The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 As Seen Through the Collaborative Illustrated Diaries of Two Preadolescent Boys

In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolution.