During the establishment of the Kádár era of state socialist Hungary and the emergence of a Hungarian ideological aesthetic that essentially internalized the Soviet cultural model—that is, in the years after the 1956 revolution—retaliation was the general tool of power. On 4 November 1956, Soviet troops marched into Hungary; by January 1957 fighting had ceased in the country, and the tabooing of revolutionary events began immediately. It would be a hopeless undertaking to detect, or even to look for, a moment of resistance in the acts of everyday communication, but an analysis of the cultural context of even a single theatrical performance reveals the human attention (and pain) present in civil situations. The tragedy of Antigone is a personal experience lived over decades because Sophocles’ text carries the story of the communist martyr minister László Rajk, executed in 1949, and the story of the prime minister Imre Nagy, executed two years after the 1956 revolution, both buried secretly and hastily, only in the technical sense, without any ritual. The reburial of the dead of the previous eras played a decisive role in both of the two major political upheavals of the post-war decades in Hungary. But nothing can explain how Jean Anouilh’s drama Antigone could have been performed at all in January 1957.