An Outlaw's Diary: Revolution

by Cecile Tormay

Here is no attempt to write the history of a revolution, nor is this the diary of a witness of political events. My desire is only that my book may give voice to those human phases which historians of the future will be unable to describe — simply because they are known only to those who have lived through them. It shall speak of those things which were unknown to the foreign inspirers of the revolution, because to them everything that was truly Hungarian was incomprehensible. May there survive in my book that which perishes with the honour of a most un fortunate generation of a people that has been sentenced to death. May those who come after us see what tortures our oppressed and humiliated race suffered silently during the year of its trial. May An Outlaw's Diary be the diary of our sufferings. When I wrote it my desire was to meet in its pages those who were my brethren in common pain; and through it 1 would remain in communion with them even to the time which neither they nor I will ever see — the coming of the new Hungarian spring.

Kindle Edition

Published October 24, 2017

About the author

Hungarian writer, intellectual, right-wing political activist, feminist, literary translator, and social theorist.

In 1919 she began expressing her political views, and opposed the Béla Kun regime. She published a book, An Outlaw's Diary, about the events of the 1918–1919 revolution, protesting against the subsequent communist government and regretting the division of Hungary.

She is known for two novels (People of the Rocks (Emberek a kövek között), 1911; The Old House (A Régi ház), 1914) and five short stories. She was nominated for Nobel Prize in Literature twice: in 1936 and in 1937.