"Love him or hate him, like or dislike what he did as Minister for Culture, but there was no denying it that he was a scholar with outstanding powers of analysis. When he joined the Gyurcsany government, I can hardly have been the only one who dared to hope that he might serve as an intellectual Trojan Horse among all the politicians and party bureaucrats.But he, too, turned into a politician, seeming to lose his powers of self-criticism as he settled into his gilded ministerial chair.
It would hardly be worth mentioning this so long after if the former minister hadn't published a long promoted book last week. Bozoki had been promising that he would write an analysis of the workings of the government once he was no longer in its midst. I was waiting for the book, since even if he still owes discretion to his former colleagues, he must still retain his academic integrity. I hoped - naively, it emerges - that he would cast light on the workings of the mechanism of which he was a part.
The book Bozoki sent us stands as a monument to his brief period as a minister. It contains documents and accounts starting with the parliamentary hearings before his appointment to the minister's long-term cultural strategy, which was never going to survive in the long run. There are interviews, portraits, ministerial speeches. It's a kind of Bozoki anthology, one which any outsider could have put together. The only exception is the chapter entitled Net Diary, where Bozoki writes some slightly more personal reflections. Sadly, this only accounts for 15 pages of a 536-page book.
Of course, it's nice to see part of your life work bound in an elegant volume. Why not? But the former minister received a grant from the National Cultural Foundation to publish this book - the Foundation whose reform was a key priority of Bozoki's term as minister. He promised, in fact, to put an end to the incestuousness of its funding decisions. As a minister, Bozoki promised that this kind of grant support would be far more effective in a modern world if it was not spent on supporting printing costs. He suggested that works could be published on the internet. Many of the writings in this volume can indeed be found on the internet - you only have to enter the minister's name.
It was a great opportunity. What a shame that we only got the politician back."
Source:
HVG
12.06.2007