Polanyi family history in English has so far focussed on the intellectual achievements and scholarly careers of the two eminent brothers, Karl and Michael, who achieved world reputations in their respective fields.¹ But in view of the fact that Karl's masterwork The Great Transformation has recently again been singled out, this time as one of "the hundred most influential books since the war,"² it is more than time to do justice to the woman to whom its author paid tribute in these unambiguous terms: "To my beloved wife Ilona Duczynska I dedicate this book which owes all to her help and criticism."³ Confirmation came in a letter from Michael Polanyi to his brother Karl, concerning "Ilona, whose share is scarcely less than yours." (March 30, 1944). A study of Duczynska's life and thought is long overdue, in order to retrieve from the past the image of a remarkable woman, many of whose passionately held concerns are relevant today, both to account for Karl's admiration and gratitude, and to establish her place within a distinguished family whose horizons she must be credited with having widened.

The family backgrounds of Karl and Duczynska were dissimilar. He was born into an industrious and cultured bourgeois family; Duczynska came from impoverished nobility in which, on both her father's and her mother's side, there was nevertheless creative flair and professional achievement. She was born on March 11, 1897 in Maria Enzersdorf, Lower Austria and died on April 24, 1978, in the cottage which had been her most permanent home.⁴ Her father, grandly styled Alfred Justus Ritter von Duczynski, was descended from a noble Polish military family. His ancestors had emigrated to Austria, and, ironically enough, served in the army which helped to suppress the Hungarians in the 1848-49 War of Liberation. A self-educated minor railway functionary⁵--he was at heart an inventor. Design drawings for a powered navigable airship, on which he had collaborated with father, were viewed by the very young Duczynska when on display in the Vienna Museum of Technology, and may have inspired her later study of aeronautics and determination to get a pilot's licence. On her mother's side, among the gentry relatives there was poetic talent in the person of Duczynska's much loved cousin, Ferenc Békássy, who became a Cambridge student, friend of Rupert Brooke and John Maynard Keynes, and whose poems were published later in translation by Virginia Woolf.

What distinguishes Ilona Duczynska from most of the Polanyi family, into which she married when in her mid-twenties, will soon become apparent. The lives of Karl and Michael were essentially confined to the study and lecture hall. But she on three different occasions broke off her education--and consequently never earned a degree--to devote herself to causes that demanded action and collaboration with others. Hers would be a life less of the study than of conspiratorial upper rooms, the streets, even the Vienna woods.

A socialist while still at school, it was out of a sense of hopelessness and desperation engendered by the war that she for a while immersed herself in scientific studies. In 1916, at the age of eighteen, while attending the Technische Hochschule (the Poly) in Zürich--women being excluded from studying engineering in Budapest and Vienna--overwork and hunger resulting from poverty brought on the first of two bouts of TB within the space of two years. Previously, she had witnessed a street demonstration signalling the rebirth of the international socialist movement in favour of peace. After thinking through her situation, while convalescing from September 1916 to March 1917, she read of the outbreak of revolution in Russia. She made contacts with socialists in the Poly and in the city. She recalls how she had received a disapproving stare from Lenin himself (whom then, of course, she did not yet recognize) for her choice of reading matter in the Bibliothek für soziale Literatur in Zürich.

Duczynska abandoned her studies and acted as a courier to smuggle the Zimmerwald peace manifesto into Hungary. There she enrolled at the University in Budapest, joined the Galileo Circle, and became a close friend of the eminent scholarly anarchist-idealist theoretician Ervin Szabó. However, she was considered that the times called for action rather than theory. Convinced like so many others that Hungary should leave the war, she planned to assassinate the main advocate of the war policy, the Prime Minister István Tisza. She had previously owned a Browning pistol in Zürich; now she purloined another from the desk drawer of József Madzsar, a relative of Oscar Jászi, with whom she was staying. A short time before, the son of the Austrian socialist Victor Adler had shot the Austrian Prime Minister. But Duczynska was more influenced by her extensive background in Russian culture, in this instance by the Narodnaja Volja (The People's Will).⁶ However, her plan was forestalled by Tisza's resignation. Thereupon she formed a radical youth group for the purpose of propagandizing and distributing leaflets among workers in munition factories and even troops in the Budapest barracks in an attempt to persuade them to oppose the war effort. She was arrested, detained for several months (during which time her illness returned), was convicted of high treason, and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.

She was rescued from prison during the liberal revolution in Budapest, and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the later but equally short-lived 1919 communist Republic of Councils. She was sent back to Zürich, under the false identity of Marguerite Mercier, supposedly a French governess from Lyon, on a mission to consolidate press connections. She went underground in Zürich under yet another false name after the successful counter-revolution in Budapest. In April 1920 she travelled for twenty days, as a deaf-and-dumb cousin of a Russian family, on a Red Cross train from Basle carrying home Russian emigrés of the 1905 revolution.. In Moscow "in the full radiance of its heroic age,"⁷ as she would describe it towards the end of her life, she worked for a few months assisting Karl Radek with preparations for the 1920 Second World Congress of the Comintern in Petrograd. Thereafter she was sent back to Vienna on another mission--carrying a toothpaste tube filled with diamonds intended to subsidize the Hungarian Communist Party whose leaders were in emigration. Her instructions were to give the stones to György Lukács who, as the son of a banker, was deemed more financially responsible, by the Soviet comrades, than Béla Kun head of the former government.

Within a few months she met Karl Polanyi, who following his breakdown and hospitalization towards the end of the war, was convalescing in a hostel for Hungarian refugees in Mödling. They married on February 25, 1923. By then Duczynska had been expelled from the Hungarian Party, on account of an article she wrote that was critical of the authoritarian basis of the party.⁸ Thereafter she contributed to other left-wing journals, and was editor of Der Linke Sozialdemokrat from 1927 to 1929. She resumed her studies, this time at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, during the period 1930-34. It was here that she met a group of younger Hungarian students; together they organized a short-lived clandestine radio station, an account of which has been written by Barbara Striker, one of three young women involved.

Karl Polanyi left Vienna for England in 1933, and their daughter Kari followed one year later. Duczynska was now embarked upon her longest period of continuous political activity which included being editor of Der Sprecher, the newspaper of the autonomous communist movement of the Austrian Workers defence formations, the Schutzbund, from 1934 to 1936. These were the heroic years of working-class opposition to fascism. Thereafter Duczynska joined Karl in England where, soon after, to her surprise, she was informed that she had been expelled from the Austrian Communist Party. She obtained work as a school teacher, but subsequently secured employment in positions in which she could utilize her mathematical background, before joining Karl in the very different environment of Bennington College, Vermont, USA in September 1941. She lectured in physics with considerable success until January 1943, while also providing what Karl acknowledged as indispensable assistance during the writing of The Great Transformation. It was at this time that she learned to fly, at Troy Municipal Airport (New York State), and she worked in the Department of Aeronautics at the nearby Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she was offered a position for the duration of the war. In the summer of 1943 she wrote there the examination for the Associate Fellowship of the Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (to which she was elected in early 1947). By then she felt that she must contribute to the war effort and leave to volunteer for appropriate work in England; accordingly, Karl resigned his post in order to accompany her. It was wholly in character that in letters written when Duczynska had previously been alone near London during the blitz, or when they were both crossing the ocean at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, there is no word of apprehension.

In England she obtained positions with the Miles Aircraft Company, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and finally--for an eight month period, which she remembered as one of the happiest of her life--with a team of brilliant eccentrics in the Aerodynamics Department of the legendary Royal Aircraft Establishment (Farnborough, Hampshire), where her duties included research and translating German texts on jet propulsion.⁹ It was at this time that she and Karl became associated in London with a group of Hungarians around Count Mihály Károlyi (who in 1918 had been President of the liberal first Republic of Hungary); these formed a potential administration ready to return to their country after the war. However, the plans came to nothing. Duczynska's political activities now consisted of writing articles for several newspapers and journals.¹⁰ For a time it seemed that a new career might open up for her when she joined the staff of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. But she resigned in mid-1947, her intention being to follow Karl to the USA where he had been made Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Then came the blow. Both of them were shocked to find that under the provisions of the McCarran Act Duczynska was denied an entry visa "for all time" due to her communist past.

It was this set-back that brought Duczynska to the more open society of Canada. She rented a room in Toronto, because it was the city to which Karl could most easily commute every few weeks. However, the uncertainty and separation of wartime, and now of the postwar period, imposed a strain on their personal life. Duczynska chafed at unaccustomed idleness in distinctly uncongenial surroundings, and her thoughts turned increasingly to Hungary. Indeed, both Karl and Duczynska as well as their daughter Kari, had entertained thoughts of going to live in Hungary; Karl even received an invitation from the Péter Pázmán University (soon to be renamed) in Budapest. Not surprisingly, in view of her initial involvement in Hungarian political life, Duczynska was intensely interested in the social achievements of the new regime in Hungary. For background she read what she could find in the Toronto Public Library on the Hungarian Populist movement and its writers, particularly their associations with the peasantry, to which she had been introduced by Endre Havas--whose memory she always honoured--in London during the latter part of the war. Accordingly, in 1948 she returned to Hungary to study the epoch-making land reform which had resulted in the transformation of the countryside. She travelled from village to village, including some on estates where she had resided as a girl. She subsequently compiled a manuscript, "Hungary: An Essay in Land Tenure and Nationhood." However, all she ever published were two articles. This was because she was deeply disturbed by the first signs of totalitarianism which she would have been obliged to criticize in a more comprehensive study. This she felt reluctant to do in the context of the Cold War. So she took the plunge and emigrated to Canada in 1950, a step she viewed with grave misgivings.

Karl's professional career, despite serious discontinuities, culminated in scholarly acclaim, like that of his brother Michael; Duczynska's was interrupted, and finally abandoned shortly after coming to Canada. The brothers' studies easily adapted to emigration and led to new careers in teaching; but for Duczynska the change came as a profound shock, bringing for a time a stifling sense of isolation. She obtained minor posts in Physics and Aeronautics at the University of Toronto, but resigned out of apprehension lest projects she was engaged upon have application for weapons development at a period when it seemed that the Cold War had a chance of winding down. She wrote articles on a variety of topics for a communist Hungarian paper published in Toronto.¹¹ But for the most part she had little choice but to devote herself to essentially practical tasks: making fully habitable the tiny cottage perched on the crest of a steep river bank,¹² and assisting Karl in his research and correspondence with typing, helping to prepare manuscripts, and obtaining books from the University of Toronto Library.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the suspense of the months leading up to it, had the effect of spiritually repatriating Karl and Duczynska to their homeland. It also united them intellectually and emotionally as perhaps never before, and caused them to embark with great enthusiasm on their one and only shared project, the English-language anthology The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary 1930-1956.¹³ For a while influential right-wing Hungarian emigrés in London successfully impeded its acceptance by publishers, until finally it appeared in 1963 in London and Toronto. It contained a Foreword by the leading English poet W.H. Auden with whom Duczynska would later consult when preparing a volume of poetry in 1970. The Anthology was unique in that it presented only those Hungarian writers--and they happened to be the most eminent--who had refused to leave their country. Especially original, given the revived cold war atmosphere, was the thesis--for which Duczynska assumed responsibility--that it was the indigenous Hungarian Populist tradition (to some extent taken over by the Communists) that had inspired a revisionist revolutionary movement committed to a socialism free from Russian domination, one representing a "Third Way" between the existing ideological polarities and power blocs.

This emphasis on independence from both blocs was represented in Karl Polanyi's final undertaking, the founding of the journal Co-existence,¹⁴ the early issues of which were published from Pickering, page-proofs of the first being delivered on the day of his funeral. World-famous scholars, friends and colleagues old and new were involved in the ambitious project which Duczynska together with Kari Polanyi-Levitt endeavoured to keep independently alive for two more years, before being persuaded to entrust it, not without profound apprehension--as events proved, fully justified--to Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press.

Thereafter Duczynska lived a life of extraordinary activity, dedicated partly to overseeing her husband's literary legacy, partly to implementing new projects of her own, dividing her time between Canada, Vienna, and Budapest. Canada meant for her the Montreal home of her daughter and two grandsons, though she cared for the latter in Vienna for one whole year, introducing them to European educational and cultural life. But it also meant her beloved cottage near Toronto, surrounded by trees, with a lake on one side, a river on the other. It was a retreat where she was able to work in relative peace, though one to which the world beat a path in the volume of mail brought by the post office Jeep which drew up daily at the edge of her precipitous, and often snowed-in, driveway. It was to this retreat that she brought back from Europe the materials--and in novelists in particular--testify to her inspiration, resolve, tolerance even. She demanded and was granted audience at official levels, more than once by the Minister of Culture György Aczél, former cell-mate in Spain of Robert Graves (according to Graves), on behalf of dissidents and in the name of reforms to achieve a socialism with a human face. An image is still invoked in Budapest, as if from some Arthurian legend of the Three Queens, of the widows of three great men--Ilona Duzynska, Júlia Rajk.

NOTES

1. Karl Polanyi was professor of economics at Columbia University. His younger brother Michael was professor of chemistry at Manchester University; thereafter he was professor of philosophy at Manshester, and this was followed by an appointment at Oxford. Michael's son John is professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto, and is co-recipient of the Nobel Prize. Kari Polanyi-Levitt was professor of Economics at McGill Univesity and visiting professor at the University of the West Indies.

2. The Times literary Supplement, October 6, 1995.

3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart, 1944, p.v. A quarter of a century later, one of Karl's former students, George Dalton, dedicated to Ilona his collection Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies. Essays of Karl Polanyi, edited by George Dalton. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968.

4. She died fourteen years after Karl (the anniversary of whose death is April 23rd).

5. Karl's father had been a railway builder, but had gone bankrupt.

6. Ilona Duczynska, "A cselekvés boldogtalan szerelmese" (The Unhappy Lover of Action). Reference incomplete.

7. "Beszélgetés Duczynska Ilonával" (Conversation with Ilona Duczynska), Valóság (Reality), 74, 7, 1974, 50-60; page 56.

8. Ilona Duczynska, "Zum Zerfall der K.P.U." (Notes on the Disintegration of the Communist Party of Hungary), Unser Weg (Our Way), Berlin, March 1922.

9. For example, Concerning the Light Path in a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer. From the German (1941). Mimeograph. Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, Hants., Janaury 1946.

10. Among others, see Ilona Polanyi, "The Hungarian Revolution," The London Quarterly of World Affairs, January 1946.

11. There is even one Canadian article: Ilona Duczynska, "A prérik szabadságharca" (The Prairies' Fight for Freedom. Outline of the Lives of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont). Kanadai magyar naptár (Canadian Hungarian Almanach). Toronto, 1954.

12. The address of which became affectionately known as "Skunk's Hollow," Rosebank, Pickering, Ontario.

13. The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary 1930-1956, edited by Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi. London: Peter Owen; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963.

14. Co-existence. A Journal for the comparative study of economics, sociology and politics in a changing world. No.1, April 1964. Publisher: Co-existence, Box 429, Pickering, Ontario, Canada. Editor: Rudolf Schlesinger, Glascow University, with an Editorial Board of twelve scholars of international repute.

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Karl Polanyi in Vienna

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