Carpathian Rhapsody

Béla Illés was a Hungarian communist who pioneered socialist realism in Hungarian literature. He served in the Habsburg army during World War I and participated in the communist revolution following the war. When the revolutionary regime was crushed, he fled to Vienna and then Carpathian Ukraine before finding refuge once again in Vienna. He was expelled in 1923 and went to Moscow, where he worked in various positions in the cultural bureaucracy until he returned to Budapest with the Russian army in 1945.