Information regarding the Lukács Archive International Foundation. Please do not respond to this email as the email address is not monitored. Appropriate email addresses are at the bottom.
Budapest, 22nd of February
Regarding the declaration you received (or will receive) about an agreement between the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Lukács Archive International Foundation
Dear colleagues,
the declaration about a presumed agreement between the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Lukács Archive International Foundation stands to all appearances in a highly dubious relation to reality. Also and most importantly it shows that the position of the Academy is alarming. Alarming, indeed, since the Academy has decided today that all manuscripts are to be removed from the Archive on the 1st of March, 2018.
This declaration is not the comforting answer to the letters and petitions we all sent to the Academy. It is the same document the Appeal warns against, and it shows precisely what the protest movement has been condemning since 2016.
The declaration states that this new position of the Academy should be celebrated as being of one voice with Lukács’ testament. According to the declaration, then, the philosopher’s last will would be in terms with the Archive losing all its manuscripts, the unity of its collections (books and manuscripts) being disintegrated, and his flat losing all attraction for research and becoming a touristic site.
The total removal of the thousands of manuscripts from the Archive – even if it was for the honest purposes of cataloguing and digitization – would mean nothing else but years of unavailability for research. Furthermore, all the assurances about future accessibility seem to be nothing but mere promises: there is no saying of deadlines, procedures, techniques… these promises cannot be taken seriously since they come from the same Academy that publicly declared in May 2016 the total liquidation of the Lukács Archive.
The fact that, instead of all the things that the Archive has to offer to the international academic community, the flat of the philosopher will host an amusing exhibition is just the final proof of, on the one hand, the hypocrisy or the flippancy of this declaration, that pretends to stand as a real answer to our petition, and, on the other, of the incompetence of its author.
Given the current state of affairs, and in accordance to international guidelines for the preservation of cultural and intellectual heritage, it is crucial that the Archive remains intact, and that its integrity is safeguarded.
PLEASE SEND YOUR PROTEST EMAILS (SEE BELOW) TO ISTVÁN MONOK AND LÁSZLÓ LOVÁSZ. IF THEY ARE NOT STOPPED, THE ARCHIVE WILL DISSAPPEAR ON THE 1ST OF MARCH.
Yours faithfully,
Dr. Miklós Mesterházi (Former fellow researcher of the Lukács Archive) – Dr. Francisco García Chicote (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Dear Prof. László Lovász and Dr. István Monok,
I, Dr. X, am deeply worried about the news on the removal of the Lukács’ manuscripts from the Georg Lukács Archive. Since the existence of the Archive and the availability of the manuscripts are of importance to my research activities, I repeatedly ask you to answer the petition sent to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on January 24th, and immediately stop the removal, in the interests of research and free thinking.
