The Esterházy myth: how economics and literature correct mistakes

Scientists are occasionally confronted with having made a mistake knowingly or unknowingly. Once the flawed evidence is exposed, the scientific results get discredited, the study is formally withdrawn, and its policy application is discarded. Reputational damage depends on the motivation and circumstances of the mistake and how fast the disclosure is made. But mistakes can also happen in art, the land of imagination and emotion, when it comes to facts. This essay compares similarities and differences in the way artists and scientists find and then disclose false information. The focus is on the renowned Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy of the country’s most famous noble dynasty. He had to deal with the devastating discovery that his father Count Esterházy, whom he had idolised and celebrated in his earlier book as the model of stoic resistance to Hungary’s communist regime, had in fact been an informant of it for decades. Instead of making an immediate disclosure and withdrawing the book with the flawed evidence as a researcher would do, Péter Esterházy decided to hold on and write a sequel - titled “Corrected Edition” - that exposes the mistake, sets the historic record straight, and takes the reader through the moral and physical brutality and inhumanity that dictatorships instil in their people. In the end, another brilliant book is born and today we read the two books together: the first one as a masterful piece of linguistic art, and the second one also as a damning historic evidence of a brutal dictatorial regime.