant to symbolize regions of Hungary lost after Trianon. Named after the four directions, they trained one’s attention on the territories lost to Austria (west), Czechoslovakia (north), Romania (east) and what later became Yugoslavia (south). Veszprémi analyzes these sculptures and several other artifacts, such as a flag and postage stamps, as encapsulating the compression of national space and historical time that characterized the “mental framework that I call irredentist spacetime” (70), or intertwining space and time by crafting mythical histories to justify territorial claims. Chapter 3 expands the focus on history and landscape by discussing emerging ideas about cultural heritage and national identity. Woodcuts of ancient battles mark the contours of the Hungarian landscape; prints of castles and peasant houses marry the history of conquest to the idealized culture of rural life. Fieldwork by young ethnographers records local cultural traditions, accounts that are then marshalled to emphasize the moral superiority of peasant life over decadent urban living.

In Chapter 4, entitled “The Archive and the Ruin,” Veszprémi contrasts two sites actively constructed to preserve Hungarian history and foster greater understanding of the country’s past. The first was the refurbished building housing the national archive, festooned with historiographical murals worthy of a “national pantheon” (144). The second site was the Medieval Ruin Garden in Székesfehérvár, strewn with the remains of an archaeological excavation of Saint Stephen’s royal court from the tenth century, and flanked by a mausoleum housing the king’s sarcophagus. The final chapter analyzes the roles of school textbooks and public statuary in representing a particular lineage of historical heros as predecessors of Horthy’s conservative mandate. To complicate the picture, Veszprémi discusses woodcuts commissioned by the Communist Party to contest the regime’s historical narrative by depicting the peasant revolt in 1514 and its leader Dózsa as the legitimate forebearer of the nation’s populist spirit. Readers of Persistent Illusions are rewarded with a wealth of evidence woven into a beautiful tapestry of historical memory and cultural politics.