Inside and Outside the Camp: The Art of the Szilágyi Sisters in the Soviet Union

This paper recounts how two Hungarian migrant women, Jolán Szilágyi (1895–1971) and Ilona Szilágyi (1904–1985) produced art in the Soviet Union during the violence of the Great Purges and World War II. Both Szilágyi sisters were committed Bolshevik revolutionaries who for decades lived, studied, and worked in the Soviet Union as political migrants seeking refuge from the increasingly fascist politics of Europe and their homeland. Yet, their stories and art practices inevitably got entangled in the violence of the Soviet system in the late 1930s and 1940s. Arrested in 1937 as the wife of an “enemy of the nation,” Ilona Szilágyi spent eight years in the forced labor camps of Western Siberia, documenting her fellow female inmates in over a hundred-and-thirty stirring watercolor and pencil portraits. At the same time, as the German invasion of the Soviet Union advanced, her older sister, Jolán Szilágyi was evacuated from Moscow and dispatched to a small village on the outskirts of Frunze, the capital of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia. Devoid of social networks, work equipments, and even essential household items, Jolán Szilágyi tried to make a living by producing war propaganda posters on state commissions. Paying close attention to extant portraits and propaganda posters and the peculiar working conditions in which the Szilágyi sisters produced them between c. 1939 and 1945, this paper studies the struggles that Jolán and Ilona Szilágyi faced in the Soviet Union as migrant and women artists during the years of World War II.