His Final Years

This chapter summarizes the last decade and a half of Zoltán László’s life. He and his family were living in eastern Hungary when the Red Army invaded in late 1944, whereupon László found well-paid and politically useful work as an interpreter for Soviet authorities. His knowledge of the Russian language was thus a crucial factor in his survival of the post-war purges. When the communists took control of the country, László made life bearable for himself by committing his memoirs to paper. His imagination allowed him to escape back to turn-of-the-century Vienna and reformulate his recollections of the idealized Austria-Hungary of his youth; he presented the lost Dual Monarchy as an empire of culture and a guarantor of European peace.