Writing for the ages

Writing for the ages Prose & Poetry from 20 th Century Hungary

A publication of the Hungarian Books and Translations Office - PIM, 2014

Intro d u ct io n When Hungarian copyright law was brought into line with European Union regulations, the period of copyright protection was extended from fifty to seventy years. This has affected the work of many of the finest Hungarian writers of the twentieth century. This volume introduces twenty-two of these authors, some still widely read, others waiting to be rediscovered—writers representing a vast range of styles and themes.

Miklós Bánffy, Lajos Zilahy and Zsolt Harsányi wrote popular novels of epic proportions with passionate love affairs set against the turbulent background of Hungary’s history. The novels of Zsigmond Móricz and László Németh revived Hungarian fiction by introducing new themes and became landmarks of the new realism. Several writers defy categorization: Gyula Krúdy, the master of dreams; Sándor Márai, obsessed with the disintegration of his social class; and Milán Füst, an outstanding poet and a writer of wise and bitter prose.

The finest woman writer of the early-twentieth century, Margit Kaffka, represents the ‘ new woman ’ and has served as a point of reference for many distinguished contemporary writers. Frigyes Karinthy and Antal Szerb chronicle sombre individual fates with an all-encompassing and compassionate sense of humour, while Áron Tamási and Ferenc Móra remain ever-popular writers of tales and fables for both young and old.

Two of Hungary’s greatest poets are also included: the heroic Miklós Radnóti and the tragic Attila József, as well as two powerful poets less internationally known but well worth discovering: the reflective realist Lőrinc Szabó, a poet of eternal restlessness and revolt; and Jenő Dsida, a divine poet of subtle, musical rhythms. Last but not least, the volume discusses two classical Hungarian poets who were also outstanding novelists: Mihály Babits and Dezső Kosztolányi.

Together, these outstanding poets and writers provide a lively picture of Hungarian literature between the two world wars and just after, and stand as proof that although the Hungarian language is isolated, those who wrote in it contributed, each in his or her own way, to the body of Western literature as a whole.

Prose & Poetry from Early-20 th-Century Hungary

Mihály Babits 1883 › born in Szekszárd, in southern Hungary 1901–1905 › University of Budapest: Latin and Hungarian literature 1906–1916 › qualifies as teacher; posts in Szeged, Fogaras (today Fogaras, Romania), and Budapest 1906 › first poems published; begins contributing to Nyugat, the leading literary journal of the day 1918 › becomes editor of Nyugat 1919 › appointed university professor 1930 › appointed member of the prestigious Kisfaludy Society dedicated to the preservation and renewal of Hungarian poetry 1931 › appointed Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour along with Béla Bartók 1937 › diagnosed with cancer of the larynx 1937–38 › collected works published in ten volumes 1940 › awarded Italy’s San Remo Prize for the best translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1941 › dies in Budapest

A poet, novelist, critic and translator, Mihály Babits was one of the leading figures of Hungarian literature between the two world wars. His impact on Hungarian literature can be compared only to that of Rilke, Valéry, Eliot and Mann in their respective countries.

Babits’s first volume of poetry, Levelek Írisz koszorújából (Leaves from Iris’s Wreath, 1909), shows superb craftsmanship and owes much to the classics. In these poems intellectual discipline combines with a barely suppressed dramatic tension as the poet seeks a way out of the prison of subjectivity. His second volume, Herceg, hátha megjön a tél is! (Prince, What if Winter Comes?, 1911), includes what is perhaps his finest philosophical poem, ‘Question at Night’, on the cosmic futility of self-regenerating existence. The volume A nyugtalanság völgye (The Valley of Unrest, 1920) is an emotional plea for reason and faith in violent times, showing profound respect for human dignity and an aversion to violence in political thought.

The year 1920 was especially difficult for Babits, as he witnessed political persecution that left its mark on his development as a poet and thinker. But in the mature poems of Az istenek halnak, az ember él (The Gods Die, Man Lives, 1929) and Versenyt az esztendőkkel (Racing with the Years, 1933), he abandoned his despair and disillusionment and came to terms with his ‘ivory

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tower’; he began to treasure life for what it is and began to yield to deepening religious feelings.

His last volume of poetry, Jónás könyve (The Book of Jonah, 1939), has a postscript revealing the autobiographical inspiration for the figure of the rebellious prophet on whose biblical story the poem is based.

Babits was also an acclaimed novelist. His analytical intelligence, coupled with an acute sensibility and the gift for always choosing the right word, are beautifully evident in A gólyakalifa (The Nightmare, 1916), which is Freudian in inspiration, and Tímár Virgil fia (The Son of Virgil Tímár, 1922), usually regarded as his best novel, which displays the economy of style and acute psychological observation so characteristic of his writings and poetry. (Tímár Virgil fia recounts the story of a fatherless boy and his teacher, who assumes the role of his father.)

Kártyavár (House of Cards, 1923) is a satire, while Halálfiai (The Sons of Death, 1927) is a novel with autobiographical elements, portraying the decay of the traditional Hungarian middle class.

Elza pilóta vagy a tökéletes társadalom (Pilot Elza, or the Perfect Society, 1933) offers a dystopian vision of the future. Its thesis is summed up in one of Babits’s essays: ‘It may well happen that the proud human race will be a quick and sorry victim of an apocalyptic collective suicide, the arms for which are already being manufactured in the factories of the military industry’.

Babits’s scholarly publications include the renowned Az európai irodalom története (A History of European Literature, 1934), a by-product of his interest in foreign literature. His Keresztül-kasul az életemen (My Life, Through and Through, 1939) contains essays and memoirs.

‘Si n ce t he em erg en ce o f H u n g a r i a n l itera t u re B a b its ha s b een o u r m o s t E u ro pea n po e t, t he o n e w it h t he g rea te s t b rea d t h o f pers pect i ve . ’

Gyula Illyés, Hungarian poet & novelist (1902–1983)

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Gólyakalifa – The Nightmare An example of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century psychological novel, Gólyakalifa (The Nightmare, 1916)—which translates literally as The Stork Caliph—displays Babits’s fascination with the subconscious and the theme of multiple personalities. The narratorprotagonist, Elemér Tábory, leads a second life in his dreams. The son of an eminent lawyer and a diligent student eager to be on his best behaviour, he is continually frustrated by the nagging feeling that the whole world is watching his every step. When the streetlights shine through the shutters at night, he imagines that Santa Claus is watching to see if he is behaving himself. He feels caught out by obscure noises from the dumbwaiter and thinks something terrible is lurking in there, some shameful, unmentionable secret.

The story begins at a May Day picnic, when Elemér meets an engineer who has returned from the United States and who, he imagines, was his boss in another world. That night Elemér has a recurrent dream in which he—a dull, malevolent, bitter and awkward lad at the bottom of the social heap, constantly taunted and laughed at by others—is apprenticed to a carpenter.

One day he badly injures his boss’s three-year-old son and has to flee to the capital. In the dream, which is as real for him as his waking life, he faintly recalls all the manners and decencies of ‘another life’. Back in the real world, he recognises people from the dream, but when he takes an interest in dreams and begins to read about them, he is no longer able to recall his own—that is, until he meets Etelka, with whom he falls in love. By this time, however, the dream-self has become a clerk by stealing another’s identity and commits a white-collar crime. Both selves share the guilt.

This novel’s vision and techniques owe a great deal to Babits’s interest in modern psychology. The plot is constructed with such intricacy that even the occasional napping of one self corresponds to the sudden awakening of the other. Consequently, any difficulty in the life of one self triggers difficulties in the life of the other. The two selves come closest to merging when Elemér starts travelling and gambling, and trying to find the clerk. His own world begins to disintegrate. He becomes involved with a woman who is the alter ego of a dream bartender. His family comes to the rescue, but just as his life seems to be sorted out and he proposes to Etelka, the clerk reveals his secret crime to a policeman, making him want to die. In a frenzy he kills a girl from the bar who, in his wakeful life, reminds him of Etelka. When he wakes up as Elemér, he relates the whole story to Etelka, who suggests killing the clerk by sheer willpower. Elemér does so, but the following day he is found shot dead, with no trace of the weapon.

With this mysterious ending Babits, who was fond of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, remains true to the genre. Although Freud’s influence is undeniable, Babits creates something far richer in this work than a mere case history illustrating a basic tenet of classical psychoanalysis.

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Miklós Bánffy 1873 › born in Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) into the Transylvanian aristocracy 1900–06 › elected MP several times 1906–09 › Lord-Lieutenant of Kolozs County and co-editor of the conservative journal Erdélyi Lapok 1912 › intendant of the Hungarian Opera House and the National Theatre, where he was instrumental in staging the works of Béla Bartók 1921–22 › Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs 1926 › returns to Transylvania, becomes editor in chief of the liberal journal Erdélyi Helikon 1939–40 › founder and president of the Hungarian People’s Front dedicated to the promotion of Hungarian culture and financial life in Transylvania 1943 › sent to Bucharest on a secret mission to contact antiHitler forces 1950 › dies in Budapest

Count Miklós Bánffy was a rich Transylvanian aristocrat, an excellent storyteller and a clearsighted intellectual. He was both a versatile writer, experimenting in a number of literary genres, and an artist with notable achievements in graphic art and painting. His love of life and his profound interest in character, landscape, history, politics and culture are the essence of his novels; he wrote from very heart of the world he portrayed, a world enchanted and exciting— and irretrievably lost.

His first published work was Naplegenda (Legend of the Sun, 1906), a mythical drama much admired by the great Hungarian poet Endre Ady. His next drama, Nagyúr (Great Lord, 1913) takes its theme from history: it is about Attila the Hun. In Maskara (Mascarade, 1926), a sharply satirical comedy, Bánffy experiments with form. The short story collections Haldokló oroszlán (The Dying Lion, 1914) and Farkasok (Wolves, 1942) evoke the world of the Transylvanian mountains with dramatic vividness. ‘Clear-sighted, cool and ruthless, he is one of our most masculine writers’, remarked the writer István Örley. Bánffy recounts the earlier part of his fascinating life in Emlékeimből (From My Memories, 1932).

It is, however, for his novels that Bánffy will be best remembered. Reggeltől estig (From Morning till Night, 1928) displays both dramatic composition and tableaux, which reveal his 9

obvious interest in character, landscape and history. His celebrated Transylvanian Trilogy (1934– 40) is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. It is launched by Megszámláltattál (They Were Counted), És híjjával találtattál (They Were Found Wanting), and ends with Darabokra szaggattatol (They Were Divided). The trilogy is still widely read for its historical insight, psychological accuracy and bravura storytelling reminiscent of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.

Megszámláltattál — They Were Counted The first part of Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy is, in the words of Patrick Thursfield, its cotranslator, ‘a remarkable work, compulsive and romantic, filled with love and sorrow and bewilderment and sex and action and splendid set-pieces of grand shooting parties, balls in country-houses, gambling for vertiginous stakes, and dramatic scenes in Parliament; as well as benign social comment, which can erupt into indignant condemnation of social folly.’

They Were Counted launches the trilogy and introduces us to a decadent, frivolous and corrupt society unwittingly bent on its own destruction. It recounts the parallel tale of two cousins, Count Bálint Abády and Count László Gyerőffy. Count Gyerőffy has just come of age and, at last free of his guardian, gives up his studies of the law and enters the Academy of Music to train as a professional musician. An outgoing young man, László soon takes to the gambling table, and the social success he secures through his newly acquired reputation as a tough gambler soon leads him down the slippery slope to financial and social ruin.

After years in the diplomatic service, Count Bálint Abády returns to Transylvania and takes up a political career as a Member of Parliament, although he well knows the difficulties of governing nations and regions with a mixed ethnic population. He is a committed modernizer and is acutely aware of his responsibilities to the people on his large estates. Still unmarried, he soon discovers that his childhood friend, the dazzlingly beautiful Adrienne Milóthy, is tragically locked into a loveless marriage to the boorish Pál Uzdy.

Their old friendship gradually turns into passionate love, but such an affair is daring and fraught with danger. Although Pál Uzdy suspects that his wife has a lover, he remains on cordial terms with Count Abády; there is no doubt, however, that he, a great hunter and a keen shot, would not hesitate to kill the lovers if he so chose. Divorce is out of the question, so Adrienne and Bálint’s love remains painful to them and scandalous to the world outside. Burdened by guilt, they try to turn their love back into friendship. In their encounters they desperately try to keep sexuality at bay, but can hardly curb their burning desire.

Meanwhile another scandalous affair develops between Judith, Adrienne’s sister, and a young confidence trickster, who seduces the girl and persuades her to elope with him, but abandons her as soon as it emerges that he cannot get his hands on her money. After this tragic 10

affair, Adrienne decides to take her unhappy sister to Venice to help her forget, but even in that city of unsurpassed beauty she finds it difficult to keep her sister from thoughts of suicide.

Bálint follows Adrienne to Venice, and in the absence of her husband, the two lovers are finally united. They both know that their love is doomed and must end soon, and that they will have to go on living without each other. ‘Maybe I can manage, even if we never see each other again,’ Adrienne keeps telling herself in their tumult of pain and desire. At the end of the novel, the story is left hanging in mid-air, leaving the reader profoundly moved and wondering about the future.

In his review of the English translation in the Times Literary Supplement, Hugh Macpherson concluded that ‘the main success of the novel is . . . in the private aspects of personality, in the varied ways of living of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the machinations of the public world of ambition and political manoeuvre. The force of Bánffy’s enthusiasm for all these things produces an effect rather like that of the best Trollope novels – but coming from a past world that now seems excitingly exotic, and from a writer who knew far more about real politics, and perhaps more about sex too.’

‘ B á n f f y i s a b o rn s to r y- tel l er. There a re pl o ts, i n t r i g u e s, a m u rd er, po l it i ca l i m b ro g l i o s a n d pa ss i o n a te l o ve a f f a i rs. [. . .]

The pre ju d i ce s a n d t he fo l l i e s o f h i s cha ra cters a re a rra n g ed i n pro per pers pect i ve a n d o n ly ha l f - cen so r i o u sly , fo r h u m o u r a n d a sen se o f t he a b s u rd co m e to t he re sc u e . H i s pa t r i o t i c f eel i n g s a re to ta l ly f ree o f cha u v i n i s m , ju s t a s h i s i n s t i n ct i ve pro m pt i n g s o f t r i b a l re s po n s i b i l it y ha ve n o t a t ra ce o f va n it y. ’

Patrick Leigh Fermor, British author and scholar (1915–2011)

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G éz a C sáth 1887 › born in Szabadka (Subotica, Serbia) 1902–1904 › receives school prizes for his essays on literature 1903 › contributes music reviews to Bácskai Hírlap 1904 › after an unsuccessful entrance exam to the Academy of Music, enrols in the Medical School of Budapest 1908 › begins contributing to Nyugat; first collection of short stories published 1909 › works as a medical assistant in the Moravcsik Institute of Psychiatry, Budapest 1909–1912 › music critics for various journals 1910 › first experiments with morphine to study its effect on the brain 1913 › becomes addicted to morphine; marries Olga Jónás; works as a physician in a spa at Palics in today’s Serbia 1914 › joins the army as a physician and is taken to the Eastern front 1917 › exempted from military service; works as a village doctor 1919 › treated for morphine-induced paranoia; escapes from hospital 1919 › shoots and kills his wife, later commits suicide

As both a doctor and a writer, Géza Csáth was interested, above all, in describing the workings of the human psyche. He gradually abandoned the parables and decadent symbolism of his first stories, which appeared in A varázsló kertje (The Magician’s Garden, 1908), for more accurate observations and the combined use of allegory and anecdote. The stories are now lyrical, now objective; the narrator is sometimes part of the story, at other times not. Non-neurotic characters who are healthy and both mentally and physically strong can find ways to cope with the broken harmony that is at the core of each story—the others go crazy or die. Dreams, mystical tales and childhood fantasies evoke a world very different from everyday life. (In his own works, writer and poet Dezső Kosztolányi, Csáth’s cousin, explored the idea of a parallel childhood world.)

Csáth’s second book or, rather, booklet, Az albíróék és egyéb elbeszélések (The Magistrate and Other Stories, 1909), contains but five short stories, two of them previously published, all of them simple and efficient. In the three new works, a son goes to the clinic to take home and bury his father’s anatomically prepared skeleton; a young wife is kissed by the family doctor and her 12

simple-minded husband writes a declaration in the newspaper to end the gossip; and a student writes a letter about the story of his pocket knife. These are the writings of a medical doctor— ironic, sharp and provoking a sad smile.

Délutáni álom (Dream in the Afternoon, 1911), one of the most popular of Csáth’s story collections, was followed by Schmidt mézeskalácsos (Schmidt the Honey-cake Maker, 1912).

The title story that opens the collection is a parable about fiction itself: the narrator makes up a medieval story just to amuse his lady partner. This story ends with a tragedy, the death of Schmidt, but the other stories, although they could also end in the same manner, have more or less happy endings because the characters all accept some kind of consolation, giving up their desires.

In the story collection Muzsikusok (Musicians, 1913), Csáth intended to create a new literary form in Hungarian, the analytical story. Of the six writings included, the first three are objective, near-medical analyses of character.

Csáth’s dramatic works, Hamvazószerda (Ash Wednesday, 1911) and Janika, have provoked admiration as well as fierce criticism. The former is an experimental piece for the theatre that Csáth termed a ‘marionette play’. He described it as ‘a lyrical presentation of a single feeling, together with all connecting images, memories and thoughts. I wrote melodramatic music to accompany it, mingling music and staging to increase the symbolical effect of the action. [...] It is a poeticised presentation of the neurasthenic feeling that haunts the roisterers and dissipated people as their fate.’

Csáth’s oeuvre includes a number of interesting works that fall outside the bounds of literature proper. Although Az elmebetegségek psychikus mechanizmusa (The Psychic Mechanism of Mental Illness, 1911) is, strictly speaking, a clinical analysis rather than a literary work, it is worth mentioning for several reasons. When Csáth, the physician, became acquainted with Freud’s views, he was tempted to develop his own theory of neurosis. On close examination of a patient, the paranoid Miss G. A., Csáth gives a minute analysis of the causes of her situation. As the woman in question was a devoted writer herself (writing long treatises about the mysterious Power she felt she had been exposed to), Csáth must have been especially interested in her case, because he was curious to learn what motivates the desire to write.

Csáth was also a fine painter and an excellent violin player. As a music critic he was among the first to praise the works of Bartók and Kodály. His writings on music were collected in Zeneszerző portrék (Composer Portraits, 1911), a collection of essays that formed the culmination of his career as a music critic.

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Délutáni álom – Dream in the Afternoon Csáth dedicated Dream in the Afternoon, a collection of twelve short stories written between 1907 and 1911, to his colleagues and friends. Some of the stories are told by a single narrator (often resembling Csáth himself) in the manner of a tragi-comical anecdote. This narrator is a medical doctor or a child or youngster called Józsi. (Csáth’s original name was József Brenner.)

The stories are analytical descriptions of the workings of the human soul: sometimes cruel, sometimes dreamy, sometimes crazy, sometimes banal.

The title story is emphatically placed at the beginning. It describes the narrator’s dream, dreamt in an interval of only fifteen minutes (showing how much real and fictitious time differ). The dream is about a mute countess who inhabits a fantasy land evoking the Arabian Nights. She is pale and beautiful but unable to cry and therefore, unable to love. The narrator falls in love with this doomed woman, whose suffering stems from a curse—a curse she can be saved from only by having a child who is to die; for then she will surely cry. She and the narrator marry but are unhappy until their saviour is born and dies. They bury the child, the countess’s tears flow freely and they seem to be saved.

The other stories in Dream in the Afternoon are also concerned with the belief that only dreams and childhood recollections can save us from dull reality, together with drugs (see the story ‘Opium’), as all of these manipulate time and create parallel worlds.

The collection’s second story, ‘Anyagyilkosság’ (Matricide), is Csáth’s most famous text (later adapted for the screen by Hungarian director János Szász). This story’s thesis is that sex and cruelty may motivate even seemingly innocent play, and the unsettling conclusion is that anything worthy of excitement is connected with pain and blood. The story is about two half-orphaned brothers, still schoolboys, whose unbridled instinct drives them to play with pain and vivisect animals. When their unripened sexual drives lead them to visit a prostitute, they discover the thrilling pleasure of torturing her; in return, the young woman asks them to bring her a present. The brothers try to rob their mother of her jewellery, which she keeps in her bedroom, and when she wakes up, they murder her in cold blood, go to sleep, and early next morning hurry off with their booty to the prostitute so they won’t be late for school, leaving the cleaning lady to discover their mother’s body.

The remaining stories are about childhood (‘Józsika’, ‘Nagy Balázs - Kis Balázs’ – Big Balázs - Little Balázs) and the fantasy world of children; average, naïve women who are ridiculous in their banal tragedies (‘Johanna’); seduction (‘Pista’); and the meticulous and wonderful description of a Budapest square seen through a child’s eyes (‘A Kálvin téren’ – On Calvin Square).

The last story (‘Hegyszoros’ - Mountain Pass) repeats the opening motif and relates a tale about life and death and the impossibility of redemption.

The collection as a whole may be read as a continuous story about one person narrated in the style of a Freudian doctor, an objective observer who still thirsts for wonders.

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Jen o“ D sid a 1907 › born in Szatmárnémeti (today Satu Mare, Romania) 1925 › studies law in Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Romania) 1930 › graduates, begins to work for a solicitor 1928 › first book of poems published 1928 › employed by the literary periodical Erdélyi Helikon 1930–34 › works for various literary journals 1933 › general secretary of the Transylvanian PEN Club 1938 › dies in Kolozsvár; third and last volume of poetry is published posthumously

Jenő Dsida was a poet of existential uncertainty as well as of unbounded bliss and joy. A disciple of the great Hungarian stylist Dezső Kosztolányi, his mastery of rhythm and wording make the reader respond to the melody of his lines. Dsida insisted that poetry is pure art, and his earliest verse shows an astonishing mastery of technique put to the service of creating intensely personal moments. Aware of his bad heart from an early age, Dsida saw the transcendental as more personal than conceptual. His constant anguish is expressed in the frequent use of fog as a metaphor.

Dsida’s first volume of poetry, Leselkedő magány (Lurking Solitude, 1928), echoes the unshackled rhythms of expressionism, while his experimentation reveals the influence of the late Trakl, Rilke and the Symbolists. Weltschmertz pervades his early work with recurring images of an empty house, a cemetery, a forest in autumn—everything is transient, himself above all, an ailing man who pays a heavy price for fleeting moments of ecstasy. In Nagycsütörtök (Maundy Thursday, 1933) he builds a bucolic shelter for his contemplative musings. His poetry here approaches impressionism. Even death is perceived as a gentle sleep, a sort of peace. But in the later poems the more dissonant world of dreams proves such idylls illusory, and the poet escapes to the world of messianism, often by paraphrasing a legend.

Dsida identifies with the risen Christ, yet he cannot resolve the tension between his humanistic notion of the redemption of mankind and a feeling of inertia, and so a tragic doubt 15

undermines his messianism. At the same time his attitude towards society is humane, objective and responsible; he is exhilarated and uplifted by city life and despite intimations of an early death, celebrates every living organism with exuberant joy. The posthumously published Angyalok citeráján (On the Zither of Angels, 1938) includes religious poems in which, surprisingly, Dsida moves towards realism and a Villonesque fraternisation with God and Death.

Dsida’s last poems are haunted more than ever by the nagging awareness of impending death, whose horrors are assuaged only by religious devotion—which, however, is not conceived of within the rigid framework of the Catholic Church, but is conceived of as the humble devotion of the wretched.

Maundy Thursday No connection. The train would be six hours late, it was announced, and that Maundy Thursday I sat for six hours in the airless dark of the waiting room of Kocsárd’s tiny station.

My soul was heavy and my body broken— I felt like one who, on a secret journey, sets out in darkness, summoned by the stars on fateful earth, braving yet fleeing doom; whose nerves are so alert that he can sense enemies, far off, tracking him by stealth.

Outside the window engines rumbled by and dense smoke like the wing of a huge bat brushed my face. I felt dull horror, gripped by a deep bestial fear. I looked around: it would have been so good to speak a little to close friends, a few words to men you trust, but there was only damp night, dark and chill, Peter was now asleep, and James and John asleep, and Matthew, all of them asleep...

Thick beads of cold sweat broke out on my brow and then streamed down over my crumpled face.

(Translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer)

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The Poem of Darkness Once more, the vigil season!

Broad pen-strokes on my sheet look grim.

Night’s rust-juice floods the gardens, by six full to the brim.

Damp oozes from the mouldering trees, you muse on how much time you’ve left. Your foot stops dead, in fear of stumbling into a tomb...

But tell me: have you ever let a snow-white sugar-cube soak up dark liquid, dipped in the bitter night of coffee in its cup?

Or watched how the dense liquid, so surely, so insidiously, will seep up through the white cube’s pure, crystalline body?

Just so the night seeps into you, slowly rising, the smells of night and of the grave all through your veins, fibres, cells, until one dank brown evening, so steeped in it, you melt and sink — to sweeten, for some unknown god, his dark and bitter drink.

(Translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer)

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Milá n F ü s t 1888 › born in Budapest 1909 › first poems published in Nyugat 1912 › receives degree in law; begins career as a school teacher 1913 › first book of poems published 1920 › banned from teaching for political reasons; begins to make a living from writing 1928 › spends six months in Baden-Baden sanatorium to cure his nerves 1935–42 › writes the novel, The Story of My Wife 1948 › begins teaching in college; awarded the Kossuth Prize 1957–66 › collected works published 1965 › nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 1967 › dies in Budapest

Milán Füst was an elemental poet and a monumental novelist. He cannot be identified with any particular artistic movement, but has had profound influence on later generations of poets. His writings have a curious power stemming, perhaps, from the asceticism of his self-restraint, his jettisoning of all illusions, and a desperate bitterness. His every word conveys a sense of heroic sadness. Neither in his poetry nor in his prose can any evolution be detected; his books are both unique and together have the force of a single, unified whole.

In his first book of poems, Változtatnod nem lehet (You Can’t Change, 1913), Füst experiments with free verse; he writes bizarre yet robust poems resembling ‘enormous petrified lava formations’ and characterised by dark, surreal imagery, suggesting the tone of ritual genres like laments and dirges.

As literary scholar Lóránt Czigány remarked, ‘Füst’s lyre is a single-stringed instrument; his poems give the overall impression of a chanting, wailing man, obsessed by a fear of persecution, embittered and always on the verge of total despair, but surviving with pathetic heroism in an apparently insane world.’

According to poet Györgí Somlyó, ‘Though every poem of Füst’s is written as if to recall a land never seen, a world never known, a moment never lived, each has none the less existed 18

within us, each is the story of our times. They are unique, unrepeatable, calling on all our senses. . . . The extraordinary length of his lines with their Biblical tone and melody, recall the flow of St. John Perse, while his anti-subjectivity, always veiled in the tragic or grotesque masks of remote cultures, chimes with the aspirations of Eliot and Cavafy.’

Devoted to the work of Shakespeare, on whom he lectured at the University of Budapest, Füst was himself a noted dramatist. Inspired by a newspaper article, his play Boldogtalanok (Unhappy Ones, 1914) was praised for its naturalism, although in fact it was an experiment in modern drama. Negyedik Henrik (Henry IV, 1940) is preoccupied with man’s moral stature. Although his plays were not staged for many years, Füst lived to see some very successful performances in the 1960s.

Of his own novel-writing technique Milán Füst wrote, ‘It is important for me that I do not become too familiar with what I select as the subject of my work, because knowledge of the reality restricts my imagination, impeding its free flow. Thus I can write only of things of which I am not overly familiar, because what is far away from me offers stimulation and moves my imagination.’

Though Az aranytál (The Golden Tray, 1920) and Advent (Advent, 1922) were well received in their day, the best known and most lasting of Füst’s novels is A feleségem története (The Story of My Wife, 1942), an exploration of jealousy. Many of his essays also deal with sexuality, others with aesthetics; these were collected in Látomás és indulat a művészetben (Vision and Emotion in Art, 1948) and Szexuál-lélektani elmélkedések (Studies in Sexual Psychology, published 1986). His autobiographical works include his voluminous Diaries—many of which were lost during the bombing of Budapest during World War II—and two collections of essays, Ez mind én voltam egykor (This was All Me Once, 1957) and Hábi-Szádi küzdelmeinek könyve (The Struggles of Habi-Sadi, 1958).

A feleségem története – The Story of My Wife Milán Füst’s The Story of My Wife is the elemental story of love and jealousy, completed after seven years of intense labour in a Flaubert-like quest for perfection. In a style both lyrical and realistic, it echoes the story of Othello in theme as well as philosophical depth.

The book is cast as the memoir of Captain Störr, a robust and passionate Dutchman of middle age who marries a petite French girl named Lizzy. At the beginning of their marriage he behaves as a man experienced in the ways of the world and so does not demand absolute fidelity from his wife, for he is often away, flying across the seas. His wife is a fun-loving, beautiful and passionate woman and the captain seems content merely to be near her in their Paris home. But as he spends more and more time with her, his love for her becomes obsessive, and his life takes 19

an unhappy turn when his flagship burns down (one fine passage describes the captain alone in his cabin in the burning ship, preparing to commit suicide), and he discovers that Lizzy is in love with one of her suitors. When he scares the young man away, however, his wife becomes depressed, and they move to London, where Lizzy recovers her playfulness and the marriage seems to move off the rocks.

In Paris, Captain Störr remains consumed by doubt and suspicion. Thinking that his wife is cheating on him, he cheats on her and begins a love affair with a young Irish woman. But he is unable to consummate the relationship. Desperately jealous of his wife, he reads her letters, follows her, and even hires a private detective. They quarrel and he nearly kills her. His best friend, a wise old salt, advises him to love and accept her together with all her faults, lies, and secrets. But the captain cannot shake off his jealousy, even though intricate investigations fail to yield a single concrete fact.

Another love affair of his follows, this time with the mistress of a colleague. He is soon reconciled with Lizzy, however, and their passionate game of love and hate continues. The final blow to their marriage is delivered at a carnival. The captain attends it alone, thinking that his wife is away visiting friends; but soon he discovers that her former lover is there at the party, and a few moments later he learns that Lizzy, too, is present. He leaves in haste, making sure she does not see him. Lizzy tries to escape with her lover using cheques stolen from her husband. The captain follows them, but after recovering his money, he lets them go. His life is in ruins. He leaves for South America.

In the final part of the novel, the captain returns to Paris where he studies chemistry and is a suitor to two beautiful sisters. His old friend has died; Störr is completely alone in the world. Then one day, he takes a bus and spots his former wife on a street corner: she is impossibly young, beautiful and nonchalant, as if time had not touched her. The captain’s love for her is rekindled; he calls an old friend of hers to find out where she lives and is shocked to learn that his wife, the only woman he ever truly loved, died years ago.

‘In the l iterat u re a bo u t jea lo u sy , Mi lá n F ü s t ’s n o vel i s a ba si c te x t. [. . .] Wo rl d Wa r I I wa s i n the m a k i n g , b u t the so l ita r y g ia n t aver ted h i s eye s. H e d efen d ed hi m sel f a g a i n s t the sca n d a l by ig n o r i n g it, by creat i n g a wo rl d o f tr u e feel i n g i n pla ce o f the rea l wo rl d. H e ha d to pro tect l iterat u re fro m po l it i c s. ’

20

George Konrád

Béla H a m va s 1897 › born in Eperjes (Prešov, Slovakia) 1915–1917 › wounded twice in WWI at the Ukrainian-Russian front 1919 › family expelled from Slovakia to Budapest 1919–1923 › studies in German and Hungarian philology at the University of Budapest 1923–1926 › journalist for Budapesti Hírlap and Szózat 1927–1948 › librarian in the Municipal Library, Budapest 1935–36 › together with Károly Kerényi founds the cultural review Sziget 1937 › marries writer and art historian Katalin Kemény 1940–1944 › called up for military service; posted to the Russian front in 1942; manages to escape 1945 › home hit by a bomb, library and manuscripts destroyed 1948 › blacklisted, forced to quit his job, works on building sites 1951–1964 › interned; works as an unskilled workman in factories 1964 › forced into retirement at the age of 67 1968 › dies; buried in Szentendre

One of the great metaphysical thinkers of the twentieth century, Béla Hamvas had a wide range of interests including literature, cultural history, history of science, psychology, philosophy and Eastern languages. He was a non-comformist whose aesthetic views were attacked by Marxist philosopher and ideologist George Lukács, resulting in the banning of his works from publication.

Most of his oeuvre was published posthumously, beginning in the early 1980s. The publication of his collected works is still in progress.

Hamvas found his form of expression in the essay, a genre at once literary and philosophical. His early essays were published in Magyar Hüperion (Hungarian Hyperion, 1936).

In 1937 he completed his influential essay, A világválság (The World Crisis), a fine example of crisis literature. His Szellem és egzisztencia (Spirit and Existence, 1941), treated the philosophy of Karl Jaspers, one of the main inspirations for his own thinking. In A láthatatlan történet (The Invisible Story, 1943), he published a selection of essays on literature, psychology, philosophy and cultural history.

Hamvas was also deeply immersed in the metaphysical tradition, the collective spiritual knowledge of mankind conveyed by sacred texts, and he was interested in the horizons they 21

opened up for contemporary man. His collection Scientia Sacra (the first six volumes, 1942–43) served to direct the attention of the age towards the philosophy of the Far East (The Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and others) and European mysticism.

From 1945 Hamvas belonged to the brief spiritual renaissance that lasted three years, during which time he edited the series Egyetemi nyomda kis füzetei (Leaflets of the University Press), held lectures and published the metaphysical collection of aphorisms Anthologia humana: Ötezer év bölcsessége (Anthologia Humana: The Wisdom of Five Millennia, 1946), the fourth edition of which was banned and pulped. His essays written together with his wife on the history of art, Forradalom a művészetben: Absztrakció és szürrealizmus Magyarországon (Revolution in Art: Abstraction and Surrealism in Hungary, 1947), offer a survey of Hungarian art from Károly Ferenczy, Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka and Lajos Gulácsy up to the so-called European School of progressive artists. Hamvas saw in surrealism and abstract art the heirs of magical thinking, the ‘overwhelming presence of a higher existence’. George Lukács attacked this concept of modern art as politically damaging, and Hamvas was dismissed from his library job and silenced for the rest of his life. (The European School, too, was disbanded.) His writings, however, were published in samizdat and widely circulated.

His essays are grounded in tradition, while the sense of humour they so often evidence springs from a combination of knowledge and wisdom. Unicornis, Titkos Jegyzőkönyv and Silentium (Unicorn, Secret Protocol, Silentium, 1948–51) were first published only in 1987.

But they were written alongside Hamvas’s great picaresque novel, Karnevál (Carnival, 1948-51, published in 1985)—his magnum opus, a ‘catalogue of fate’ and a ‘human comedy’ that spans many continents and ages, Heaven and Hell. Hamvas’s three shorter novels, Szilveszter ( New Year’s Eve, 1957), Bizonyos tekintetben (From a Certain Point of View, 1961) and Ugyanis (Therefore, 1966–67) were first published together in 1991, followed in 1992 by his collection of essays, Patmosz (1959–1966), whose title alludes to John the Apostle’s exile to the island of Patmos. The second part of Scientia Sacra: az őskori emberiség szellemi hagyománya II. rész: A kereszténység (Scientia Sacra: Mankind’s Spiritual Heritage, Part II. Christianity, 1960–64) appeared in 1988.

22

Karnevál – Carnival Hamvas’s magnum opus, a novel he called ‘a grand catalogue of fate’ and ‘an inventory of mankind’, deconstructs the classical picaresque genre itself. The intricate and dispersed plot, with its dozens of characters, defies easy summary. The six ‘books’ that comprise the two volumes of Carnival are preceded and interrupted by introductory chapters, somewhat in the manner of Fielding’s Tom Jones, except, as the reader learns later on, Carnival, a metaphysical picaresque and one of the most exciting and innovative novels of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, lacks a fixed point from which either the writer or the reader could observe it.

On its pages a ‘Voice’ narrates a mock-learned, mock-arrogant conversation between the protagonist, Mihály Bormester (Michael Winemaster), and the ‘Narrator’, who claims to be a ‘spiritual agent’ in telling Bormester’s story. If we are to believe the Voice, Bormester would find this narration silly on three counts: first, that it should have happened at all; then that someone should be telling it; and finally because someone else should be telling it. Later, the reader and the critic are invited into the game.

As explained by dramatist, novelist, and essayist György Spiró, ‘This novel describes the development and the spreading of madness in a completely original way. It was born as a gesture of the rejection of omniscience, and hence it is occasionally a stinging satire on the human consciousness and our conception of the soul, and occasionally a parody of all possible (past and future) philosophies, including all rational and irrational philosophies, religions, aesthetics and theories of everyday existence.’

In the first book, a red-haired assistant-draftsman (Bormester’s father) arrives in a town where he meets as many people as there are attitudes or masks. All these characters are prismatic caricatures; some of them have more than one identity. Most of them return in the second book, but they have changed their distinctive ‘monomanias’.

In the books to come, the hero, Bormester, ‘saves’ and marries a hysterical woman, then develops a double identity, strangles his wife, receives a spiritual leader, and survives the war. Countless other characters turn up, every time in another environment, as the novel spans the period from the 1880s to WWII. In the seventh book a new character appears. His name is Vidal (‘the one who can see’), who is eager to shed his mask and get a glimpse of the Land of Promise.

The Narrator and the Voice discuss every event and almost every character in the book.

They comment on the difficulties of narration—thus foreshadowing the post-modern novel; they discuss the concept of time, reality, probability, style, common sense and the imagination, women, the body, misunderstandings, the masks people wear in society and much more. As György Spiró puts it, ‘Hamvas’s book is not simply the work of a caricaturist with wide intellectual horizons, because caricature is limited by the subject it distorts. The writer parodies the whole of human existence, and we have the feeling that he is most probably the freest of Hungarian writers.’ One might add that this ‘freest of Hungarian writers’ takes off where Sterne, Fielding and Joyce left off.

23

Z so lt H a rsá nyi 1887 › born and educated in Korompa (Krompachy, Slovakia) 1910 › graduates in the humanities and in law in Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) 1910 › co-founder and co-editor of the theatrical weekly Színházi Hét, later Színházi Élet 1914–18 › fights in World War I 1919–41 › writes for the conservative Új Idők, published in Budapest 1938 › directorial manager of the Vígszínház theatre, Budapest 1943 › dies in Budapest of a heart attack

Zsolt Harsányi began as a poet noted for his great facility of technique, which he put to use later in the writing and translating of light verse, chansons, operetta libretti, and the libretto to an opera by Zoltán Kodály. Much of his life was devoted to the theatre and light entertainment.

Besides writing for newspapers and editing the popular theatre magazine Színházi Élet, Harsányi translated comedies and classical literature as well. He was also an immensely popular playwright.

His play, A bolond Ásvayné (The Mad Mrs. Ásvay, 1942), written in the spirit of Ferenc Molnár, was a great success.

Harsányi was also a popular writer, and a number of his novels enjoyed success abroad.

Of Magdolna (Through a Woman’s Eyes, 1938), perhaps his best, the New York Times Book Review wrote in 1940: ‘Women will discover their own experiences, emotional if not factual, reflected in Magdalena’s story. Harsányi understands and can portray people.’

Harsányi’s popularity was however based on his mastery of the biographical novel, in which he could speak indirectly about his rejection of conformity by writing about the lives of men endowed with exceptional qualities. His secret was a quick-paced, absorbing plot and a focus on psychological motivations. His fictional biography of Franz Liszt, Magyar rapszódia 24

(Hungarian Rhapsody, 1935), is perhaps the best of this genre. He explored the life of Galileo in És mégis mozog a föld (The Star Gazer, 1937), a book whose hero is shown as a student at the University of Pisa, in constant mental torment. The reader sees Galileo experimenting and lecturing, then bearing the paralysing effect of denunciation, and finally confronting the Jesuits.

The biography of Rubens, Élni jó (Lover of Life, 1940), portrays the flamboyant personality of the painter and provides a lively picture of Western Europe in the early-seventeenth century.

H a rsá n y i k n e w ho w to ra i se s i g n i f i ca n t q u e s t i o n s, ho w to m a k e cha ra cters co m e to l i f e o n t he pr i n ted pa g e , ho w to pro d u ce ten s i o n a n d a n t i ci pa t i o n i n t he d e vel o pm en t o f t he pl o t, ho w to ca pt u re t he a t m o s phere o f rem o te t i m e s, ta k e sn a p sho ts o f m o o d s a n d crea te se t t i n g s i n w h i ch t he i n d i v i d u a l m o ve s w it h t he cer ta i n t y o f h i s po w er i n t he sha d o w o f o m en s t ha t m o u l d ed h i m i n to a s u f f er i n g h u m a n b ei n g . [. . .] No t o n ly t he cha ra cters b u t a l so t hei r b a ck g ro u n d ho l d a f a sci n a t i o n fo r H a rsá n y i , a n d . [. . .] he sha re s t h i s f a sci n a t i o n w it h t he rea d er.

József Reményi, literary critic

25

Magyar rapszódia – Hungarian Rhapsody Hungarian Rhapsody portrays Franz Liszt as an artist deeply committed to his art and to his loves.

Harsányi follows him from his childhood to the end of his adventurous and eventful life. The real and imagined episodes are sensitively and seamlessly told, but the power of Harsányi’s mastery is best revealed in his portrayal of Liszt’s temper and spirit.

Little Franz loves his piano, but he hates the discipline and tedium of the études he has endlessly to practise. He adores the unrestrained music of the Gypsies (who will pick up the themes of his rhapsodies a few decades later). He is recognized as a prodigy, and the famous teachers Czerny and Salieri accept him as their student as soon as they hear him play. However, when Czerny, like Liszt’s father earlier, reminds him of the need for discipline when playing the piano, the child replies, ‘But that is the way I feel it.’ His first disillusionment comes in Paris where Cherubini, head of the Conservatoire, turns down his application on the grounds that he is a foreigner.

Nevertheless, his success as a pianist is enormous, and only when his first opera fails in Paris does he seek consolation in religion.

The young Liszt’s personality unfolds scene by scene. In Paris, Franz grows into an extremely handsome young man, and he is fully aware of the fact. He is involved in a string of outrageous affairs with countesses and ladies of society falling for him and leaving their husbands for his sake. In the slightly abridged English translation of Hungarian Rhapsody, four of the novel’s five books bear the names of women who exercised a decisive influence on Liszt’s life. Countess Caroline de Saint Cricq is his first love, whom he is not allowed to marry. Countess Marie d’Agoult, a prominent society lady, leaves her elderly husband for his sake. Though they have three children, after ten years spent together they separate for good when Liszt’s infidelities are aired in the papers.

Liszt’s subsequent marriage to Princess Carolyne of Sayn-Wittgenstein is, for once, more an affair of the head than of the heart, and she proves to be a great source of support for his work. His daughter, Cosima, from Marie, also plays an important role in his life, as her love affair with Richard Wagner rekindles Liszt’s own romantic feelings. The enigmatic and, at times, paradoxical nature of Liszt’s character, as he seeks a harmonious emotional life amid his love affairs and his music, is set against a background of high-society decorum, intrigue and lavishness as it offers an insight into a remarkable life.

The romantic Liszt is influenced by the times as well. The era of the French Revolution inspires him to compose his Revolutionary Symphony. At Princess Belgiojoso’s soirées he meets many of the era’s artists. As a child Franz had been introduced to Beethoven and Rossini; now he comes to know Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Delacroix, Lamartine, and others. There are revelations concerning Liszt as an artist in relation to other composers, among whom Wagner exercises the most decisive influence on his work.

Wagner and he become close friends in Weimar, where Liszt finances the performance of 26

Tannhauser and makes it a great success.

As a virtuoso pianist Liszt travels widely. He performs in most European capitals and courts and even visits the Czar. His intellectual freedom is, however, more important to him than an involvement in politics. He gives up his peripatetic life for his beliefs—the new music of radical romanticism and his ardent Catholic faith.

27

Attila József 1905 › born in a Budapest slum, the son of an itinerant Romanian worker and a washerwoman, both of whom he loses at an early age 1910-12 › lives with foster parents, and later (1917–18) at an orphanage 1922 › first volume of poetry published, soon followed by publication of his poems in various journals and an anthology 1924 › enters University of Szeged 1925 › expelled from university for a scandalous poem with left-wing sentiments 1926 › on a visit to Paris he enrols at the Sorbonne 1927 › poems published by L’Esprit Nouveau 1927–28 › two semesters at Budapest University 1930 › joins the illegal Communist Party 1931 › new volume is confiscated; he is prosecuted; begins psychoanalysis 1933 › expelled from the Communist Party 1936 › co-editor of the independent left-wing literary review Szép Szó 1937 › meets Thomas Mann; after a breakdown, is subjected to psychotherapy; commits suicide

Despite his short life, Attila József became one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century, leaving behind a literary legacy of about 600 poems that have left an indelible mark on Hungarian poetry. A socially committed writer with strong ties to the working class, his poems speak of a profound sense of alienation on the one hand, and a yearning sense of the need for love on the other. As the storm clouds of fascism gathered overhead, he cried out against it as his psyche began to give way, ending in his suicide.

Predisposed to be an impulsive rebel and unblushingly sincere, József fused the personal and the social in his poetry, which also exhibited an unusual facility for versification.

His technique was already in evidence in his first volume, Szépség koldusa (A Beggar of Beauty, 1922), published while he was still a high school student. His second, Nem én kiáltok (That’s Not Me Shouting, 1925), shows his mastery of the freely associating metaphor. In the words of literary scholar Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, József’s third volume, Nincsen apám, se anyám (I Have No Father, No Mother, 1929), ‘appropriated and perfected an enormous variety of classical, symbolist, and modernist structures, eclectically mixing and changing them with fiendish 28

virtuosity, [developing] a genre the thrust of which is anchored in the music of magic charms, spells, lullabies, nursery rhymes, and Hungarian folksongs.’

There is a new grotesque playfulness in József’s sequence Medallions. The poems of Döntsd a tőkét, ne siránkozz! (Root out Capital, Don’t Grumble, 1931) are, as the title suggests, unabashedly agit-prop in intention.

József’s poetry achieves a mature complexity in Külvárosi éj (Night in the Slums, 1932), an admirable blend of the philosophical presented with shifts of perspective. While the poet speaks of slums, dark warehouses and heavy freight trains, his poems are, according to poet and translator George Gömöri, ‘realistic and transcend realism at the same time: things come to life, exude a dull sadness, the landscape permeates the poet’s soul.’

The volume Medvetánc (Bear Dance, 1934) continues the poet’s preoccupation with reality, as in the love poem ‘Ode’. ‘József’s clear understanding of the physical reality of the world, even our own bodies, can be unsettling until we accept its beauty,’ writes a recent translator, Frederick Turner.

In Nagyon fáj (The Pain is Great, 1936), his closing account of his final years, József explored the fundamental concepts of crime, punishment and hopelessness, as well as the lack of order and freedom, and he seeks God as a vulnerable child might seek his father. ‘There is something paradoxical, almost uncanny, about the poetic greatness of József’s last four years,’ observes George Gömöri. ‘As with Hölderlin, it was balanced on the edge of the precipice that he wrote his most radiant and heart-rending poems.’

József’s short prose piece Curriculum Vitae (1937) reveals the roots of his desperate search for identity: ‘In the third-grade reader, however, I found some interesting stories about King Attila and so I threw myself into reading. These stories about the King of the Huns interested me not only because my name was Attila, but also because my foster-parents in Öcsöd used to call me Steve. After consulting the neighbours, they came to the conclusion, in front of me, that there was no such name as Attila. This astounded me; I felt my very existence was being called in question. I believed the discovery of the tales about Attila had a decisive influence on all my ambitions from then on; in the last analysis it was perhaps this that led me to literature. This was the experience that turned me into a person who thinks, one who listens to the opinions of others, but examines them critically in his own mind; someone who resigns himself to being called Steve until it is proved that his name is Attila, as he himself had thought all along.’ (from Curriculum Vitae, translated by John Bátki)

In the final analysis, perhaps it was this search for identity—coupled with József’s consciousness of the losing battle being waged against fascism before World War II, which went hand in hand with his genius—that made him fling himself, at the age of thirty-two, in front of an oncoming train.

29

That’s Not Me Shouting That’s not me shouting, it’s the earth groaning, Beware, beware, for Satan is raving.

Lie low on the bottom of clear streams, flatten yourself into a pane of glass, hide behind the light of diamonds, under stones with the small insects, hide away in the fresh baked bread, you poor man.

Seep into the ground with cool showers!

Only in others can you wash your face, it’s no use bathing it in yourself.

Become the edge on a small blade of grass and you’ll be greater than the world’s axis.

O machines, birds, leaves, stars!

Our barren mother is praying for her child.

My friend, my dear, beloved friend, whether it’s horrible, whether it’s splendid, that’s not me shouting, the earth is groaning.

(Translated by John Batki)

30

Freight trains Freight trains are pulling in. a slow clanking lightly handcuffs the silent landscape.

Like an escaped prisoner the moon flies free.

Broken stones rest on their shadows, sparkling for themselves.

They are in place as never before.

From what huge darkness was this heavy night chipped?

It falls on us as a piece of iron falls on a speck of dust.

Desire, born of the sun, when the bed is embraced by shadow, could you keep watch through that whole night as well?

(Translated by John Batki)

31

M a rg it Ka f fk a 1880 › born in Nagykároly (Carei, Romania) 1886 › father dies; raised in local convent 1898 › receives teaching diploma at the convent, then teaches at a school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Miskolc 1899 › moves to Budapest 1899-1902 › scholarship at the prestigious Erzsébet Training College for Women, qualifies as a secondary school teacher, begins publishing short stories and poems 1905 › marries Brunó Frölich, a forestry engineer; divorces in 1910 1906 › son born 1910 › resumes her maiden name as a writer, joins the Nyugat circle 1914 › marries theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer, a medical student ten years her junior 1914–18 › husband called into the army but is assigned hospital work; Kaffka follows him to his hospital postings 1918 › dies with her twelve-year-old son in Spanish flu pandemic

‘ I f t he n a m e M a rg it K a f f k a w ere a n o m d e g u erre , m a n y a t r u e a n d g o o d rea d er wo u l d wo n d er, w ho i s t h i s re s t l e ss, po w er f u l w r iter ? ’

Endre Ady, poet

Margit Kaffka was the first Hungarian writer to treat the problems specific to women with compassion and insight rather than genteel sentiment. A strong-willed ‘New Woman’ whose life and works epitomized many of the complex problems of women in contemporary Hungarian society, she supported herself by teaching and writing stories, novels, poetry and books for children. In the beginning of her career, she composed poems in an innovative, illusion-free tone, incorporating conversational language in urban settings (Versek; Poems, 1903). This won the great poet Endre Ady’s admiration.

Though Kaffka continued to write poetry until her death (Az élet útján; On Life’s 32

Journey, 1918), the second phase of her career began with the launch of Nyugat, the influential progressive literary review of the time. Her first prose writings—collected in Levelek a zárdából.

Nyár (Letters from the Convent. Summer; 1904) and A gondolkodók és egyéb elbeszélések (The Thinkers and Other Stories; 1906)—were short stories. Her characters were almost exclusively women—unhappy housewives, schoolgirls and artists—who suffer from the restrictions imposed upon them by contemporary society. They are ‘new types’, as Kaffka called them, uncertain yet ambitious, aware that a whole new era is beginning, but not yet sure of their role in it. Love no longer provides a haven. In one story (“A Gondolkodók” – The Thinkers), the young lovers are so acutely aware of the possibility of disillusionment that they are unable to savor their moments together. Marriage, as Kaffka knew all too well from her own experience, often brings only bitter resentment and a new set of restrictions. These topics resurface in her later collections as well, including Süppedő talajon (On Swampy Soil; 1912) and Szent Ildefonso bálja (St. Ildefons’s Ball; 1914).

It was, however, as a novelist that Kaffka produced her most memorable work. Of these books, Színek és évek (Colours and Years, 1912), about the lack of alternatives to marriage available to women, is considered her finest. Perhaps only Edith Wharton wrote with comparable indignation at having been reared only for marriage. This story is rich in finely observed detail and minute psychological observation. Mária évei (Mária’s Years, 1913) is about a new type of career woman, a dreamy soul with ideals and principles who gradually loses contact with the world and commits suicide.

By nature inclined to impressionism, Kaffka could also skilfully render realistic settings and the minutiae of human misery, as in Két nyár (Two Summers, 1916). Possibly the most beautiful story about the war years, it depicts with profound insight the happy but slowly disintegrating marriage of a poor young couple. The heroine of Állomások (Stations, 1914) is a liberated middle-aged woman who manages her own life and, in the words of Lóránt Czigány, ‘leaves the sinking ship of her disastrous marriage in time, without distressing herself and, driven by her ambitions, penetrates the bustling cultural life of contemporary Budapest.’

In Hangyaboly (Ant Hill; 1917)—autobiographical in inspiration, as are her other novels, and stylistically her most satisfying work—Kaffka has the story unfold in the closeted world clearly inspired by her own bitter memories of her strict Catholic upbringing. The novel also marks a stylistic turning point in an oeuvre that was curtailed by her untimely death.

K a f f k a i s o n e o f t he sel ect f e w w ho d e ser ve a l ea d i n g ro l e i n co n tem po ra r y l itera t u re . She i s t he m o s t ta l en ted , t he m o s t b r i l l i a n t H u n g a r i a n wo m a n o f a l l t i m e .

Aladár Schöpflin, literary critic

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Színek és évek – Colours and Years Set against the background of the disintegrating world of the gentry, Kaffka’s most popular novel begins at the end of the story with which it is concerned. It is most remarkable for its subtle use of suppressed memory that emerges unexpectedly, for its blending of past and present. The narrator, Magda, is a fifty-year-old woman who recalls the story of her life. The self-reflective tone is dominant throughout the novel. From time to time the narrative’s linear flow is disrupted by the heroine’s reflections. Kaffka’s real strength lies in the detail, whether describing the interior of a room, the personality of an acquaintance, or the precise nuances of a certain mood.

She can sketch a scene in just a few sentences. In this novel, realism merges with impressionism: the years are related in colours.

Magda Pórtelky’s family belongs to the Hungarian gentry, a class at risk of extinction unless it maintains its position through marriage. Magda herself is a lively child who grows up to be a clever, proud and beautiful girl of marriageable age. The belle of the ball, she is surrounded by suitors, but soon learns that one of them has turned her down because of her scant dowry.

She has little time to lose, because she is living with her widowed mother and grandmother, and there is a young and prosperous uncle who needs the house for his new family. Mother and daughter have to choose rapidly and rationally. Magda marries a considerate but dull lawyer, Jenő Vodicska, with whom she comes to find more and more in common; for example, Jenő has an interest in interior decorating.

The marriage has been under stress for a while when one day Magda’s first love, Endre, shows up. But Magda is already pregnant and sends him away. The couple become more prosperous and spend too much, despite the father-in-law’s early warning. Jenő hopes in vain to become the new deputy mayor of their town. As their debts continue to mount, he commits suicide. ‘Everything ended then’, as the author puts it.

For a year Magda stays with relatives, first at home, then in the capital, but she has nothing to live on. Ironically, her mother’s impoverished husband lectures her on women’s emancipation, just to prove that she has to stand on her own two feet instead of eating his bread.

The novel explores every avenue open to the impoverished widow. She might take in lodgers, become a rural postmistress, a housekeeper for an ancient uncle, or even try acting in Budapest.

From the perspective of her high social status every choice seems equally appalling. In the end she is subjected to her stepfather’s latest, this time utterly reactionary view that women will always be inferior and will never be taken seriously. The only confidant Magda retains is a former friend of theirs, Horváth, a bachelor with a modest income. However, he is not willing to marry her unless gossip makes marriage inevitable, which it soon does.

The marriage turns out to be a disaster. Magda literally has to steal the housekeeping money from the pocket of her new husband, who would spend it on cards and women, and they quarrel all the time. Having suffered a stroke, Horváth dies and Magda finally gains her 34

independence. Now she can think of a future with their three beautiful daughters, whose life will be that of the new woman: all three will study toward a profession.

‘In Colours and Years’, wrote scholar George F. Cushing, ‘Kaffka wrote about what she truly knew, the world of her youth: the farmers’ wives who were spent from childbirth . . . her mother’s life, the county political circle which rested on intrigue, the petty-minded upstarts. . . .

Her sure touch in changing fact into fiction astonished the critics.’

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Frigye s Ka rinthy

1887 › born in Budapest 1906 › begins working as a journalist; writings published in various papers and journals 1908 › begins to write for Nyugat 1912 › first satirical collections published 1931 › lectures at various conferences 1938 › dies in Siófok

To this day Frigyes Karinthy remains perhaps the most popular of any twentieth-century Hungarian writer. A Renaissance man with wide-ranging interests, he was a prolific poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, essayist, parodist, journalist, and translator. His Micimackó, the rendering of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, is legendary for its linguistic inventiveness and is firmly entrenched in his nation’s popular culture.

Karinthy began as a poet. As a promising new talent, he published many poems in Nyugat, though only two collections of his poetry appeared. Nem mondhatom el senkinek (I Can’t Tell Anyone, 1930) was an immediate success and a real surprise, since, in the words of writer and critic László Cs. Szabó, ‘in his poetry, Karinthy, the great humorist, wrote with the torment of a Rigoletto-like clown, naked, without self-pity.’ Üzenet a palackban (Message in a Bottle, 1938), his last book of poems, appeared posthumously.

However, the book that established Karinthy’s place in Hungarian literature was Így írtok ti (That’s How You Write, 1912), a collection of short literary caricatures on many of his contemporaries, an instant success still quoted today, and a clear-sighted stylistic analysis of the entire Nyugat generation. ‘These pastiches unfolded the potentials of a new genre; his target was not a particular work, or some mannerism of a writer—instead, according to Lóránt Czigány, he 36

presented a miniature portrait, a stylistic profile of an author, and condensed his criticism into humorous form.’ Just as warm and lasting a reception was given to his short story sequence Tanár úr, kérem (Please, Sir!, 1916), a witty and trenchant account of schoolboy life, which is a perennial favourite with young Hungarians.

Karinthy’s interest in fantasy literature, especially the works of Jules Verne and Jonathan Swift, combined with his satirical pen, produced Utazás Faremidóba (A Journey to Faremido, subtitled Gulliver’s Fifth Journey, 1915), an imaginary travelogue in the manner of Swift, which reveals Karinthy’s longing for a less irrational world: Gulliver is here rescued from the battlefields of the First World War and transported to the unknown land of Faremido.

‘Instead of the bloody and ulcerous concoction that is organic life,” observed fellow writer Dezső Kosztolányi, “[Karinthy creates] a much fuller life, tingling with electricity, with man-machines made of steel . . . whose speech is music and whose brain is a mixture of quicksilver and mineral matter.’ The sequel, Capillária (Capillaria, subtitled Gulliver’s Sixth Journey, 1921), set in an empire of females living under the sea, offers a satiric re-examination of the ‘sexual contract’ between the sexes and calls for its revision.

It is virtually impossible to list even a small portion of all that Karinthy wrote. He lived and wrote at a punishing pace and had a restless and troubled life; he fizzed and bubbled with many more plans and ideas than he was ever able to commit to paper. At his graveside the writer Zsigmond Móricz said, ‘Karinthy has died, and the gods have lost their voice.’

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Utazás a koponyám körül – A Journey Round My Skull The iconic A Journey Round My Skull chronicles the circumstances prior to and during the brain surgery performed on the author in 1936. As Hungary’s most popular humorist and a well-known journalist, poet and novelist, Karinthy’s sudden illness shook the nation, and the public closely followed its course. Appreciating this interest, and also wishing to dispel some of the gossip, Karinthy decided to ‘go from humorist to tumorist’ and give a full account of his illness and operation, just as he had experienced it.

The story begins as Karinthy is sitting in his favourite café one evening, and is puzzled to hear a train thundering past. The sound is a most unlikely one, since there are no trains in the heart of Budapest, but being the ever-inventive man that he is, he searches for some plausible explanation, and having rationalized away the business to his own satisfaction, he promptly forgets all about it. But the next day the train thunders by again, and soon he is forced to admit that he is hallucinating. In the next few days he has attacks of nausea and vomiting, followed by blackouts, so he looks up his symptoms in the medical literature. A born egotist, he mockingly picks the gravest of all possible causes and jokingly sets up a self-diagnosis—brain tumour. A splendid joke, but the symptoms become more severe. One doctor follows another, and the various symptoms are finally united into a pattern of a familiar, yet dreaded diagnosis—it seems that the joke was no joke and a tumour is the most likely diagnosis.

As his symptoms worsen, Karinthy decides to read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers. However, his rapidly deteriorating eyesight forces him to give up reading at the point where Joseph is thrown into the dried-up well. A symbolic coincidence, for Karinthy must undergo an urgent operation. He goes to Sweden with his wife, where the world-famous Swedish surgeon Herbert Olivecrona undertakes to save his life despite the 20-30 percent chance of success.

The operation, which is written with the detachment of a scientific observer and with the imaginative precision of a great novelist, proves to be an experience of the absurd. No anaesthesia can be employed, so Karinthy hears the sound of his skull being opened and is aware of every move; yet the absence of pain or feeling turns the operation into a surreal, near-death experience.

Perception is altered as the relationship between time and space is twisted into a knot of anguish and, later, agonizing pain. Dream dovetails with reality, and Karinthy sees his own self, in the form of a brown dog cut in half, running along a railway line towards an uncertain destination: survival.

In the days of convalescence that follow, it turns out that although the operation was largely successful, Karinthy’s eyesight has not recovered. Contrary to expectations, Karinthy is not shocked by the news. He knows better. Then he picks up Thomas Mann’s novel, with the bookmark at the point where he had stopped, and begins to read. A miracle: Joseph emerges from the well, and Karinthy recovers his sight.

The unique record of a unique experience, A Journey Round My Skull thus provides a close-up look at a life-and-death struggle in which the intellect triumphs over physical frailty, and consciousness takes up arms against the dark forces of dissolution and decay.

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Dez so“ Ko szto lá nyi 1885 › born in Szabadka (Subotica, Serbia) 1901 › first poem published, in Budapesti Napló 1904 › attends university in Vienna 1905 › becomes a journalist in Budapest 1906 › continues his university studies but abandons them to work for Budapesti Napló, temporarily replacing Endre Ady 1907 › first book of poems published 1908 › begins writing for Nyugat 1930 › president of Hungarian PEN Club 1936 › dies in Budapest; Nyugat publishes a special issue in his honour

‘While Babits was definitely a better poet than he was a prose writer, it is arguable whether Kosztolányi’s poetry or his fiction was the more significant contribution to literature,’ commented Lóránt Czigány. Indeed, not many writers published in the inter-war years could surpass Kosztolányi’s popularity or his hold on the literary and moral imagination of the public.

Kosztolányi’s first book of poems, Négy fal között (Within Four Walls, 1907), displays an exquisite grasp of language and flair for form, while its general tone, alternating between lightness and gloom, foreshadows the leitmotif of his mature years. The collection was followed

by A szegény kisgyermek panaszai (Lament of a Poor Little Child, 1910), which continues the elegiac treatment of the poet’s childhood recollections. Its poems, which bear the hallmarks of impressionism and symbolism, capture the moods of childhood with a sure touch, its delicate sketches covering an array of feelings from playfulness, often manifest in allusions to nursery thymes, to the fear of the night and the fear of death, another recurring leitmotif of Kosztolányi’s oeuvre.

A bús férfi panaszai (Lament of a Sorrowful Man, 1924), the sequel to this book, is a verse cycle about growing up.

Then, in 1928, Kosztolányi, a master of rhyme and form, unexpectedly appeared with 39

a volume of free verse with the telling title Meztelenül (Naked), a strikingly modern attempt at the time. In his last book of poems, Számadás (Reckoning, 1935) the main themes are illness, the grief over the transitory nature of human existence, and an empathy with those who are suffering.

Kosztolányi was also an outstanding novelist. His first novel, Néró, a véres költő (Darker Muses. The Poet Nero, 1922) is a psychological study of Nero—not the emperor, but the dilettante poet—and other Roman figures, but the story in fact deals with the problems of the writer’s own time and the eternal question of how to behave in society. Kosztolányi’s compassionate realism and ethical stance are also prominent in his novels Pacsirta (Skylark, 1924), which explores the blind alleys of small town life, and Aranysárkány (Golden Dragon, 1925). Another small town story, Golden Dragon, concerns Antal Novák, a teacher in a country school, who is driven to suicide; the book shows with the precision and detail of a detective story how, in face of persecution, he reaches, ineluctably, his final decision. As the author sums it up, ‘He tried to shape life, which is endless and absurd, and now he is punished by the Gods.’

In Kostolányi’s philosophy, observed Lóránt Czigány, ‘honesty [offers] inadequate protection against the unscrupulous machinations of those who possess power in society.’

Kostolányi’s last and perhaps best-known novel, Édes Anna (Anna Édes, 1926), is a finely wrought psychological portrait of a servant girl driven to brutally murder her employers, who have humiliated and exploited her both morally and physically. She is sentenced to death, but her death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment thanks to the passionate defence of a physician, who pleads that the blame for the tragedy rests with her murdered mistress.

Kosztolányi was also a prolific short story writer. His collection Esti Kornél (Kornél Esti, 1933) presents his favourite character, Esti, whose permutations speak of the author’s conviction, amounting to a plea, that people should give up their linear, and thus limiting, thinking, in favour of seeing the individual as an admirably complex being, moral and immoral at once, friend and foe, conformist and revolutionary. In the beginning of what novelist Péter Esterházy calls a ‘romantic autobiography’, its author asks, ‘Who is Kornél Esti?’ Then he goes on to say, ‘What he was to me and what he was would be no easy task to relate, nor would I dare to say. My memory does not reach back as far as our friendship whose beginning is lost in the archaic mist of my most tender years. He has been close to me since I know my own mind, always in front of me or behind me, always with me or against me. I loved him or I hated him. I was never indifferent towards him.’

In the Kornél Esti stories the author’s sense of humour finds an outlet as nowhere else, while the poetic conceit in the fact that Esti is always different yet is always Esti, is not only an early expression of the post-modern attitude, but is also a wonderfully conceived call, with the help of art, for human empathy.

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Pacsirta – Skylark In Skylark, Dezső Kosztolányi continues to look at small-town existence treated with fine psychological insight and deep compassion. The story unfolds in the small provincial town of Sárszeg (Mud Corner), a name that recalls the muddy villages in the poorest parts of Hungary. It is the autumn of 1899. Skylark, the only daughter of the Vajkays, is preparing for a weeklong trip to relatives. This is the first time she has ever left her parents. She is plain to the point of being unattractive, lacking in humour and joy, and considers loving and taking care of her parents her most important task in life. In turn, her elderly parents’ whole existence revolves around her, and they are devastated by her approaching absence.

The father, Ákos Vajkay, is a broken man of fifty-nine, who had made his living from genealogy, and his only hobby is heraldry pursued in the dust of archives. The mother is a colourless creature but devoted to her husband and daughter. Long years have passed since they have taken part in any social event: Skylark has held them back, for she has tired of people staring at her. Her parents know that she will never marry and that they will live the rest of their lives in utter boredom. But when the dark presence of their daughter lifts, the old couple slowly begin to rediscover the pleasures of small-town society. They go out, eat at a restaurant, and savour long-forgotten spices. They meet the colourful characters of the fin-de-siècle town and are invited to a theatre performance they enjoy enormously. Enchanted by the town’s coquettish prima donna, the father feels revived by the gently erotic atmosphere of the show.

The couple are introduced to a young man, Miklós Ijas, a reporter on the local paper, whose life has been darkened by a family tragedy. He is the only man in town who can understand the old couple’s quiet sorrow, for he is more than a local gentleman; he is a promising poet who has decided to make a career in Budapest. Meanwhile, the couple get a letter from Skylark with a childish account of her holiday, full of trite phrases. Kosztolányi’s irony is evident in presenting her letter in full, but this is tragic irony, full of compassionate sorrow.

On the sixth day of their daughter’s absence, Ákos Vajkay meets up with ‘the lads’ in the casino. He smokes, plays cards, sings along with the Gypsy band, and gets very drunk. In his drunken state he is at last able to blurt out the truth to his wife—their daughter is a burden who has deprived them of their lives.

After this cathartic night comes the seventh day, and Skylark arrives on the evening train. Their life goes on exactly as before, but at night, when no one hears them but God and Christ, they weep and pray in their shabby rooms, their only consolation being this: ‘There are so many who suffer even more.’

The threesome can be redeemed only by the keenly observant eyes of Miklós, the poet, who is in some respects the alter ego of the writer himself: ‘He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into his arms, stripping it of flesh and bone, and feeling its depths as if they were his own’—surely Kosztolányi’s confession of how he felt about the power of words.

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G y u la Kr ú d y 1878 › born in Nyíregyháza 1892 › first short story published 1893 › begins contributing literary pieces and articles to various newspapers 1896 › moves to Budapest 1897 › begins to work for several newspapers; first collection of short stories appears 1912 › first collection of Sindbad stories published 1914 › becomes member of the Petőfi Society devoted to popularising Hungarian poetry 1930 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1933 › dies in poverty in Budapest, just as he is ordered to vacate his rented apartment

An extremely versatile and prolific author who wrote more than sixty novels, three thousand short stories, over a thousand newspaper articles and four plays, Gyula Krúdy was only nineteen when his collection of short stories Üres a fészek (The Nest is Empty) appeared in 1897. His early writings, such as A víg ember bús meséi (The Sad Tales of a Happy Man, 1900) show the influence of romanticism and writers such as Hungary’s Mór Jókai, Charles Dickens, and Ivan Turgenev.

At the turn of the century he first broached his main theme, the extravagant and nostalgic life of the Hungarian gentry. With a critical and ironical approach Krúdy described the clash between the old and new values (Álmok hőse; Hero of Dreams. 1906). He was also fascinated by life in Old Buda, describing it with a wonderful sense of local colour (Régi szélkakasok közöt – Among Old Weathervanes, 1909). Here, as one of his translators, Paul Tabori, remarked, ‘He knew every street, every inn, almost every house. For him Budapest was Paris and London, Rome and New York; I don’t think he spent more than a few months of his entire life away from Hungary.’

As his style matured, Krúdy began to employ a revolutionary new technique which in many ways anticipates the stream-of-consciousness narrative, and which by all odds was native to him. The disregard for the time-structure of the story was his great innovation. This went hand in hand with a disregard for plot in favour of associations and the fragmentary and momentary, 42

which lent a dream-like quality to his work. Memory became the chief source of his narrative material, leading to the use of interior monologues and a profusion of subordinate clauses in his sentences. The effect was startling. As put by Lóránt Czigány, everything ‘disappeared under a veil of poetry’.

Krúdy’s innovative thinking appears at its best in the novels and stories where he uses motifs from his own life to create what many consider his alter ego. Wrote French linguist Aurélien Sauvageot, ‘He presents himself to us in various guises; as Sindbad the Sailor, as Kázmér Rezeda, the poor amorous poet who is constantly on the move and full of longings, always frequenting the company of women, and who has a passion for food; a man who proclaims the vanity of life. . . .’

Krúdy’s first alter ego appears in A vörös postakocsi (The Crimson Coach, 1914), perhaps his most popular novel, which called the public’s attention to Krúdy’s earlier writings as well.

The protagonist is one Kázmér Rezeda, presented as ‘a sad-looking gentleman whose haircut and the way he held his head were both slanted. He looked as if he had fallen a-dreaming some autumn evening in front of the first fire lit in the stove, burning the tokens of a past love, letters, locks of hair, little flounces, maybe even a garter—as if he were still holding his head in the same pose he had taken when he gazed at the feminine letters going up in flames.’ The novel is a nostalgic voyage from reality to dream, from present to past, evoking Budapest at the turn of the century. As the book’s translator, Paul Tabori, commented, ‘I have a reasonable though perhaps over-optimistic hope that with this book Krúdy . . . would have broken through the barrier of language, bridged the abyss between a strange, savoury and exquisite civilization and the modern West.’

This novel was followed by its sequels Őszi utazások a vörös postakocsin (Autumn Journeys in the Crimson Coach, 1917), a confessional and nostalgic account of Budapest, and Rezeda Kázmér szép élete (The Happy Life of Kázmér Rezeda, 1933), a less idealistic picture of his city and class. In his last years Krúdy published a collection of short stories, Az élet álom (Life is a Dream, 1931); here, instead of the dream-like atmosphere of his earlier pieces, where dream and reality, past and present merge, ‘the Hungarian Proust’ turned towards realism and meticulously described contemporary events.

The cultural historian John Lukacs wrote: ‘Krúdy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events in dream-like settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts.’ (New Yorker, 1 December 1986)

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Szindbád – Sindbad The Sindbad stories are accounts of the adventures of Krúdy’s alter ego, Sindbad the traveller, with the golden twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy serving as the background.

Krúdy continued to write these stories until his death. The main collections appeared as Szindbád ifjúsága (Sindbad’s Youth, 1911), A francia kastély (The French Chateau, 1912), Szindbád utazásai (The Travels of Sindbad, 1912), and Szindbád megtérése (The Conversion of Sindbad, 1925). The unifying principle in these stories is time itself, for Sindbad, searching and restless, attempts to change the present by immersing himself in recollections of his youth and his amorous adventures. Dreams and imagination mingle with reality, rendered in Krúdy’s evocative lyrical style, which conveys a stunningly original vision of the world.

Sindbad is more Casanova than Don Juan; the many women he has seduced were all madly in love with him and remember him with nostalgic awe. He is a born adventurer; the moment he attains the object of his desire, he sets sail on a new voyage. Some women commit suicide in consequence (‘Szindbád második útja’ – The Second Journey of Sindbad’; ‘Szindbád titka’ – Sindbad’s Secret; ‘Szindbád útja a halálnál’ – Sinbad’s Encounter with Death), others leave him right after their elopement (‘Utazás éjjel’ – ‘Journey at Night’), and there is one woman, Maimunka, who awaits his return with undying, almost maternal love. Sindbad is not interested in the personal fate of these women (although sometimes he feels a slight twinge of guilt); rather, he is enchanted by the eternal mystery of womanhood.

In the stories about his youth, Sindbad visits the town were he used to live as a child, to re-live the moment when his friend drowned in the river (‘Ifjú évek’ – ‘Years of Youth’), or when he first courted an actress (‘Az első virág’ – ‘The First Flower’). ‘A hídon’ – ‘On the Bridge) shows him meeting his own grown-up daughter, a love-child who does not recognise her father and to whom Sindbad is afraid to tell the truth. In these stories a sense of tragedy blended with irony enraptures the reader; while one may disapprove of the somewhat dubious figure of Sindbad, one cannot help but feel empathy for this sad and passionate man, and envy for his lust for life.

Reality dissolves when in some of the stories we learn that Sindbad is dead, but has not ceased to be. He often dreams of death, and dies several times (‘Szindbád álma’ –Sindbad’s Dream; ‘Érzelgős utazás’ – ‘Sentimental Journey’). Once he commits suicide, another time he dies alone in his room. Moreover, he often returns from death, either as a ghost that comes to visit a woman (‘Sírontúli bolondság’ – ‘Return from the Grave’; ‘Az éji látogató’ – ‘A Visitor in the Night’), or is transformed into a pearl and spends his unhappy penitence in the rosary of a nun.

In one story he is 103 years old, in another he is seemingly dead and his body is sent on a cart from his wife to his lover and back (‘A tetszhalott’ – ‘Suspended Animation’). The atmosphere of these stories is that of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights – fantastic anecdotes replete with realistic, often brutal detail.

In the book, Szindbád megtérése (The Conversion of Sindbad), the hero is already an old 44

man, but he is dissatisfied with his lot and longs for new women and new experiences. He is the kind of man who attends a religious ceremony only to have a look at the women. He desperately longs for the pleasures of life, and is a great gourmand and wine-lover. His son accompanies him on these last journeys, but he is there only to listen to Sindbad’s meditations.

The tales of Sindbad are still a favourite with Hungarian readers. In the 1970s they were turned into the award-winning film Szindbád directed by Zoltán Huszárik, with the legendary Hungarian actor, Zoltán Latinovits, in the title role.

There a re po em s b y A d y a n d s to r i e s b y K r ú d y w h i ch seem to ha ve b een w r it ten b y a cl e ver i m ita to r. B u t rea l fo l l o w ers n e ver se t o u t i n t hei r fo o ts te p s ; b o t h A d y a n d K r ú d y a ch i e ved t he f u l l e s t rea l iz a t i o n o f t hei r re s pect i ve s t y l i s t i c i n n o va t i o n s, a n d d i d n o t l ea ve a n y u n e x pl o red a ven u e s o pen to t ho se w ho w ere a t t ra cted to t hem.

Lóránt Czigány

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Sá n d o r M á ra i 1900 › born in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia) 1918 › begins law studies in Budapest; first volume of poetry published 1919 › continues his studies in Leipzig, later Berlin and Frankfurt 1920 › begins writing for Simplicissimus and Frankfurter Zeitung 1923 › moves to Paris with his wife 1928 › returns to Budapest 1930 › begins writing and publishing his major works; also writes for a variety of papers and journals, including Nyugat and Pesti Hírlap 1943 › elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1948 › leaves Hungary for political reasons 1951–67 › works for Radio Free Europe 1952 › after living in Switzerland and Italy, settles in New York and later becomes a US citizen 1967 › moves to Salerno, Italy 1980 › moves to San Diego 1989 › dies in San Diego 1990 › posthumously awarded the Kossuth Prize

Sándor Márai began his literary career as a poet and journalist, and continued to write poetry almost all his life; he also contributed hundreds of articles to newspapers and journals throughout Europe and the United States. His collected poems appeared in Munich as A delfin visszanézett (The Dolphin Looked Back, 1978), but he is best known for his novels and, particularly, his memoirs. The clarity and elegance of his style, springing from the clarity of his vision and reinforced by his moral stature, lend a certain air of nobility to his prose. A true cosmopolitan, he was an indefatigable defender of civil values and after World War II would not allow publication of his works in Hungary as long as the communists were in power. A revered emigrant writer with a strong moral presence in Hungary, Márai adhered faithfully to the cultural obligations imposed by a purposeful life; he was a man whose ethical values were bolstered by personal discipline and whose ‘first principle,’ in his words, ‘is the fulfilment of duty’; a human being who shaped his life through writing, in which ‘the highest degree of pleasure bursts into flame.’

Despite all odds, Márai held on to the vision of the perfectibility of man. In his life as well as his works, he subjected himself to rigorous self-analysis; this yielded a psychological portrait of the educated Hungarian middle class, which, by its very existence, posed a challenge to communism.

Márai’s first novels, essayistic and intellectual in style, show the influence of Freud.

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He often writes about artists, and does not conceal the autobiographical sources of his work.

Csutora (Csutora, 1932), for example, is the story of the writer’s dog. From the 1930s onwards Márai’s major preoccupation unfolded: the disintegration of the Hungarian polgárság, or genteel middle class. His novel Válás Budán (Divorce in Buda, 1936) is a good example of his novelistic technique: its few characters are presented from the inside, and the pace of the story, a love triangle in a middle-class setting, is leisurely. The novel A gyertyák csonkig égnek (Embers, 1942) has a similar theme: two elderly men talk all night long about the loves of their lives, their stories unfolding in the form of monologues. Published posthumously in English and other languages to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs.

As a dramatist, too, Márai was most interested in love-triangles. His play Kaland (Adventure, 1940) is about the great adventure of love and death: ‘At the critical moment of life’s great adventure each of us must stand alone.’ In 1940 Márai published the novel Szindbád hazamegy (Sindbad Heads Home), which has become a favourite in Hungary. It relates the last wanderings of the great Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy (whose key protagonist and alter ego was Sindbad), who died in poverty and seclusion. The book triggered a revival of interest in Krúdy’s work. ‘What Márai (who was twenty-two years Krúdy’s junior and knew him in the last years of his life) had composed was a Krúdy symphony, in the form of a reconstruction of Krúdy’s last day, in Krúdy’s style,’ wrote John Lukacs. ‘I read this book when I was seventeen. Afterward, I read as much Krúdy (and Márai) as I could lay my hands on, buying Krúdy volumes often in second-hand bookshops. And I was not alone.’ (New Yorker, 1 December 1986)

Márai was also noted as a writer of short stories (‘Kabala’ – ‘Charms’, 1936; ‘Mágia’ – Magic, 1941), but his memoirs show him at his best, for they can be read as a continuous sequence of novels about a remarkable writer’s life—much of this life spent in an uprooted existence in a turbulent era.

Európa elrablása (The Ravishing of Europe, 1947) is a book of essays about Márai’s personal experiences in the West after the Second World War, while Föld, föld…! (Memoir of Hungary, 1942), is a scathing, though at times humorous, and always insightful memoir that provides one of the most poignant and vivid portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation in 1944 and the solidification of communist power in 1948. Márai’s absorbing diaries were published in Hungarian in Washington, Toronto, Rome, and Munich, before they appeared in Budapest (Napló – Diary, 1958, 1968, 1976, 1984, 1992). In his words:

This is the H u n garian m id d le- cla ss who se way o f life I wa s born into, obser ved, cam e to k n ow an d scr utin ised in all its feat u res to the very roots, an d n ow I see the whole d isintegratin g . Perhaps this is m y life ’s, m y writin g’s sole d uty: to d elin eate the co u rse o f this d isintegration .

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Egy polgár vallomásai – Confessions of a Bourgeois

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Márai’s remarkable work, his autobiography Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Bourgeois; 2 vols., 1934–35), combines rigorous self-analysis with the psychological portrait of the writer’s own class. It shows the author at his best – brave, honest, intellectually incisive. It is a striking example of his integrity, for which he was much revered and from which he never swerved.

The first part of the book provides a personal account of the writer’s childhood in smalltown Hungary in the first decade of the twentieth century: an objective but dramatic description of middle-class life in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia). Márai recounts his schooling and his summers spent in a villa near town, and gives a detailed account of his family: its history and its inner workings, including his belief that he inherited his hypersensitivity from his mother; he also highlights the important moment in his life when he lost his faith in Christ.

It takes only a few months for the growing boy to show his inclination to rebel openly. In the summer he and his family spend their holidays at the residence of a wealthy uncle who allows the children to accompany him on hunting excursions. One day the young Márai gets fed up and makes an escape. He spends the night in the forest. His father tries to bring him back to the family and to middle-class existence, but he is determined to leave them. He is sent to a boarding school.

His childhood, and in fact the whole era of peaceful prosperity ends when, on a fine sunny day, the news arrives that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria has been assassinated in Sarajevo. This is where the first book ends.

The second book covers Márai’s youth and his life after the war, when, as a struggling writer, he travels through Europe. It is the portrait of the writer’s ‘passionately self-imposed imprisonment in art,’ observed László Cs. Szabó. Márai is only nineteen when he arrives in Leipzig and continues his travels to Weimar, Frankfurt (where he starts his career as a writer at the influential Frankfurter Zeitung) and Berlin, where he finally feels at home. Another turning point comes when he meets his childhood friend Lola, a girl from Kassa. They fall in love and are soon married.

They move to Paris, but the place seems alien and they are very poor. As Márai begins to take part in French life, they buy a car and explore the countryside. The writer begins to understand why he is drawn to the French. Though life in France is not as orderly as in Hungary or Germany, there is a deeper sense of inner order and harmony in people’s hearts. Márai, who devoted his entire life to the idea he first read on the gate of the cathedral of his hometown, Pro Libertate, discovers in France that true liberty means complete inner freedom.

Ten years have passed since he left Hungary, and Márai feels that he is now ready to write in earnest. He decides to return home and settles in Buda, the older and more peaceful part of the capital. He lives alone (his wife having remained in Paris) and makes his living as a journalist and writer. His disillusionment with society life has prepared him for his lonely life as an artist. The book ends with the death of the writer’s father, a true representative of a middle class that was by then almost obliterated by the turmoil of history. At this point, Márai has no doubt that it is his duty to write about the way of life of his father and his class, since he, as an artist, cannot follow in their footsteps.

Ferenc Móra 1879 › born in Kiskunfélegyháza 1901 › graduates from Budapest University of Sciences, teaches in a village school 1902 › editor, later editor-in-chief of Szegedi Napló, for which he continued to write till the end of his life 1904 › librarian at the Somogy County Library; begins to study archaeology 1905 › begins writing for the children’s journal Az én újságom, eventually contributing over a thousand pieces 1917 › appointed director of the Municipal Museum, Szeged; takes part in archaeological digs and folklore collecting 1922 › editor of the popular liberal newspaper Világ 1934 › dies in Budapest

The son of a poor tinker, Ferenc Móra continued the tradition of regionalism. His literary achievements were manifest in a variety of genres—novels, short stories, sketches, essays, and books for children. He also published notable studies and reports on archaeology. Rab ember fiai (The Prisoner’s Sons, 1908) is an adventure story from the times of Turkish rule, in which children heroically rescue their father from prison. His best-known children’s book, Kincskereső kisködmön (The Treasure-Hunting Smock, 1918), is an autobiographical piece still popular with children today. This and his other books for children are considered the most enjoyable children’s tales in Hungarian literature. Thanks to Móra’s broad imaginative vista and masterful handling of human emotions, they are entertaining indictments of injustice, pointing to the necessity, as literary critic József Reményi observed, of ‘straightening things out with goodwill,’ and they are ‘reminiscent of old folk tales, in which the particular stimulus of dreams, hopes, fairies and heroes acts as a sort of consolation in a disturbed and disturbing world.’

A versatile author and journalist, Móra was also an amateur archaeologist. His reports on the prehistoric sites around Szeged and in the Hungarian lowlands, A kunágotai sírok (Graves in Kunágota, 1926), are still of immense value. His most celebrated novel, Ének a búzamezőkről 49

(Song of the Wheatfields, 1927), is noted for its subtle handling of psychology and the question of guilt. Set in the period of World War I, it treats the predicament of a peasant so deeply attached to his land that he is not prepared to sacrifice it even for his son, a prisoner of war. While the characters are finely drawn as individuals, they also symbolise the fate of Hungarian peasants in general.

Móra’s historical novel Aranykoporsó (The Gold Coffin, 1933) is a richly-drawn love story set in ancient Rome under the Emperor Diocletian. Offering an impressive portrait of the Christian-Roman conflict, it is written with a wry sense of humour, and can to an extent also be read as an allegory of Emperor Franz Joseph and his time.

Móra’s satirical short novel Hannibál feltámasztása (Hannibal Resurrected, 1924/1955) was published only posthumously. A satire of the state of Hungarian education and cultural affairs in the inter-war period, it depicts a frustrated schoolmaster who publishes a treatise on what would have happened to the world had Hannibal won the battle of Zama. Instead of being lauded for his scholarly brilliance, he is humiliated and even attacked in Parliament for his destructive views. As observed by Lóránt Czigány, this book zeroed in on ‘corruption, nepotism, ignorance, and wishful thinking, all part of chasing the délibáb [rainbow] in political aspiration. . . . It is a small wonder that Móra could not have his book published’ during his lifetime.

Mó ra sa w t he i n d i v i d u a l i n t he pea sa n t. L a co n i c o r ta l k a t i ve , ea s y g o i n g o r s t i n g y , sel f - a ss u red o r s u b ser v i en t, ha pp y o r u n ha pp y , t he pea sa n ts rely o n co d e s t ha t d i s t i n g u i sh t hem a s m em b ers o f t he h u m a n f a m i ly w it h i n t he b o u n d a r i e s o f a co m m o n a n d s p i r it u a l cl i m a te . [. . .] Wh i l e fo l l o w i n g t he fo o ts te p s o f o t her H u n g a r i a n a n ecd o ta l w r iters, h i s wo rk s ha ve a d i s t i n ct o rg a n i c u n it y. H i s sen se o f i m m ed i a cy reca l l s D i ck en s a n d D a u d e t, a n d t he pl o t a n d cha ra cters o f so m e o f h i s s to r i e s a re rem i n i scen t o f t he “ ta l l ta l e s ” o f M a rk Twa i n .

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József Reményi

Kincskereső kisködmön – The Treasure-Hunting Smock In this children’s novel, Móra relies heavily on his own boyhood memories, evoked with humour and a light touch.

Gergő is a poor village boy who lives with his parents in an old mill. They are very poor indeed, but Gergő can’t shake his dream of being rich one day. He wants what the other boys in school have, such as a fine pair of boots, even if they would be difficult to walk in. Seeing his son’s yearning, his father, a furrier, makes him a fine jacket, a magic ködmön. The fairy living inside the ködmön will help Gergő attain his dream, he is told, but only if he is a good boy and always tells the truth. Thus it is that the magic ködmön becomes the boy’s conscience.

One day Gergő climbs up to the attic looking for treasure, but finds only a piece of glass that, as it turns out, is able to change the environment around it. He then goes outside, peeps in the window of the local Catholic church, and sees the sad face of Christ. Deciding to give Christ the magic glass, he goes inside. The priest wants to throw him out, but Gergő falls asleep in the pews and dreams of God, who accepts and appreciates his present. When the altar boy wakes him up, Gergő sees that his ‘diamond’ is gone—taken by God, no doubt. Such touches of irony often relieve the bitter memories of the author’s similar childhood experiences.

Gergő’s father dies just after completing the magic ködmön, but there are other grownups to look after him. A little old seamstress pays his school fees, and an old forester lends him a shabby-looking hat with the magic power to give him courage when confronting other children.

Gergő learns justice from his fellow students. When a strange old man punishes a boy unjustly, they all take revenge by making fun of him. But then Gergő learns that the old man is the grandfather and only surviving relative of another boy, a smart little chap on crutches who, because his grandfather was a miner, lives in a mine. One day Gergő goes to the mine looking for the boy to return a telescope he obtained by cheating. The two boys are injured, but only slightly and, although the old man dies, the story has a happy ending, and the author leaves his readers with the message: ‘Love is life.’

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Z sig m o n d Mó ricz 1879 › born in the village of Tiszacsécse in the Hungarian lowlands 1899 › studies theology in Debrecen 1900 › studies law and the humanities at the University of Budapest 1903 › begins working for the children’s section of the newspaper Újság; begins collecting folk songs, tales, and games 1908 › first short story appears in Nyugat 1910 › war correspondent, journalist 1929–33 › co-editor of Nyugat with Mihály Babits 1939–1942 › as Hungary’s pre-eminent ‘folk writer’, becomes editor of the literary review Kelet Népe (The People of the East) 1942 › dies in a town near Budapest

Born into a family of poor but ambitious peasants and constrained by his social origins, Zsigmond Móricz was the great re-inventor of the Hungarian novel and his nation’s best-known twentiethcentury practitioner of realist prose. Having no romantic illusions concerning rural life, he established a new mode of writing—terse, robust, sometimes even cruel in its honesty—that yielded a disturbing reading experience. His literary début was a moving short story, Hét krajcár (Seven Pennies, 1908), published in Nyugat and written with great compassion. Móricz’s novels and short stories deal with rural poverty and the brutality often accompanying it: insensitive village or small-town folk driven by self-interest or reckless sexual energy, primitive shepherds, bandits of the plain, petty officials, and lackadaisical yet penniless gentry.

His first of sixteen novels, Sárarany (Gold and Mud, 1910), is about a near-mythical character of boisterous energy and sexual prowess, a peasant Don Juan seemingly destined to be a leader in his community’s fight for land. Instead of achieving high ideals, though, this peasant winds up killing a landowner over a woman. In telling the story of this protagonist with naturalistic excess and unflinching realism, Móricz revealed the rigidity of class structures and the potential minefield of primitive forces boiling underneath.

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The hero of A fáklya (The Torch, 1917) is an idealistic Calvinist minister performing his duties in the debilitating Hungarian countryside, where his every effort is thwarted by ignorance and by the egotism bound up with class interests. The novel ends with an all-consuming fire and the death of the protagonist, who argues with God until the end, because God has resolved nothing.

The two anecdotal novels Kivilágos-kivirradtig (Until Daybreak, 1926) and Úri muri (Gentlemen’s Games/Very Merry, 1928) both deal with the self-destructive lifestyle of the gentry; a life of gambling and drinking; and the throwing of gargantuan parties, including one where the host sets fire to his own barn to provide nighttime light for the dancers. Rokonok (Relatives, 1932) is about small-town nepotism and corruption.

Erdély (Transylvania, completed in 1935), a monumental historical trilogy set in the seventeenth century, shows Móricz at his best; it is outstanding for its excellent dialogues, powerful characters, authentic atmosphere, and a mesmerising mastery of the Hungarian language. Barbárok (Barbarians, 1932) is a collection of Móricz’s numerous short stories. Often devoted to the people of the Hungarian Plain, these works evidence a ballad-like beauty and a brutal honesty reminiscent of Hemingway.

Móricz’s other writings include novels for young people (Légy jó mindhalálig; Be Faithful unto Death, 1920); poems for children (Boldog világ; Happy World, 1912); and plays (e.g. Sári biro – Judge Charlotte, 1910; Búzakalász – Wheatsheaf, 1924; and Vadkan –The Wild Boar, 1925. His lasting popularity is perhaps best indicated by the sixteen film adaptations of his works, the last released in 2012.

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Az Isten háta mögött – In the Back of Beyond In the Back of Beyond is set in the provincial town of Ilosva, a godforsaken place where the only excitement is provided by occasional country fairs. Few of the town-people harbour ambition.

The exceptions are the attractive young wife of the local schoolteacher, the town magistrate, and a sensitive, idealistic student. The central character, however, is the dull and wholly uninteresting schoolteacher, Pál Veres, who can’t understand why one of his wife’s admirers calls him Monsieur Bovary. The entire male population of the town seems to be in love with his wife, yet he is quite unaware of it.

Mrs. Veres is a sexually frustrated, unhappy and neurotic woman, not very bright (‘she was primitive and limited in her understanding, but exceptional in her sensuality’), yet dissatisfied with the narrow confines of her existence. She tries to escape her fate by seducing the magistrate, but their passionate embrace is interrupted by the student, a teenage boy who is also madly in love with her. The magistrate leaves, and the aroused woman tries to seduce the boy instead, but the return of her dull and insensitive spouse frustrates her efforts. The next day she learns about the grotesque accident that has befallen the magistrate, who died after jumping out of the window of a house where he had spent the night with another unhappy wife. In her hysterical despair, she follows his example, but lands unhurt on her behind. The town swarms with gossip, but the obtuse husband remains untouched: he returns to his ‘loving wife’ and life goes on, wearisome and provincial as ever.

There is, however, a faint glimmer of hope: the young lad. After kissing Mrs. Veres, he is driven to lose his virginity with the aid of a prostitute, but along with the loss of his virginity, he also loses his romantic ideals. In protecting the woman from scandal, he is constrained to lie to his headmaster and is threatened with expulsion. He has passed the first test in life; he has played the valiant knight but found no one worthy of his passion, and so he is determined to leave the unhappy world of the provinces.

The most moving parts of the novel are passages about the lad, both dramatic and dream-like, as inquisitive and suspicious eyes follow his every step, his pain and isolation echoing that of the heroine. The tone recalls Gustave Flaubert and Theodore Fontane as it charts a meaningless existence untouched by imagination. Móricz had a thorough grasp of human psychology, but was especially aware of sensuality and frustration. There is no relief of any kind.

While Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had the occasional opportunity to escape from the town and was capable of committing adultery and suicide, Mrs. Veres is resigned to her stale and asexual lot, and is further burdened with the ridicule and suspicion to which her accident gives rise.

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László Németh 1901 › born in Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) 1905 › family moves to Budapest 1919 › begins studying the humanities at the University of Budapest, then transfers to the Medical Faculty 1925 › begins hospital internship; first short story published in Nyugat 1926 › begins writing literary reviews for Nyugat, Erdélyi Helikon and other journals 1928–43 › professor at various medical schools 1930 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1932 › begins publication of his own periodical, Tanu (Witness) 1934 › co-founder and editor of the periodical Válasz (Response) 1939-42 › editor of Zsigmond Móricz’s periodical Kelet népe (People of the East); editor of Lajos Zilahi’s journal Híd 1957 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1975 › dies in Budapest

Born into a middle-class family, László Németh was a writer, essayist, playwright and political reformer who became a leading spokesman for populist ideals. As a reformer, he was an unremitting moralist and a promoter of ‘quality socialism’—that is, socialism without Marxism.

As a writer he was indebted to the brief but influential tradition of the realist novel, and most of his themes were taken from provincial life. His first short story, ‘Horváthné meghal’ (Mrs. Horváth Dies), is a closely observed portrait of a peasant woman.

László Németh`s novels are particularly rich in memorable female characters. Gyász (Mourning, 1935), a psychological novel written through the heroine’s eyes, presents a dark world resembling that of Greek tragedy. The heroine, Zsófi Kurátor, is a young widow who, after the loss of her husband, makes mourning the chief preoccupation of her life. When she loses her son as well, her insistence on mourning nonstop alienates the people of the village, including those who otherwise inclined to sympathise with her. However, for lack of a loving heart, she had nothing to fall back on except for the role of the noble, grief-stricken woman, a ‘peasant goddess’, whose tragedy is that she insists on a tradition no one takes seriously any more.

Németh’s second novel, Bűn (Guilt, 1936), introduces a male character, a young man

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from the provinces who is hoping to settle in Budapest. The book suggests the impossibility of mutual understanding between the intelligentsia and the peasantry: in the end the hero, an idealist intellectual devoted to the improvement of society, commits suicide. Németh’s bestknown novel, Iszony (Revulsion, 1947), narrated in the first person by its heroine, Nelli Kárász, ends in similar gloom. Nelli, who is forced into an unwanted marriage, is driven to murder, but she, a ‘dark angel’, is at least able to come to terms with herself and account for her sins. The third in the triptych of Németh’s powerful female characters is the eponymous heroine of Égető Eszter (Esther Égető, 1956). The novel is a saga spanning the first half of the twentieth century, a sweeping portrait of three generations of a middle-class family in a provincial town with the heroine’s life at its centre, from her childhood to her life as a grandmother.

Németh’s last novel, Irgalom (Compassion, 1965), comes to terms with the world through the moral evolution of the heroine, Ágnes Kertész, who in the end is finally able to suppress her inclination to bigotry along with her aversion to the world, through an understanding of the complexity of human relationships. ‘Compassion is a novel about the necessity of accepting vital instincts, accepting the world as it is, notwithstanding its moral imperfections’, wrote Lóránt Czigány.

A versatile author with a didactic bent, Németh also wrote essays on a wide range of topics, twenty-two plays, and several autobiographical works. In all his writings, he displayed a wide-ranging erudition and an unashamedly subjective ardour devoted to the improvement of man’s moral stature and intellectual goals.

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Iszony – Revulsion Revulsion, László Németh’s novel about an unhappy marriage, offers a striking psychological portrait of a proud and lonely woman. The first-person narrative of the heroine, Nelli Kárász, shows her alienation from the world and her gradual transformation into an angel of death.

Németh’s breathtakingly powerful description of physical and psychological details owes much to his medical background and to his artistic insight.

The book begins when Nelli is still living with her parents and is ashamed of their poverty-stricken state. She adores her taciturn and workaholic father, whom she resembles in many ways. A young and carefree gentleman from the provinces begins to court her, but she responds to his letters only for the sake of her parents. When her father suddenly dies, she is not in a position to reject her suitor and marries him, although by nature she would prefer his reclusive brother. Either way, she feels no desire for physical contact with him. Her husband, Sanyi Takaró, is her exact opposite: lazy, easy-going, and sexually active. She is disgusted by both his bodily habits and his behaviour, and tries what she can to delay the consummation of the marriage, but has to yield in the end.

Her physical frigidity is rooted in a puritanical morality, noble idealism, and complete isolation. (‘My soul had no inclination to mix with the world,’ she comments.) She finds consolation in doing work around the house. Her husband is in love with her and he is proud of her, and after a while she reconciles herself to her new life. She gives birth to a little girl and, although she feels no genuine maternal affection, she is happy with her child, because caring for the baby seals her off from her husband. But, as life goes on, she is also estranged from her own daughter.

As Nelli describes their marriage, she also gives a detailed and accurate description of the Hungarian village and its inhabitants: the lawyer, the doctor, the neighbours. The details of her marriage are also minutely drawn: the endless quarrels (the husband once comes close to committing suicide) and her jealousy—she hates her husband, but rages at the thought of his cheating on her. In her all-devouring misery, she slowly develops into a monster. Once, when Sanyi falls ill, she toys with the idea that he has died. But Sanyi seems to get over his illness, and when night comes, he wants to make love to her. Wrestling the convalescent man with a pillow she somehow—whether intentionally or not is not stated—covers his face and smothers him.

With the help of the county physician, Nelli gets away with the murder. She moves house and later becomes a nurse in a hospital. In her hard-working loneliness, she at last finds peace. The novel is a masterpiece, a triumph of austere composition and psychological insight.

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Ká ro ly Pap 1897 › born in Sopron, son of the town’s Orthodox rabbi 1915 › army service, front duty 1919 › officer of the Red Army 1920-21 › imprisoned for revolutionary activity 1921 › emigrates to Vienna 1922 › returns to Debrecen, works as a coffin maker 1923 › publishes first short story in Pesti Napló 1926 › begins contributing to Nyugat and Az Est 1930 › considered for the Baumgartner Prize but does not receive it due to his previous involvement with the Red Army 1944 › drafted into forced labour service 1944 › taken to Buchenwald in November 1945 › dies in Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen, exact date of death uncertain

Károly Pap (pronounced “Pup”), perhaps the strangest, loneliest writer in Hungarian literature, is often compared to Franz Kafka because of his controversial relationship to his father, a rabbi representing Neolog Judaism in Hungary, which was in strife with the Orthodox. His short stories and novels are noted for their unadorned lyrical prose and exploration of religious and ethical issues. His first novel, Megszabadítottál a haláltól (You Delivered Us from Death, 1932) reflects his messianic views. This “Christ story” is a parable of how the Jews and all of war-ridden mankind could be saved. The novel was very popular among left-wing writers and was warmly welcomed by Zsigmond Móricz.

The novel A nyolcadik stáció (The Eighth Station of the Cross, 1933), describing a painter’s struggle to create a portrait of Christ, is an allegory of creative work.

In the autobiographical novel Azarel (1937)—Pap’s magnum opus, a masterpiece of world Jewish literature—the main character is caught in a bind between Orthodox piety and Neolog hypocrisy.

Irgalom (Mercy, 1937) is the author’s only short story collection published during his lifetime. Most of the stories deal with children and childhood from an autobiographical perspective. In the intolerant atmosphere of the early 1940s, Pap treated the theme of Jewishness and Exodus in two dramas, the play Batséba (Bathsheba, 1940) and Mózes (Moses, 1944), in which he tried to find a way out of the pitfalls of history.

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Pap was a prolific short story writer, considered by many to be Hungary’s best in the inter-war years. The title story of the collection A szűziesség fátylai (The Veils of Virginity, 1945) deals with the vulgar and carnal aspects of the male-female relationship, which renders all love impossible. The other three story collections published posthumously are A hószobor (The Snow Statue, 1954), Szerencse (Luck, 1957), and B. városában történt (It Happened in the Town of B., 1964).

Azarel Set in rural Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century, Károly Pap’s novel Azarel is wrought with an agitated inner monologue, the near-hysterical reflections of a troubled child presented in detail as he struggles to understand his own self and his relationship to religion and to God.

Gyuri Azarel is the youngest son of a Neolog—i.e., modern reform—rabbi. Before his birth, his father promises him to his pious grandfather, Papa Jeremiah. The old man, who is an Orthodox fanatic, lives in a tent in the yard of the synagogue, busy contemplating the possibility of redemption. He considers all his seven sons heathen failures and seeks to impart his knowledge of Jewish learning to his young grandson, hoping that the child will prove to be his true disciple who will help bring about the appearance of the Messiah. The small child lives with the old man, who becomes more and more zealous and incapable of dealing with the child. In response, trying to adapt to the world of the yard and the adjoining cemetery, the child takes refuge in his imagination, heartened by the stimuli of the natural environment he inhabits.

When his grandfather dies, young Gyuri is forced to return to his parents, who are now almost strangers to him. In vain he expects the furniture and other inanimate objects of their bourgeois flat—a lifeless world, compared to that of the synagogue yard—to come to life, He feels that his rigid and respectable rabbi father expects filial obedience and Judaic devotion from him, but the boy is furious at Judaism and at his father for trying to make him believe in a God he has little use for. He accuses his parents of being hypocrites. When he attempts suicide by jumping out the window, his parents see this as an act of childish ingratitude. The lack of understanding drives the boy to rebellion. After a severe beating he leaves home, begs on the streets, and hurls himself into an early breakdown. He makes up his mind to go to the synagogue to denounce his rabbifather as a hypocrite, but in his highly emotional and agitated state of mind, he hears a heavenly voice, faints, and is returned to his home—to bed, ill, as a sort of prodigal son. To everyone but himself it seems that from then on, he will accept the laws and ways of his family.

Dramatized with the sensibility that echoes the works of Isaac Babel and Henry Roth, Azarel is a realistic and powerful story, narrated with authority and force. The conviction of the narrator’s grandfather, Papa Jeremiah, that by consorting and living with Christians whose ‘hirelings’ they are, the reform Jews are helping to ‘melt the Jewish people in the furnaces of exile’, is prophetic for a book first published in 1937.

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Mik ló s R a d n ó t i 1909 › born in Budapest 1927–28 › studies textile manufacturing in Reichenberg, in Bohemia 1928 › launches the short-lived literary journal 1928 with friends 1929 › co-founder of the avant-garde literary journal Kortárs 1929 › joins the Art Forum of Szeged Youth, a group of left-wing intellectuals and artists 1930 › begins to study Hungarian and French at the University of Szeged; first volume of poems published 1931 › second volume of poems banned 1934 › awarded doctorate in Hungarian literature; moves back to Budapest, marries; frequent contributor to Nyugat.

1937 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1931–39 › three visits to Paris, which exercises a profound effect on him 1940 › called up to serve in a labour battalion for three months under the anti-Jewish laws; then, in 1942–43, for ten months 1943 › converts to Catholicism 1944 › deported to labour camp in Bor (Yugoslavia), then sent on a forced march to Germany; on November 4 or 9, shot dead by soldiers near Abda, in western Hungary

One of the eminent poets of the twentieth century, Miklós Radnóti also translated widely from classical Greek and Latin as well as English, French and German poetry. In the words of one of his own translators, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, ‘He framed poetic innovation in the pattern of the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. . . . Some poems, cast in ancient meters, ring with prophetic power. Others, in delicate invented forms, create the most exquisite crystalline tones. They produce magic, conjuring up the unprecedented without becoming obscure.’

Radnóti’s earliest volume, Pogány köszöntő (Pagan Invocation, 1930), is written in the expressionist tones of the avantgarde. The poems are composed in free verse, full of evocative visions. With their new configuration of images, new rhythms and tonalities, his second and third volumes, Újmódi pásztorok éneke (The Song of New-Fashioned Shepherds, 1931) and Lábadozó szél (Convalescent Wind, 1933) evidence a distinctive shift toward surrealism. The poems collected in Új hold (New Moon, 1935) and Járkálj csak, halálraítélt (March On, You Who are Condemned to Die, 1936) show the influence of contemporary French poetry and culture, and 60

often carry political undertones. Meredek út (Steep Road, 1938) and the posthumous Tajtékos ég (Clouded Sky, 1946) contain the poet’s renowned eclogues in which he employed classical forms to articulate the anguish of the threatened and persecuted individual, resulting in works of great compassion and beauty. The model for the cycle was the Eclogues of Virgil, of which he himself translated the Ninth Eclogue in 1938.

Besides his poems, essays and studies, Radnóti also published a prose memoir, Ikrek hava (Under Gemini, 1940), based on reflections on the death of his mother and twin brother when she gave them birth. His Diary appeared in 1989. His Razglednicas (Postcards, 1944), short masterpieces describing incidents during prisoners’ death march to Germany, were found in the poet’s pocket when the mass grave in which he was interred was exhumed after the war.

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Peace, Dread I went out, closed the street door, and the clock struck ten, on shining wheels the baker rustled by and hummed, a plane droned in the sky, the sun shone, it struck ten, I thought of my dead aunt and in a flash it seemed all the unliving I had loved were flying overhead, with hosts of silent dead the sky was darkened then and suddenly across the wall a shadow fell.

Silence. The morning world stood still. The clock struck ten, over the street peace floated: cold dread was its spell.

(1938) (Translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner)

From “Razglednicas “ III. The oxen drool saliva mixed with blood.

Each one of us is urinating blood.

The squad stands about in knots, stinking, mad.

Death, hideous, is blowing overhead.

(Translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner)

IV. I fell next to him. His body rolled over.

It was tight as a string before it snaps.

Shot in the back of the head – ‘This is how you’ll end.’ ‘Just lie quietly,’ I said to myself.

Patience flowers into death now.

‘Der springt noch auf,’ I heard above me.

Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear.

(Translated by Steven Polgár)

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Forced March He’s foolish who, once down, resumes his weary beat, A moving mass of cramps on restless human feet, Who rises from the ground as if on borrowed wings, Untempted by the mire to which he dare not cling, Who, when you ask him why, flings back at you a word Of how the thought of love makes dying less absurd.

Poor deluded fool, the man’s a simpleton, About his home by now only the scorched winds run, His broken walls lie flat, his orchard yields no fruit, His familiar nights go clad in terror’s rumpled suit.

Oh could I but believe that such dreams had a base Other than in my heart, some native resting place; If only once again I heard the quiet hum Of bees on the verandah, the jar of orchard plums Cooling with late summer, the gardens half asleep, Voluptuous fruit lolling on branches dipping deep, And she before the hedgerow stood with sunbleached hair, The lazy morning scrawling vague shadows on the air...

Why not? The moon is full, her circle is complete.

Don’t leave me, friend, shout out, and see! I’m on my feet!

(Translated by George Szirtes)

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“ Lorinc Szabó 1900 › born in the industrial city of Miskolc 1919 › begins studies at the University of Budapest but discontinues them; Mihály Babits is among his teachers 1920 › first publication of his poems in Nyugat 1921 › translates and writes for Nyugat; works for the evening paper Est 1922 › first book of poems published 1927 › editor of the literary periodical Pandora; journalist of the liberal dailies Pesti Napló and Est, which also publish his writings 1932 › (also 1937 and 1944) awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1957 › awarded the Kossuth Prize; dies in Budapest

Lőrinc Szabó was a poet of great originality, passionate intensity, and impeccable craftsmanship.

A member of the so-called second Nyugat generation of writers, for a short time he was Mihály Babits’s friend and protégé. His analytical intelligence and hypersensitivity, together with a predilection for exalted but logical style, made him one of the most influential, if not the most popular, poets of the twentieth century.

His first book of poems, Föld, erdő, Isten (Earth, Forest, God, 1922) shows a poet of Dionysian temperament writing in a bucolic ‘landscape’. This collection seems heterogeneous because of its unbounded pantheism, the use of blank verse and the avoidance of personal experience. Szabó’s early poetry was strongly influenced both by Babits and Stefan George; it was shot through with expressionism, and bore traces of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

His second volume, Kalibán (Caliban, 1923), is similarly heterogeneous, with the poet appearing more reluctant to accept an inner peace while he is rebelling against mankind in general and his own Prospero, Babits, in particular. In it he claims that no human being is capable of pure, Olympian conduct. Although he did not yet know it, Szabó’s quarrel was not with the ideal of beauty that Babits championed. Rather, his restlessness was a revolt against life itself and its irreconcilable contradictions. Later on, duality and a longing for negation came to dominate his works.

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Szabó’s inner turmoil and restless intelligence are reflected in the title of two of his volumes, Fény, fény, fény (Light, Light, Light, 1926) and A Sátán műremekei (The Masterpieces of Satan, 1926); here the poet experiments with the reflection of cosmic powers by linguistic means, and rails against capital and the way he is forced to live as a poor poet and struggling journalist. The chaotic exclamations and fragmentary images (‘Curse the city and flee!’, ‘We live in an iron age and there’s nothing worth saving’, ‘Poison! Pistol! Under the express train!/ Slit your rasping / throat, you madman!’) are Luddite assaults on technological civilization. These belligerent poems present city life as a nightmarish landscape swarming with humans, whose powerful descriptions are underscored by a dynamic, expressionist style.

Szabó’s second artistic phase brought bitter scepticism, agnosticism and disenchantment. Szabó was well versed in contemporary philosophy, particularly Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell, as well as in Oriental thought. Te meg a világ (You and the World, 1932) and Különbéke (A Separate Peace, 1936) are monuments to intellectual curiosity and, especially, unsparing self-analysis. The world is revealed as a prison, man is condemned to solitude (‘I am covered by solitude, as an apple by its skin’), and only fleeting bodily contact is possible between the sexes, for love is nothing but ‘a secret duel between two self-interests’. Szabó’s imagery is refined into a remorseless logic in a chaste language. However painful they might be, objectivity and exactness of description are his highest values. The bitter analytical poems against morality are counter-pointed by poems relating Buddhist philosophical parables, and poems about Lóci, the poet’s son.

His third period is reflective. Towards the end of his life the poet seems to have found some kind of reconciliation and harmony in recalling his childhood memories and the happy moments of his adult life. His lyrical autobiography Tücsökzene (Cricket Music, 1947) is a fine example of narrative poetry, a loosely connected sequence of originally 352 extended 18 line sonnets, describing with objective sensibility various episodes of his life.

A huszonhatodik év (The 26th Year, 1957), Szabó’s final book of verse, is tragic in inspiration: it is a book of praise and mourning, recalling the memory of a love affair lasting twenty-five years. The cycle of 120 sonnets proclaims an eternal love marked by beauty and intensity, ending with the death of the lover. Szabó’s mystical perception of love proves cathartic for both poet and reader.

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The Dreams of the One Since you are this way and they are that and his interests are different and truth’s a sort of nervous fact or verbal front and since nothing out there pleases me and since the crowd still has supremacy and of the framing of rules I am utterly innocent: it is high time now that I escaped your net.

What should I go on waiting for any longer, timidly scanning days to come?

Time hurries past, and whatever lives is true to itself alone.

Either I am sick, or you are; and am I not to recognize the weapons in the hand of love or hate that comes to stand before my face?

If I am forever only to understand, where is my own place?

No! no! no! How can I bear to be no more than a thread in a mad web: to understand and honour the guard and share his pain, his pain!

All who could, have long got out of the snares, they go freely through and about the wires.

I and the world, there go the two of us, captive in the cage, the world with the limelight on itself, like me on my own stage.

We’re escaping, my soul, we’ve sprung the lock, the mind has leapt away but is careful to paint itself with the bars of appearance.

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Inside it is one that outside’s a thousand fragments!

Who knows where the man ever went that saw the fish, and still the net intact?

Forbidden? By someone else! Sin? To them, if caught in the act!

Within us, inside, no divisions or frontiers, nothing is forbidden we are only what we are, each one a solitude, not bad, not good.

Hide in the depths of yourself! For there, the great and free dream, you’d swear, lies abandoned still, as where our mother the unbounded sea appears like a memory in the sharp taste of our tears and blood.

Back into the sea, into ourselves! Only there we can be free!

We needn’t look out yonder to see anything coming to us from the Many.

If ever we are hucksters with the crowd, truth crumbles down to powder; only the One is our home ground, never undone: let us dream, if we still can, the dreams on the One! (Translated by Edwin Morgan)

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Antal Szerb 1901 › born in Budapest 1911 › begins school at the prestigious Piarist Gymnasium, where his first forays into writing are later published 1921 › six poems published in Nyugat, for which he continues to write 1924 › obtains PhD from the University of Budapest 1924-29 › lives in France and Italy 1929-30 › lives and studies in London 1933 › elected president of the Hungarian Literary Society 1935, 1937 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1937 › appointed university professor at Szeged 1943–44 › called up into forced labour 1945 › executed along with 2,000 other Hungarian Jews during a forced march westward at Balf, in western Hungary

Antal Szerb—essayist, novelist and passionate scholar of literature—was one of the most accomplished and most likeable figures of Hungarian literature between the two world wars.

He was rich in ideas, writing in a witty, cultured conversational tone—a quintessential Central European intellectual, with all the refinement, integrity and rootlessness of the species.

Being primarily interested in English letters, Szerb launched his literary career with the slim Az angol irodalom kistükre (An Outline of English Literature, 1929). This was followed by his much more ambitious and widely read literary history, the irreverent and witty A magyar irodalom története (The History of Hungarian Literature, 1934), in which he set Hungarian authors against a European background, much to the chagrin of the conservative authorities, who banned it in 1941. A világirodalom története (The History of World Literature, 1941), a comprehensive yet highly personal survey of world literature, brilliantly completes this sequence of syntheses. No literary historian in Hungary has ever been so popular.

In Szerb, the scholar and the writer of fiction are difficult to separate, so it is little wonder that he had a particular fondness for writing essays, which were collected in Hétköznapok és csodák (Weekdays and Miracles, 1942) and two posthumously published volumes, Gondolatok a könyvtárban (Thoughts in the Library, 1946) and A varázsló eltöri pálcáját (The Magician Breaks 68

His Wand, 1948).

When Szerb turned to fiction, the scholar was always present. His stories are often set in the periods he happened to be concerned with at the time, and prominent among his heroes is the figure of the scholar, as in the stories ‘Cynthia’ (1932), ‘Madelon, az eb’ (The Dog Madelon, 1934), and the novel A Pendragon legenda (The Pendragon Legend, 1934), which is simultaneously a detective story, a mysterious legend, a historical novel, a work of popular science and a parody.

The short stories in Szerelem a palackban (Love in a Bottle, 1935) reflect a young man’s obsession with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with the world of miracles, mysticism, of the irrational and escapism. The hero of Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight / The Traveller, 1937), on honeymoon in Venice, flees from his bride and wanders around Italy. In the course of his wittily related, surrealistic adventures, he confronts existence and death and concludes, ‘He would have to remain with the living. He too would live: like the rats among the ruins, but nonetheless alive. And while there is life, there is always the chance that something might happen.’ George Gömöri commented, ‘The Traveller is a short but colourful and entertaining novel, influenced more by Cocteau and Gide than by contemporary English writing, even though Szerb was one of the early admirers of Aldous Huxley.’

The background of the novel A királyné nyaklánca (The Queen’s Necklace, 1943) is the complex world of the French ancien régime contrasted with the values of Rousseau and Voltaire, and, indeed, the author’s own values. Szerb published the novel VII. Olivér (Oliver VII, 1941) under the pseudonym A. H. Redcliff.

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Utas és holdvilág – Journey by Moonlight ‘It was a really strange thesis, half parody of religious history, half deadly serious study of [. . .] himself.’ The way the protagonist of the novel depicts his friend’s writing could well stand for Antal Szerb’s own handling of the narrative technique. Len Rix, the novel’s English translator, praises it for its ‘gently ironical tone, the deceptive casualness with which the story unfolds, the amused skepticism playing on every variety of pretension.’

Mihály, a well-off businessman, is on his honeymoon in Venice, a town he has avoided so far, feeling he was not ready for it, just as he had not deemed himself ready to give up his freedom and get married. Moonstruck, he wanders the alleys of the city, until, in a rush of sincerity, he talks about his youth to his newly-wed wife. But the telling of the tale changes him, and on their way to Rome, Mihály gets off the train only to find himself on another one heading to Perugia. This escape, involuntary if not entirely unintentional, is a new experience for Mihály, who realizes that he does not wish to be found. Fleeing from the world, he soon collapses with a nervous breakdown and ends up in a hospital in Foligno. Here he hears about a strange friar in Sant Ubald’s monastery whom he recognizes as his old friend Ervin, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism. Meeting with him, Mihály confesses that he feels trapped by his marriage. Ervin absolves him and sends him to Rome, but in the meantime, his wife, Erzsi, has moved on to Paris.

In Rome, Mihály reluctantly decides to go home when, quite accidentally, he happens across his old friend, the wealthy Éva, whom he has loved, but quickly loses sight of her. The other main characters of his unmarried life also make appearances, all of this conspiring to help Mihály decide that the sole answer out of the free life versus married life quandary is death. But the story is not to have a tragic ending: as Mihály composes his farewell letter to his family, an Italian acquaintance insists that he should appear at a baptism; he drinks so much at the festivity afterward that he forgets about his suicide. His father also joins the scene, and takes Mihály home to resume the life he had wanted to escape from, but now rid of nostalgia and free of the panic of married life. Still, hope is the last to die, and the novel ends with the hero thinking that as long as he’s alive, something may still happen to make it all worthwhile.

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Áron Tamási 1897 › born in Farkaslaka, Transylvania (Lupeni, Romania) 1918 › in active service on the Italian front in World War I 1921 › receives law degree from the University of Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) 1922 › graduates from the Commercial Academy of Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) 1923 › sets sail for the USA 1925 sends his short stories home; his first book is published 1926 returns to Transylvania and joins the Helikon Literary Society; member of the Transylvanian Artists Guild 1929 awarded the Baumgarten Prize, also in 1930, 1933 and 1943 1945 settles in Budapest and becomes a member of Parliament 1954 awarded the Kossuth Prize 1966 dies in Budapest

Áron Tamási is the best-known Hungarian writer to emerge from among that legendary ethnic Hungarian subgroup that inhabits Transylvania, the Székelys—a writer whose native Transylvania was annexed to Romania after World War I under the Treaty of Trianon, then in 1940 was partly re-annexed to Hungary, only to be returned to Romania in 1945; a writer who throughout these politically turbulent years maintained a firm belief in individual liberty. He also understood the needs of the simple folk, whom he knew first-hand. The structure of his numerous short stories and novels resembles that of myths and folk tales, while the freshness and vividness of his language and his special brand of Székely humour, coupled with close observation rendered in poetic terms, make him an author still widely read today, and whose many books have been turned into films.

Tamási emerged as a writer during his stay in the United States, where he made a meagre living from odd jobs while writing pieces about the world he had left, based in Székely tradition.

His first book of short stories, Lélekindulás (Soul-Moving, 1925), displays all the characteristics of his writing—the theme is rural life, the language is lively, the writing is full of playful humour and wit. The stories present poverty in minute detail without romanticizing it in the least, yet they also express the belief that, with sufficient moral strength and intellectual vigour, one can 71

be master of one’s destiny. Tamási published many collections of short stories in his lifetime, notably Hajnali madár (Bird at Dawn, 1929) and Rügyek és reménység (Buds and Hope, 1936), but it was his autobiographically inspired Ábel trilogy (Ábel a rengetegben – Ábel Alone, 1932; Ábel az országban – Ábel in the Country, 1934; and Ábel amerikában – Ábel in America, 1934) that made Tamási’s name.

In Jégtörő Mátyás (Matthias the Icebreaker, 1935), perhaps the most original of his thirteen novels, he experimented with mythic structure. A sublimation of the author’s predicament as a second-class citizen in his native Transylvania, it concerns a stray spirit arriving from the stars whose transmigration through flea, spider, bee, stork, owl, eagle, fox and dog ends with it entering a human being whose birth concludes the novel. Tamási’s naive surrealism in this work is akin to that of folk tales and fables; the eternal battle between good and evil is staged with calculated simplicity and naivety, which lends an irresistible charm to the book. As critics have noted, Tamási’s style is in some ways the Transylvanian forerunner of magical realism.

Ragyog egy csillag (A Star is Shining, 1938) continues this tale: the spirit is re-born in a village boy, a Messianic figure with a calling to improve his people’s lot by ‘uniting the body and the spirit’. In the novel, which contains many autobiographical elements, Tamási asserts his belief in a world of peace and harmony.

Tamási also wrote a memoir of his childhood. Entitled Bölcső és bagoly (The Cradle and the Owl, 1953) it was intended to be the first part of an autobiographical trilogy.

Tamási was also a playwright. His Énekes madár (Songbird, 1934), the first of six dramas, is a folk play which, he notes, ‘is set in any Székely village at any time’. An intriguing, closely observed psychological drama of people living in isolation with nothing but their feelings and a strict sense of ethics, it ends, unsurprisingly, with love triumphing over the baser passions of suspicion, hate and jealousy—but the happy end does nothing to diminish the profound drama of the heart.

Ábel a rengetegben – Abel Alone Áron Tamási’s most popular novel met with such an enthusiastic reception that he turned it into a trilogy by writing the sequels Ábel az országban (Ábel in the Country, 1934) and Ábel Amerikában (Ábel in America, 1934). The trilogy is rooted in the author’s own experiences; the protagonist, Ábel, is both Tamási’s alter ego and a timeless mythical hero.

The story of Ábel a rengetegben begins in 1920, one year after the Székelys, natives of Transylvania, had submitted to Romanian rule. In their close-knit ethnic community they developed a most effective defence mechanism: a peculiar battle of wits, the fundamental rule of which is that one never gives a direct answer to a direct question. Ábel, the book’s fifteenyear old protagonist, is already well versed in this kind of banter. The novel begins with a battle of 72

native wits between him and his father, who inveigles him into saying that he is old enough not to be afraid to be alone. When it turns out that his father has found Ábel a job as a watchman in a firewood depository in the mountains, he is compelled to keep his word. The very next day the defenceless child is out in the wilderness, alone except for a cat, a goat and a stray dog sheltering in his log cabin. He takes up his new job as watchman and meets a variety of often dubious characters who visit him on the mountain. He is faced with temptation and yields: with the help of a leftover grenade he found in the forest he uproots trees and trades the wood for pulp fiction which gradually undermines his sense of reality and his keen intellect. Later, three visiting friars provide him with better reading material, and the mind-numbing books are consigned to the flames.

In the course of a harsh winter, Ábel encounters other visitors as well: a cunning adventurer and a cruel policeman. The boy has to fight for his existence against human cunning and inclement weather; though he meets cunning with cunning, he only just manages to save his life.

This is a story of initiation into manhood, of the defenceless child maturing into an adult. It culminates with a visit from his father, who has come to tell Ábel that his mother has died. Ábel grieves, but his adventures are not over. Like two hungry wolves, two rogues show up at his hut, and Ábel is humiliated again, this time together with his father. Ábel a rengetegben is an introduction to the soul of the people of the Balkans, a pitting of cunning against brutality.

The novel, however, ends on a peaceful note. It turns out that there is some humanity left in the bandits, and they turn themselves in to the police. A dying friar, Ábel’s friend, even gives them his blessing. Thereupon, Ábel visits his mother’s grave and vows that he will always help the poor and the suffering.

In Ábel az országban, the second book of the trilogy, Ábel leaves the mountains for the city and after many hilarious adventures and detours, at the end of the book he is invited to his father’s wedding and receives a ticket to America. In the third part of the trilogy, Ábel Amerikában, Ábel sails for the U.S., where he tries to find his place in an outlandish, mechanised civilisation, and where, in his search for the ultimate answers to the meaning of existence, he comes upon an old black man, who tells him, “We are born to this Earth to find a home on it.”

Taking the old man’s observation to heart, at the end of the novel Ábel returns to his homeland, just as Tamási did himself.

The trilogy is highly original in style; it evokes the world of ballads and the playfulness of Székely anecdotes and folk tales. The unforgettable, closely observed, down-to-earth portraits of the characters emerge in settings detailed and timeless at the same time, a fact that has helped Tamási’s writings remain a favourite with generations of readers.

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Józsi Jeno“ Tersánszky 1888 › born in Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) 1910 › first publication, in Nyugat 1911 › first collection of short stories published by Nyugat Könyvtár 1914–18 › serves as an army volunteer in World War I, becomes a POW 1922 › begins writing regularly for Nyugat 1944 › helps persecuted Jews obtain forged papers 1949 › receives the Kossuth Prize 1950–55 › silenced for political reasons 1956 › collected works begin to appear 1969 › dies in Budapest as a celebrated figure

‘Of the minor prose writer around Nyugat,’ wrote Lóránt Czigány, ‘it was J. J. Tersánszky who discovered the world of social outcasts, tramps, gypsies, and other vagabonds.’

Tersánszky’s first collection of short stories, A tavasz napja sütötte (Springtime Sun, 1911) already shows his commitment to the common people and the poor. His style is often nominal and nearly always sparse and tense; the settings are sketched in a few lines and the characters are drawn with quick, efficient brushstrokes: helpless drunkards, children, women torn by erotic passion, and schoolboys trying to get hold of the girls. This penchant for efficiently rendered descriptions stemmed from Tersánszky’s admirable gift of observation, which he had originally meant to use as a painter. His popular Viszontlátásra drága (Good-bye, Darling!, 1916), which he finished in the trenches of World War I, was, according to the great Endre Ady, ‘the first war novel that represents true quality.’ The book’s central character is a young Polish woman, Nela, in war-torn Galicia, who is abused and raped by Russian, Austrian and Hungarian officers in turn. A dreamer who is confronted with the realities of war and cut off from the protection of social mores, she is gradually transformed from victim to indifferent participant grateful for small favours to someone who is perhaps already thinking of her next adventure when an officer of a retreating army bids her farewell with the words, ‘Good-bye, darling!’

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Tersánszky’s truly original contribution to Hungarian fiction, however, is represented by his Marci Kakuk novels. An irresponsible vagabond and partly Tersánszky’s alter ego, Marci Kakuk first appears as a minor character in the short story ‘Ruszka Gyuriék karácsonya’ (Christmas at Gyuri Ruszka’s), but later becomes the narrator of the ever-popular Marci Kakuk novels and the prototype of those social drop-outs ‘whose only concern in life,’ observed Lóránt Czigány, ‘is to keep on living.’

In Kakuk Marci ifjúsága (Marci Kakuk’s Youth, 1921), the first volume devoted to Tersánszky’s popular hero, Marci Kakuk appears already fully armed with an arsenal of verbal and practical tricks. An unusual character without too much moral responsibility but with abundant joie de vivre who loves women and wine, he resembles the heroes of picaresque novels; no matter how many adventures he lives through, he never changes.

A céda és a szűz (The Whore and the Virgin, 1922) is a novella about the double standards of contemporary society. The narrator-protagonist, Veron, is a servant girl who likes to read and to explore the city, and doesn’t mind giving in to her sexual urges. But she is still as pure as a virgin (at least in her heart) compared to the other servant girl, Ágnes, who obeys only her financial urges and hypocritically lets her old and ugly godfather seduce her, finally succeeding in becoming his wife. In Tersánszky’s opinion, money corrupts society and everyone should acknowledge that sexuality is simply a bodily need, an instinct that needs to be fulfilled. After the novel’s publication, Tersánszky was duly charged in court with ‘advertising pornography’ and was sentenced to two months in prison.

The conflict of conventional versus true morality reappears in A margarétás dal (Song with Daisies, 1929) as well. The novel is about Natasha, a young woman of loose morals who is still an idealist deep down, because her only aim in life is to get close to her only true love.

One of Tersánszky’s most interesting books is nevertheless a work of nonfiction, Nagy árnyakról bizalmasan (Great Shadows, Confidentially, 1963), an unlikely memoir about the great Nyugat generation, whose real hero is Tersánszky himself. His intention was to show the iconic writers in their nightgowns and slippers, and to reveal to the public fascinating aspects of their private lives.

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Legenda a nyúlpaprikásról – The Legend of the Rabbit Paprikás Tersánszky’s heroes are often poor men and women, drunkards who long for redemption and plan to change their lives, but always fail, for only a divine miracle could help them. The Legend of the Rabbit Paprikás is an ironic yet heart-warming attempt to show how ‘miracles’ work.

Gazsi is a miserable swineherd, a wretched old man with no ambition who is always kicked around and who during the winter lives in a wooden hut in a constable’s yard. One day he is asked to fetch the constable’s knife left in a tree trunk in the middle of a snowy field. He hasn’t eaten for a whole day and can hardly walk, but as the constable asks God’s blessings for Gazsi’s journey, in his naïve faith the old man goes after the knife in the falling winter night. He succeeds in finding the knife, but he also finds some dead rabbits illegally hidden by someone after the day’s annual rabbit hunt. He picks them up and carries them back to the constable’s house. By the time he gets there, he is almost frozen, but he still helps the constable’s wife to prepare a savoury rabbit paprikás (paprika stew). When it is ready, they send him back to his hut without giving him so much as a bite of the stew.

Poor Gazsi is so curious to know how such a heavenly dish tastes that he can hardly wait for next year’s rabbit hunt—convinced as he is that he will find another bunch of hidden rabbits. When the time comes, however, he has a sore leg and a high fever and falls asleep on his makeshift bed, missing the events of the hunt, which prove more memorable than usual.

It all begins with a poor little rabbit that sleeps all through the hunt and wakes up only when its mother is shot and the constable and his dog begin to collect the kill. Frightened, it jumps up and breaks into a run. The dog immediately follows. Paprikás, the little rabbit, crosses the field and suddenly finds itself in the path of a countess’ onrushing coach. It manages to avoid getting hit, but the horses’ feet get entangled in the leash of the dog in pursuit, which soon finds itself under the wheels. The coachman falls out onto the road, the countess swoons, and the bolting horses drag her away.

Meanwhile the rabbit, whose way is blocked from several sides by the villagers, runs right into the village, causing great confusion. It finally finds a hiding place—right in the hut of the sleeping Gazsi. The coach also turns into the constable’s yard, but the countess finally comes to, calms the horses, then goes back to fetch the unconscious coachman. When Gazsi wakes up in the evening, he is greatly disappointed that he has missed the opportunity to try and find the rabbits and taste the stew. Instead he finds a live rabbit—namely, Paprikás. Soon he tames it, and the little rabbit and the poor old swineherd make friends.

Much later, when the countess finds out what happened to the rabbit that caused her accident, she is so touched by the fact that Paprikás even brought its bunnies to Gazsi that she takes him along with the rabbit family and appoints him to be a regular swineherd on the count’s estate. Thus, the legend about naivety and goodness ends well, with the writer commenting that Gazsi now took his rightful place among the real heroes of fiction.

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Lajos Zilahy 1891 › born in Nagyszalonta (Salonta, Romania) 1914–1916 › serves in World War I; is seriously wounded 1916 › begins to work as a journalist; first volume of poems published 1920 › graduates from Budapest Law School 1920s › works for the daily Magyarország, later becoming its editor-in-chief; also begins writing for other newspapers and journals 1926 › appointed secretary of PEN International 1935 › two articles by him launch the debate on the New Spiritual Front, which deepened the schism between the populist and urbanist writers 1939 › launches Pegazus, his own film company 1940–44 › member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; editor of the journal Híd (Bridge) 1948 › emigrates to the U.S. 1974 › dies in a sanatorium in Novi Sad (Yugoslavia); is buried in Budapest

Lajos Zilahy may have made his writing debut as a poet (Versek; Poems, 1916), but he achieved worldwide popularity as a novelist who chronicled the life of the disintegrating middle-class and the aristocracy with Old World romanticism, a hefty dose of surging emotion, and a hint of the erotic. His novels delve into the history of the Hungarian-speaking territories in the twentieth century, but history serves merely as a backdrop to the enthralling stories and vivid cast of unforgettable characters trying to find happiness in a disintegrating world. He is little remembered as a playwright—Hazajáró lélek (Returning Soul, 1923), Süt a nap (The Shining Sun, 1924), and Fehér szarvas (The White Stag, 1927) were produced by Hungary’s National Theatre— but his plays were popular and much lauded around the time of their release.

Zilahy’s passionate if at times overwrought love story, Halálos tavasz (Deadly Spring, 1922), banned after its publication, was later made into a film of the same name starring two of Hungary’s top actors, thereby making it a best-seller seventeen years after its first printing.

(Zilahy wrote the script.) Két fogoly (Two Prisoners, 1927), a ‘classic Hungarian novel of love and war’, according to the cover of the English edition (1999), was followed by Valamit visz a víz (Something is Adrift in the Water, 1928), a tragic and haunting story, a moving account of the life of a suicidal woman, later filmed as Adrift! by the Czech director Ján Kadár. Though at times 77

overflowing with emotion, this novel, which recounts the disruption of the peaceful family life of a fisherman by his gradually overwhelming passion for a mysterious woman whom he literally nets in the Danube half-drowned, offers a fine example of the author’s ability to draw timeless female characters.

Ararát (1947; published in the U.S. as The Dukays, 1949), considered Zilahy’s most important work, and forms part of a trilogy. The Dukay novels describe the life of an undistinguished but influential Hungarian family, the Dukays, whose fate provides insights into the turbulent events of Hungarian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first part, A bíbor évszázad (Century of Scarlet, 1966) is an epic novel of nineteenth-century revolutionary times. As it follows the mixed fortunes of Hungarian aristocrats, especially the animosity between two Dukay brothers, it provides striking portraits of leading figures of the Habsburg Monarchy such as Prince Metternich. The subsequent Rézmetszet alkonyat (The Dukays, 1949) and A dühödt angyal (The Angry Angel, 1954) tell the beautiful and tragic story of the astronomer Mihály Ursi, a commoner, and his beloved wife, Zia Dukay, a countess, in times of war and communism. At the end of the saga, those who survive, like Zilahy himself, emigrate to America, but the idealistic Mihály Ursi remains in Hungary to face hard times.

A két fogoly – The Two Prisoners

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The Two Prisoners (1926) is a moving love story on an epic scale, set in Hungary and Russia before and during World War I. Péter Takács and Miette Almády, two young people both fatherless in Budapest, meet at a party in 1913 and promptly fall in love. Péter begins to court Miette in earnest. Miette accepts, and after many frenzied kisses, they are engaged. Meanwhile, Miette’s friend, Olga, confesses to her that she has lost her virginity. Close friends though they are, Miette’s strict code of morality leads to their estrangement, and Olga soon runs away from home to live with her lover, a wealthy banker. Her fate is related later in the book (she dies young, of consumption), for the story of the principal characters is counter-pointed with that of their friends, society youths in Budapest, whose lives turn out to be even more tragic than those of the protagonists, thus offering a cruel parallel and a sad alternative to Péter and Miette’s fate.

Péter and Miette marry, and although they sleep in separate rooms, they spend a lot of time together and are very much in love. Péter, however, is suspicious of one of Miette’s former suitors, but as his jealousy proves to be unfounded, he and Miette are soon reconciled. Then, after only four months of marriage, just as they are spending an idyllic time together at Lake Balaton, World War I breaks out. Péter joins the army and is sent to the front. After engaging in battle he is taken prisoner and transported first to Kiev, then to Tobolsk, in Siberia. A new phase begins in their lives. Both are prisoners: one of war, the other of love. Many years will pass without the hope of them seeing each other again, and mail is very slow.

Miette grieves. As the years pass, her father dies, leaving her alone in the world. Her

money is running out, and for a long time no letter arrives from Péter. Miette falls in love again; after much hesitation and spiritual torment, she begins an affair with a fine young man, Iván, though both of them know that the affair will have to end when Péter returns from Russia.

Meanwhile, Péter meets a Russian girl named Zinaida. Though their intimacy is intense, their love remains platonic, as he is still in love with Miette. When he learns that she has financial worries, he decides to escape from the camp. Dressed as a monk, he sets out on his journey in the long Siberian winter. This is the time of the Russian Revolution: the country is overrun by police.

Ivan is soon caught and transported back to Tobolsk.

Seven years pass. The war is over and the prisoners are released. Although her heart is heavy, Miette breaks off with Iván and waits for her husband’s return, resolved to love him again. But Péter is not among the returning soldiers. Miette soon learns that Péter died just days before his release. She is shattered by the news.

Another five years pass. Miette has married Iván and they have two children. She and her husband set off for Siberia to find Péter’s grave. In Tobolsk, they stop near Zinaida’s house to ask the way to the cemetery. The master of the house shows Iván the way without seeing Miette, who is sitting some way off in the car.

Only the reader is allowed to know that the man is, in fact, Péter. The news of his death was false; after he received an anonymous letter informing him of Miette’s unfaithfulness, he decided to remain in Siberia with Zinaida, with whom they have a child. Péter and Miette never see each other again.

The New York Times called the novel “simply and beautifully-written, inspired.”

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Béla Zsolt 1895 › born in Komárom (Komárno, Slovakia) 1916 › first volume of poetry published 1918 › begins writing for journals in Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania) 1920 › moves to Budapest; becomes editor of the literary journal Tavasz 1925 › contributes to the liberal papers Világ, Magyar Hírlap and Újság 1929–1938 › contributor, then editor of the left-wing literary journal A Toll (The Pen) 1939 › because of his Jewish origin, banned from writing and working for newspapers 1942–43 › called up to a labour battalion, spends nineteen months in the Ukraine, then receives a prison sentence for his political views 1944 › taken to the Nagyvárad ghetto; escapes with forged documents 1945 › taken to Bergen-Belsen in the famous Kasztner train 1945 › returns to Hungary, becomes a leading figure of the Hungarian Radical Party, and editor in chief of its newspaper, Haladás 1947 › elected MP 1948 › elected president of the Civil Radical Party (in opposition) 1949 › dies in Budapes

Poet, novelist, journalist, and political activist, Béla Zsolt is still a controversial figure in the Hungarian literary world. A member of the urban middle class, he fought for human rights and attacked provincialism of all kinds, sharply berating the nationalist and populist wing of Hungarian literature. Having witnessed the 1919 Revolution as a young journalist of radical and liberal convictions, he was disillusioned by its aftermath, which he recalls in his novel Kilenc koffer (Nine Suitcases, 1946).

Zsolt began as a talented poet praised by Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi and Lőrinc Szabó, among others. His poetry collections (Hiába minden, All in Vain, 1921; Igaz könyv, A True Book, 1923) show the influence of the aesthetic and avant-garde movements of the age. A journalist for life, a star publicist and a restless editor, Zsolt stood up for his liberal and radically democratic convictions, and fought against anti-Semitism and fascism. His prose, often characterised by a sociographic eye for detail and a sharp rationality, often engages with political ideas. He takes up the theme of Jewish assimilation in his novels and plays, criticizing its 80

shortcomings. Two of his novels are concerned with unsuccessful ‘mixed marriages’: Házassággal végződik (It Ends in Marriage, 1926) and Gerson és neje (Gerson and his Wife, 1930).

Zsolt attacked the greed both of the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectual classes. The impassiveness of his heroes is, according to his best critics, a reflection of the self-protective mistrust of Zsolt, the former idealist, who has been betrayed and disillusioned. The protagonist of his novel Bellegarde (1931), offered the choice between middle-class comforts and revolutionary activity, chooses the former. In another novel, Kínos ügy (An Embarrassing Affair, 1935), Doctor Hell, Zsolt’s ironically drawn alter ego, finds that his struggles for a better world are drowned by café-society opposition. In Villámcsapás (Stroke of Lightning, 1937) Zsolt explores the roots of his own personal and social disillusionment. His next novel, Kakasviadal (Rooster Fight, 1939), is concerned with the events of the 1919 Revolution. The parallel lives of its two protagonists stand for two alternative attitudes after its decline. Zsolt’s last unfinished novel, Kilenc koffer (Nine Suitcases, 1946, 1980), documents life in the Jewish ghetto of Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania) and is intermingled with the writer’s memories of forced labour in the Ukraine. Zsolt never wrote the second part about his escape from Belsen-Berger to Switzerland and about Rudolph (Rezső) Kasztner’s controversial scheme that saved the lives of at least some of Hungary’s wealthy and well-known Jews. Perhaps his illness prevented him, perhaps disillusionment, or both. of the wretched.

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Prose & Poetry from the Second Half of the 20 th Century Hungary

Tibor Déry 1894 › born in Budapest 1917 › novella published by the popular journal Érdekes újság; Nyugat begins to publish his poems and short stories 1919 › member of the Writers’ Directorate during the Hungarian Soviet Republic; father commits suicide 1920–1924 › emigrates to Vienna, then Bavaria; writes for the progressive avant-garde journals MA and Sturm 1924–1926 › lives and works in Paris and Perugia 1926 › moves back to Budapest, but continues to spend much time abroad 1934 › in Vienna, takes part in the socialist Schutzbund uprising; begins writing his A befejezetlen mondat (The Unfinished Sentence) trilogy 1938 › imprisoned for political reasons in Hungary 1947 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize 1948 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1956 › criticises the communist party at the Petőfi Circle meeting of writers and intellectuals 1957 › sentenced to nine years in prison, but freed with clemency 1963-68 › allowed to publish again; elected as member of three academies 1977 › dies in Budapest

Tibor Déry may be widely regarded as the finest writer of “socialist prose,” but this does not mean he was a propagandist of communist party ideology, only a writer with pronounced views of his own who espoused the cause of socialism. Drawn to Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, he began his career with experimental poetry and fiction. In his early years his main aim as a writer was to break with his upper-middle-class background. His first major novel, the ambitious trilogy, A befejezetlen mondat (The Unfinished Sentence: 1934–38, 1950, 1952), offers a tableau of the social crisis of Hungary in the thirties: it shows the workings of the illegal communist party, set against the background of a powerful bourgeois society.

Déry’s second comprehensive novel, Felelet (Answer, 1950, 1952), remained unfinished for political reasons. The story presents the life of a working-class hero, using the technique of socialist realism. The book, however, was vehemently criticised by Hungary’s cultural “commissar,” József Révai, who was outraged by the unofficial and unorthodox presentation of

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the illegal communists, and a bitter dispute followed, which marked a turning point in Déry’s career and resulted in his revolt against the regime.

After 1956 Déry was imprisoned for “conspiracy against the state:; during his three years in prison he finished his great Orwellian dystopia G. A. úr X.-ben (Mr. A. G. in X., 1964), which satirizes the years of the personality cult by describing the strange and oppressive atmosphere of an utterly desolate city, where moral values no longer exist. A kiközösítő (The Excommunicator, 1965), another parable of the fifties, is a historical novel about the life and times of St. Ambrose of Milan, portraying the fanaticism of the priest with obvious irony. No wonder Déry’s contemporaries were convinced that the bishop was modelled after Révai himself.

After the postrevolutionary regime had shown clemency and Déry was released from prison, his last twenty years were marked by a prolific output: he wrote novels, dramas, short stories, novellas and essays. Ítélet nincs (No Verdict, 1969), Déry’s autobiography, is an elegiac recollection of his dead contemporaries and a grave yet humorous analysis of his life. By this time, Déry had renounced his illusions about politically committed literature: “I was a bad communist from the outset, I don’t deny that. The only question is—and the answer has been debated for decades—whether anyone can be a good writer and a good communist at the same time in the close-fitting uniform the Party makes him wear, and which he rarely gets permission to unbutton.”

Tibor Déry is an excellent storyteller. His passionate love of truth and uncompromising ethical stance, coupled with a sharp eye for detail and a quietly unfolding sentimentalism in the best sense of the word, are most evident in his novellas, Niki: Egy kutya története (Niki: The Story of a Dog, 1956), Szerelem (Love, 1956), and Vidám temetés (A Merry Funeral, 1960). One of his best novellas is the autobiographical Két asszony (Two Women, 1962), which recounts the story of his wife and ageing mother while he was in prison, when the two women convinced each other that he was in fact abroad, preparing a major motion picture—the only way they could bear his absence and insecure fate. (The novella was prophetic; combined with Love, in 1970 it was turned into a motion picture of the same name that won the Jury Prize at Cannes.)

Among Déry’s later works, Kedves bóper (Dear Beau-père, 1973) is of special importance.

A self-portrait, it relates the rigors of old age and the love of an aged writer for his beautiful French daughter-in-law. His novella, Képzelt riport egy amerikai pop fesztiválról (Imaginary Report About an American Pop Festival, 1971), was turned into a popular protest musical in 1973 that is still being performed today.

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Niki: Egy kutya története – Niki: The Story of a Dog This novella is set in the dark years of Stalinist Hungary. An elderly couple who have lost their parents in the war and their only son in the battle of Voronezh take up an amiable mutt, Niki, who becomes part of their lives. The story relates the life and death of the dog with a whole historical period serving as the background. Niki, who understands nothing of politics, is merely the victim of contemporary history. Gradually losing her home and the person she loves, she succumbs, giving up hope and the will to live.

The story begins with the adoption of the young dog. Her owner, Mr. Ancsa, is a communist engineer whose moral integrity leads to conflict with the corrupt regime, the cruelty of which is disguised through ideological reasoning. At the mercy of his Party superiors, he is first fired from his job and moves to the city, and then, after a time, is arrested and imprisoned without any viable reason given. Knowing nothing of her husband’s fate, Mrs. Ancsa, a frail and ailing woman, is left alone with the dog. She struggles along with the help of her husband’s friend, a taciturn worker and devoted communist, who believes, however, that Mr. Ancsa is not guilty, and does his best to have his sentence reversed.

The atmosphere of political terror that prevailed in communist Hungary under its de factor dictator Mátyás Rákosi from 1949 to 1956 is evoked by showing the hostility of the former friends and neighbours towards the lonely woman, for no one dares or wishes to speak to the wife of a “guilty” man. Mrs. Ancsa is socially isolated and yet forced to share her apartment with another family. All the same, she keeps her integrity and never abandons hope that her husband will return. The dog, meanwhile, becomes accustomed to the absence of her master, and develops a daily routine of walk and play along the Danube. Although food is scarce and she is constantly mocked and criticised for the “luxury” of keeping a dog, Mrs. Ancsa refuses to part with her only companion.

Years pass by, and the dog, who has not forgotten Mr. Ancsa, slowly gives up hope of ever seeing him again. After a trip to the country that evokes old memories, Niki falls ill. The engineer is released that very morning, but by the time he returns home, she is dead. The story ends with the dialogue of the engineer and his wife, revealing the senselessness of their ordeal: “‘Did they say why they arrested you?’ ‘No,’ the engineer replied. ‘They never said.’ ‘And did they say why you were released?’ ‘No’, he said. ‘They said nothing.’”

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Szerelem - Love Like Niki, this novella is also based on the author’s own experiences. Both stories deal with the ordeal of a loving couple separated by the senseless workings of an oppressive political system.

The story begins in a prison: the protagonist is led out of his cell clad in his civilian clothes, thinking that he is probably being taken to the scene of his execution, and he can hardly believe it when he is then released after seven years in prison. He doesn’t know why he is being released, but he never had a trial in the first place; he was only a victim of circumstances. Be that as it may, he heads home to his wife. The plot describes his way home and his reunion with his family.

The tense, unsentimental description of his journey tells of his meeting with a sympathetic taxi driver who immediately recognises that he was in prison, for there were political prisoners in his own family; it shows the terrible weight of freedom when he stops under the open sky, looks up at the branches of a flowering apple tree and feels sick; and, finally, his arrival home. The neighbours are shocked, for they knew nothing of him for years, and half of his apartment has been allocated to strangers.

The most moving moment of the story is his meeting with his wife and little son.

She has been waiting for his return, never giving up hope of seeing him alive. Their reunion is presented in an unforgettable dialogue; their conversation is restricted to essentials, for their physical proximity upsets them. Their undying love is evident, and the story ends with the wife promising that they will spend the rest of their lives together. Déry’s economical style and unyielding love of truth make a lasting impact on the reader.

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Endre Fejes

1923 › born in Budapest 1937 › after finishing four years of elementary school, works as a tailor’s apprentice, then as an iron turner 1945–49 › lives and makes a living as a manual labourer in various countries of Western Europe 1949 › returns to Hungary 1951 › sent to the Kistarcsa internment camp after his failed attempt to escape from Hungary 1955 › turns to writing full time 1963 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1975 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 2009 › awarded the Prima Primissima Prize

The 1960s was the age of asking awkward questions in Hungarian fiction, and no one asked as many embarrassing questions as Endre Fejes, who had an impeccable working-class background, and who placed the familiar world of the Budapest working-class in the focus of his novels, short stories and plays. His short story collections, A hazudós (The Liar, 1958) and Vidám cimborák (Jolly Companions, 1966), deal with the life of a young people working in factories on the outskirts of Budapest, and the difficulty of reconciling a consciously lived life and one lived in ignorance. In the short story ‘A hazudós’ (The Liar, 1958), nostalgia is capable of transforming reality into the beautiful realm of imagination, but a later story, ‘Vigyori’ (Grin, 1958), shows how the monotonous nature of everyday life shatters even the illusion of love between young people and, with it, points to the gap between socialist ideals and practice.

Reflection and consideration are not strong points of Fejes’s characters; the workingclass people he writes about are often governed by stubbornly unconscious drives, like the main protagonist of his short story ‘Mocorgó’ (Restless, 1958) whose one and only goal is the possession of a tent to house a second-hand shop in, which he finally achieves after long years of 88

dubious dealings and misfortunes.

The characters of Fejes’s most-important novel and one of the most interesting books of the 1960s, Rozsdatemető (Generation of Rust, 1962), raises the uncomfortable question: after years of socialist propaganda, what is the truth about the lives of the working class? The book, set in the Józsefváros slums of Budapest, spans over fifty years in the lives of the Hábetler family who, despite the Party’s propaganda efforts to raise the cultural standards of the ‘proletariat’, survive various historic upheavals by frequenting pubs, going to soccer games and involving themselves in family squabbles. Though the Hábetler family gradually achieves a slightly better social status than the servants of the first generation, their chronicle, related in unadorned, factual language, makes it abundantly clear that no single member is ever conscious of his or her social position or that they have choices as individuals. Their mentality, alas, does not reflect Party mentality.

Fejes’s autobiographical novel Szerelemről bolond éjszakán (Tales of Love Told on a Crazy Night, 1975) is set in the turbulent years following World War II, when two young men try to seek their fortune by clandestinely joining a transport of Jews who attempt to emigrate to Palestine. Most of the novel takes place on transport trains and in rehabilitation camps, where the adventurous young men try to remain masters of their own destiny but are ultimately overpowered by the hopeless nature of their endeavour. The novel ends on a train near the French border, where the heroes hope to cross into France, but are bitterly disappointed when they realise that it is in fact heading for Germany.

Fejes, who is something of a cult figure in the literary and cultural life of Budapest, has also written a number of popular plays, most of which were also turned into television films.

Of these, Cserepes Margit házassága (The Marriage of Margit Cserepes, 1972) and Jó estét nyár, jó estét szerelem (Good Night Summer, Good Night Love, 1977—based on the novel of the same name, 1969) are still produced today.

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Rozsdatemető – Generation of Rust The book begins with a murder. János Hábetler Junior kills his brother-in-law, Zentay, at the junkyard behind a factory. The novel is an investigation into the motive behind the single, powerful blow that kills Zentay on the spot. It seems there is no single reason, however, and that the lives of all the members of the Hábetler family must be examined during the fifty-year period from the time when old János Hábetler returned from World War I up to the moment of the murder.

Motivated by his experience in the war, János Hábetler decides he will remain an honest man throughout his life, a wow he will never break. In the army he has learned to respect his superiors, and whenever the need arises, he goes to his superiors for help. In turn, his naive trust in them prompts them to provide him with financial assistance. He marries Mária Pék, and is provided with a job as an office clerk, which proves sufficient for the meagre upkeep of his family.

Mária Pék is a tyrannical creature, but the family forms a tight unit in the one-anda-half rooms they share—a tightly fortified bastion, where the parents, their three daughters and one son live, their lives secured against all intrusions from the outside world by Mária’s despotic love. Outsiders can enter this community only for brief intervals, and though each of the three girls is married, their marriages don’t last, and they eventually rejoin this insular family community.

The life of the Hábetler family is a life of monotony punctuated by such commonplace events as family quarrels, love affairs, occasional illnesses, the loss and regaining of badly paying jobs and the birth of children—all this in an atmosphere of gossip, drinking and occasional flareups of family violence. In the life of the Hábetler family, each day is like the other; historical upheavals such as World War II and the revolution of 1956 are mere glitches in the eventless and repetitive routine of family life. The Hábetlers lack any kind of political motivation, and politics concerns them no more than does the weather. Sándor Seres, the political activist who from time to time tries to convince them about the virtues of communism, is ridiculed by them as the most stupid person among their acquaintance.

The only person who is not content with this kind of life is the young János, but just like the other members of his family, he lacks the capacity for self-reflection, and so his rebellion against his life is ultimately no more than desperate anger. It is this anger and frustration, coupled with hatred of his brother-in-law’s social ambition, that motivates János’s deadly blow, plus the fact that Zentay mentions János’s first love, a Jewish girl who perished in Auschwitz together with their infant son.

At the time of its publication, the novel led to a heated critical debate, where one side accused Fejes of ‘overt determinism’. In the climate of the times, the character’s lack of social consciousness was seen as destructive, and the lack of any sort of moral judgement was considered subversive of socialist teaching.

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‘ I reg a rd G en erat io n o f R u s t to b e a n ew t ype o f b o o k , a n d e x pla i n its s u cce ss by the fa ct that the m a jo r it y o f m y rea d ers sa w thi s, o r el se i n s t i n ct ively felt it. A l so , b eh i n d the u n fl i n chi n g tr u th o f the n o vel they d i sco vered m y fa ith i n e ver y Já n o s H á b etl er who - a s I w ro te- ‘ d i d n ’ t u n d ers ta n d cer ta i n thi n g s a b o u t the wo rl d , whi ch i s why he wa s helpl e ss ’ .

Endre Fejes

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Erzsébet Galgóczi 1930 › born in the village of Ménfőcsanak 1945–49 › attends the Teachers’ Training School in Győr 1949 › applies but is not admitted to the Academy for Film and Performing Arts, Budapest; attends university, but soon leaves and works as a lathe operator at a factory in Győr 1950 › wins first prize in a short story competition 1953 › first short story collection published 1950–55 › studies dramaturgy in Budapest; begins working as a reporter 1959 › becomes a freelance writer 1962, 1969, 1976 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1981-85 › Member of Parliament 1978 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1989 › dies in Ménfőcsanak

Originally a committed socialist writer, Galgóczi gradually lost faith in the regime, and her work reflects her growing criticism of political repression and corruption. She was familiar with the problems of the various social classes, for she was born in a Hungarian village and worked for a time as a lathe operator. As a reporter and sociologist, she was also familiar with the historical and regional issues of the age, as witnessed by her Kegyetlen sugarak (Cruel Light, 1966) and Nádtetős szocializmus (Thatched-Roof Socialism, 1970). Most of her heroes are strong-willed, lonely individuals, embittered in their private lives and political struggles, desperately searching for truth and a life worth living.

At the beginning of her career, Galgóczi was a devoted communist, and her early efforts reflect the vigour of youth and a strong belief in an ideology that, many believed, would redeem a country just out of World War I (Egy kosár hazai, Food from Home, 1953). The contradiction between life as it is lived and communist ideology, however, soon appears in her work—the difficulties of the forced collectivisation of land and the abuses of those in power were becoming evident even to those loyal to the regime.

Galgóczi’s faith in the Party was shaken by the revolution of 1956, but her interest 92

and subject matter was still biased by her class loyalty—a source of inner conflict that she, as a concerned writer and individual, felt compelled to examine.

Galgóczi’s short stories are concerned with existential and ethical problems. Pain and suffering is a central motif (Inkább fájjon! – Let it Hurt!, 1969). Her characters are riddled by poverty, helplessness, death, and alcoholism. With the precision of a sociologist, she described the lives of poor villagers and city intelligentsia, both humiliated by politics and exposed to its mercy.

Some of Galgóczi’s writings resemble folk ballads. In the short story ‘A nagymama’ (The Grandmother, 1969) a woman becomes an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and her whole family is dishonoured as a result. (One of Galgóczi’s main themes is the role of the mother in the family.)

Her last and most famous novel, Vidravas (Otter Trap, 1984) was greeted as a sensational attempt to expose the sins of Communism. The book deals with a political show trial in the dismal fifties that led to the lifelong imprisonment of an eminent geologist for ‘sabotage’ and the deportation of his wife to a godforsaken village. The heroine of the novel, Orsolya Rév, a young painter expelled from university when her parents are labelled ‘kulaks’—a Soviet-era term for affluent farmers—is now living in the village with her parents. A believer in Communism, she is gradually convinced by the geologist’s wife that her husband is not guilty. After the death of the old woman, Orsolya is convinced by a young secret police officer to write forged letters to the geologist to make him believe that his wife is still alive, and she falls in love with him—a man representing the regime that has punished her parents for being kulaks. The novel ends in the summer just before the outbreak of the 1956 revolution.

Even the titles of Galgóczi’s writings speak of her major concerns—corruption and the conflict inherent between the individual and society. Among these are Kinek a törvénye (Whose Law?; short stories, 1971), Pókháló (Cobweb; novella, 1972), A vesztes nem te vagy (The Loser is Not You; short stories, 1976), and Idegen a faluban (Stranger in the Village; collected writings, 1984). She also wrote television and film scripts, as well as radio plays.

‘ I f o n e w i she s to b e fa m il ia r w ith the hi s to r y o f the peo pl e o f H u n g a r y b et ween 19 5 0 a n d 19 8 0 , it i s wo r th rea d i n g G a lg ó cz i , fo r she i s e x cept io n a l i n sho w i n g the l i fe o f the pea sa n ts a n d the l i fe o f the f i rs t- g en erat io n o f po s t wa r i n tel l ect u a l s. ’ Pál Réz

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Szent Kristóf kápolnája – The Chapel of St Christopher Zsófia Tűű, the central character of this novella, is a typical Galgóczian heroine: a young woman in her thirties, lonely and depressed, who tries to re-shape her life with the help of art and human contact. Just as the heroine of Vidravas (Otter Trap, 1984), Zsófia is also a painter whose career was curtailed, and instead of creative work, she is restricted to restoring works of art. But like many disappointed and impoverished artists of her generation, she is also an alcoholic. The writer later admitted that Zsófia’s figure is in many respects a self-portrait, a presentation of her ‘own unhappy youth’.

The novel begins with Zsófia’s arrival at a village, where she is to restore the altar painting of the chapel. The village looks beautiful enough, and Zsófia is soon introduced to many of its inhabitants and she begins to work on the painting, of St Christopher. She takes lodgings at the house of an old woman who is tending to her paralysed husband—an old woman who has no children and no company, and refuses to take any money for the room. In exchange, she asks Zsófia to paint her husband’s portrait.

Little by little the painter’s pain and anguish ceases: hard work and the tranquillity of the country make her give up drinking. She befriends the dean of the chapel, a gentle old man, to whom she imparts the painful secret of her past. She confesses to him that she was in love with a high-ranking politician, a married man in his fifties, who bought her a studio; and, though he visited her often, he treated her only as a mistress. As a consequence, the desperate young woman was tormented by insomnia and developed a drinking habit. Her coming to the country was a flight from this unbearable situation. She is still waiting for his letters, she says, but—as she receives none—she is slowly reconciled to her fate, at least while the restoration of the altar painting lasts.

The friendly old dean, however, has his own secret: the crypt of the small, inconspicuous chapel is hiding a great treasure, the antique jewels of the church of Győr, hidden from the communists in 1949. Shortly after Zsófia’s arrival, the dean receives a letter announcing the death of another old priest who knew the secret, and the aged dean realises that he is now the only person who knows the treasure’s hiding place. What’s equally worrying, a few days later, young Szemerédy, once the local count, returns to take away with him the remains of his mother, who was left behind in her illness when the family fled to Switzerland. The problem is that the dean and his men had removed her body from the crypt and buried it in the graveyard to make room for the treasures.

After thirty years the mystery is revealed, and the treasure comes to light. A delegation arrives for the unveiling, led by Zsófia’s lover, the Minister of Education. They secretly meet in the garden of the chapel, but Zsófia is unwilling to return with him to Budapest, deciding instead to remain in the village and continue the full-scale restoration of the little church. She has found her aim in life.

The Chapel of St Christopher, a masterful blend of documentary material and the writer’s imagination, is a mystery story, a love story and a tale about artistic integrity all rolled into one.

Although it is highly enjoyable without its political background, it provides a fascinating glimpse of the historical state of affairs of the years just before the decline of Communism in Hungary.

‘ I sn ea k ed m u ch o f the u n ha ppy yo u n g wo m a n that I o n ce wa s i n to the f ig u re o f the pa i n ter o f the chapel . ’ Erzsébet Galgóczi

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Péter Hajnóczy 1942 › born in Porcsalma, adopted by Béla Hajnóczy; later lives in various children’s homes 1957 › wins a swimming championship, but abandons sports 1959 › employed as a physical labourer 1962 › finishes Eötvös József High School, Budapest, as an evening student 1975 › first volume of short stories published 1976 › becomes a freelance writer; works for the prestigious Mozgó Világ journal 1979 › visits London (his only trip abroad) 1980 › awarded Milán Füst Prize 1981 › dies in Balatonfüred or Budapest

Péter Hajnóczy, one of the great original voices of his generation, had a short and self-destructive career, but one nevertheless complete in itself. Much of his writing is centred around his own suffering and alcoholism, and the objectivity, honesty and insight which be brought to his descriptions of his inner torment, his addiction to alcohol and the disintegration of his own personality, have secured him a cult status in the pantheon of the tragically fated post–World War II Hungarian writers. When writing about Malcolm Lowry, Hajnóczy speaks about his own art in an indirect way: ‘Though his writing is narcissistic and complex and he is mesmerised by the quality of his own achievement, his thriving for perfection was fuelled by a bitter and silent sadness which would eventually overpower his worship of the self, propelling him unto the ultimate suffering of despair, leading him past the barren clarity of understanding to a longing for love.’

Even in his earliest stories, Hajnóczy was already an experimental prose writer. His technique, a mix of automatic writing, repetitive structures and movie-like cuts, used pattern and rhythmic repetition to create a very special atmosphere new to Hungarian literature at the time. ‘A szertartás’ (The Ritual, 1992) is an iconic piece of this period. In it, the possibilities of motivic variation are exploited to the full, achieving a musical complexity.

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Later on, the freedom of the self became the main subject of Hajnóczy’s short stories and novellas. Most of his short stories depict an individual pitted against the bureaucratic and pitiless power-structure of society, where the quest for uncompromised individual freedom leads to a paradoxical situation in which integration is as much out of the question as is outright revolt against the system. One of the stories of this period, ‘A fűtő’ (The Stoker, 1975), is about a man attempting to get back his suspended ration of the daily half-litre of milk; in it, his humiliation is raised to a symbolic level, and when he is unable to achieve his goal, he responds with another symbolic gesture: he takes off his shirt as a sign of surrender.

With time, Hajnóczy’s writing became more and more surreal, reflecting the absurdity of the static situations that were his concern. Some of his stories, like ‘A csuka’ (The Pike) and ‘Munkaterápia’ (Work Therapy) are imbued with a fable-like allegorical quality that exposes the absurd and satirical nature of existence.

One of his best known works, the short novel A halál kilovagolt Perzsiából (Death Rode Out of Persia, 1979), is an autobiographical piece about an alcoholic writer who returns to drinking and gradually sinks into delirium. This short novel, a brutally honest vivisection in which the narrator analyses his situation and suffering with an unflinching eye, is also notable for its style.

His last major work, the short novel entitled Jézus menyasszonya (The Bride of Jesus, 1981), is perhaps also Hajnóczy’s most mature piece of writing, and certainly, it is his testament.

In a previous biographical note he wrote, ‘The first shot of pálinka, which is a lifesaver but at the same time one you want to puke up, reminds me of my childhood and Holy Communion—the church square covered with pigeon droppings, the father, the long preaching—as if God were taking to Himself whoever wished to enter Him in this manner to remind him of his duty, the reason why he has been sent into the world.’

Hajnóczy’s only work of non-fiction, Az elkülönítő (Isolation Ward, 1975), paints a bleak picture of the patients trapped in the power structure of a hospital in northern Hungary.

‘ P éter H a jn ó czy l ived i n a co u n tr y where r ig hts were fo r m a l ly reco g n iz ed , b u t where the e x erci se o f the se r ig hts [the s tate] m a d e i m po ssi bl e. H i s w r it i n g s, ho we ver, were n o t cha ra cter i sed by a cr it ica l ed g e , b u t the pro fo u n d , o n to lo g i ca l e x per i en ce o f thi s ci rcu m s ta n ce.

Tamás Reményi József

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A halál kilovagolt Perzsiából – Death Rode Out of Persia This short novel is in fact an autobiographical piece of prose about a writer sitting in front of an empty sheet of paper looking at the sheaf of notes he created during his two-year long drinking spree, when he realises that his wife has forgotten to give him his anti-alcohol medication, and so he begins his slow but determined return to drinking, which will inevitably lead towards the dreaded delirium.

His notes, his thoughts, his memories and the drink-induced hallucinations are united into a textual collage in which alcohol is the main cohesive factor. Glancing at his notes from time to time, the writer recalls his past, the years he spent working as a mason, a stoker and a coal-transporter; he recalls his rebellion against his family, the winter he spent in an unheated bungalow, the hard physical labour he had been doing, the difficulties of writing and the trials of alcoholism.

The two most coherent and most lengthy events the writer-protagonist remembers are both long summer days spent on the beach; the first involves the start of his relationship with Krisztina, a young, demanding and naive university student who picks him up at an outdoor swimming pool, while the second involves the monotonously long time he spends on the shore of Lake Balaton, while waiting for his lover, ‘A’. Both occasions are starting points for affairs with women whom the writer will marry in the future, but the two are very different; also, during the years that elapsed between the two events, the writer’s social position deteriorated. When he meets Krisztina he is working as a clerk in the Institute of Geodesy, and by the time he spends the day waiting for ‘A’, he is a coal transporter who barely escapes prison when he is caught with an illegal transport.

As the day progresses, the writer gets more and more drunk, and in the process his consciousness becomes increasingly separated from his body, developing into a nearschizophrenic duality: on one level he is painfully aware of the progress of the events, and he knows perfectly well what will happen and contemplates his actions with a detached objectivity; but on another level, with each glass of wine he tries to convince himself that it will be the last, but he must drink it if he wishes to continue writing.

His attitude towards hallucination is also ambiguous. The images he sees are almost always exotic and violent—African warriors, Malaysian head-hunters and pornographic visions.

The writer is terrified by them but also drawn by their haunting familiarity, as they mark a stage in his loss of the self, where decisions are no longer of consequence. Indeed, there are no decisions at all to be made, and total freedom is achieved while the personality and the self are dissolved in the terror of delirium.

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Gyula Illyés 1902 born at Felsőrácegrespuszta 1916 parents separate; moves with mother to Budapest 1918 › becomes an enthusiastic supporter of the communist Hungarian Soviet Republic 1921–22 › after a brief stay in Vienna and Berlin emigrates to Paris; takes on odd jobs, studies at the Sorbonne 1924 › becomes acquainted with major avant-garde writers and artists; first publications in progressive emigrant magazines, including Kassák’s MA, published in Vienna 1926 › returns to Hungary after receiving amnesty for his role in the leftist Michaelmas Daisy revolution of 1918 1931 › first Baumgarten Prize 1934 › invited to attend the First Congress of Soviet Writers in the U.S.S.R. 1937 › co-editor of Nyugat with Mihály Babits 1945–49 › member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1948, 1953, 1970 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1969 › elected vice-president of PEN International 1970 › awarded the Herder Prize 1974 › awarded the highest order of the Orde des arts et lettres in France 1977 › on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, receives the Laurel Wreath of the People’s Republic of Hungary 1981 › receives Mondello Prize in Italy 1983 › dies in Budapest

Gyula Illyés—poet, novelist, and essayist—was a politically and morally engaged writer.

Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the twentieth century, he is held in high esteem for his undaunted loyalty to “the people” and his note of vigorous defiance. Though a socialist all his life, in the 1930s he joined the populist movement of népies writers. After the revolution of 1956, Illyés became renowned for writing the iconic poem Egy mondat a zsarnokságról (One Sentence on Tyranny, 1956), which was published in a literary gazette during the uprising, but for years was considered too dangerous to be published as part of his collected poems.

His early poetry¾including Nehéz föld (Heavy Earth, 1928), Szálló egek alatt (Under Soaring Skies, 1935)—was influenced by the French avant-garde and Hungarian folk poetry and was published by Nyugat. His realistic images, challenging rhythms and compelling variety of themes were highly praised by the critics. His later works—Dőlt vitorla (Tilted Sail, 1965) and Minden 99

lehet (Everything’s Possible, 1973)—show the influence of classicism and post-modernism.

Illyés was a master of unusual rhythms and unexpected rhymes; his great ode, ‘Bartók’, which appeared in the volume Kézfogások (Handshakes, 1956), helped shape the aesthetics of the postrevolutionary generation of Hungarian artists.

Illyés was also a successful playwright. He wrote twenty-two plays, most of them historical. His most important dramas, Ozorai példa (Example at Ozora, 1952) and Dózsa (1956), both treat decisive periods of Hungarian history.

Illyés was a distinguished prose writer as well. His fiction is in most cases documentary, exhibiting his best qualities: irony and ethical commitment. Petőfi (1936) is the biography of Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet. However, instead of treating the topic with the usual reverence, Illyés concentrates on Petőfi both as a poet and a man, offering many valuable insights into the young poet’s psychology and poetical methods. Puszták népe (People of the Puszta, 1936), perhaps Illyés’s most important and certainly best known documentary novel, was written the same year. Magyarok (Hungarians, 1938) chronicles the political turmoil and the ideas of the age with an unequalled clarity and objectivity, while Lélek és kenyér (Soul and Bread, 1939) is a book of sociography and essays co-authored with psychologist Flóra Kozmutza, Illyés’s wife.

Whether poetry or prose, Illyés’s output is strongly autobiographical. Hunok Párizsban (Huns in Paris, 1946) is an interesting novel about the years Illyés spent in Paris in the twenties among young workers and French intellectuals. Illyés was strongly influenced by the spirit of France. The time he spent abroad are a determining factor in his oeuvre, as he himself admits in Franciaországi változatok (Variations in France, 1947). His late prose is also self-revealing. Kháron ladikján (On Kharon’s Boat, 1959) is an essayistic novel on old age written in a highly lyrical tone.

‘A po et ca n n o t a n d m u s t n o t b e o ther tha n o r ig i n a l . A n d a n o r ig i n a l po et i s he who i s n o t co n ten t w ith the cu rren t v i ew o f the wo rl d , who w il l reg en erate the wo rd s o f the tr i b e a n d g ive vo i ce to the n ew rea l it ie s. ’ Gyula Illyés

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Puszták népe – People of the Puszta People of the Puszta is a combination of a novel, a diary and sociography. After reading André Gide’s Travels in Congo and having spent years in Paris, Illyés decided to write an essayistic novel based on his own experiences with the region of Hungary where he was born and raised. The book began as a series of reports on the lives of agricultural servants, the most defenceless and exploited social class in the country, the people among whom Illyés emerged as the emissary of a silent community. Having returned from emigration, Illyés saw his own people with the eyes of a stranger (‘as an African tribe whose language I happened to speak’), and the mostly happy memories of his childhood were now transformed by the misery of the adult world that confronted him.

The book is structured according to different topics. It starts with a description of the puszta, the Hungarian plains, and its people, the servants of the great aristocratic families, whose lives were utterly determined by hard agricultural work. With little or no hope of ever having private property, they live like serfs exposed to the wishes of their lords. They, the people of the puszta, form a whole microsociety with laws and layerings of its own; its people know their place on the strict social ladder, their position being determined by their closeness or distance from the lives of their lords.

It is a barbaric tribal society in which families stay together until death, men fight and kill each other with knives, and children know everything about their parents’ sexuality. Illyés describes their everyday lives, tells the reader what they eat (not much, and in some parts of the plains they even starve), how they raise their children, how they sing, how they talk, and how they celebrate. He quotes their curses, their songs and their poems. He dwells on their medicinal methods, their cruelty with the incurable (who are not worth keeping alive because they cannot work), the brutality of their superiors, and the indifference of the aristocracy towards them.

One of the book’s most moving chapters describes the defencelessness of the young servant girls who are regularly summoned to the manor and sexually exploited, while no one speaks out against this ancient custom, the direct continuation of the ius primae noctis of medieval landlords. The dark scenes evoked are the more poignant as Illyés recalls his own memories about these humiliated creatures; as a child, he once witnessed the recovery of the body of a girl from a well—a girl whose only way out was suicide.

In People of the Puszta, Illyés mixes precise historical description with his own memories; he describes his family (his father worked as a machinist on a large estate), his schooling, and the efforts of his parents and grandparents to help him emerge from the depths of poverty and oppression. The book is thus both a historical document and a personal memoir from the pen of a first-rate writer and poet.

‘ I ha il fro m the sa m e reg io n a s G y u la I l lyé s [. . .] yet I rea d 101

th i s bo o k [. . .] a s i f I were rea d i n g a n e x cit i n g d e scr ipt io n o f so m e fo reig n la n d a n d its peo pl e; a s i f I were o n a jo u rn ey o f e x plo rat io n wh ich i s a l l the m o re f u l l o f e x citem en t b eca u se th i s fo reig n la n d ha ppen s to b e m y o wn n at ive la n d. I l lyé s ha s m a n a g ed to shed l ig ht o n thi s terr i b le s t i l l n e ss, a s i f t u rn i n g a s po tl ig ht o n the secrets o f the o cea n b o t to m. Thi s requ i red a po et ¾ d r y s tat i s t ic s o r so cio g ra phi c d eta i l wo u l d have l ef t m e co l d. What d o e s it m ea n that a thi rd o f the peo pl e o f H u n g a r y a re ser va n ts ? I l lyé s sho ws u s what it m ea n s. I t m ea n s so m ethi n g d ea d ly. O n e th i rd o f H u n g a r ia n s a re u n d er the o cea n , a n d they a re b u r ied a l ive. ’ Mihály B a bits

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György G. Kardos 1925 › born in Budapest 1943 › graduates from high school 1944 › taken to prison camp in Bor (Yugoslavia); is freed by the underground 1944–1951 › goes to Palestine, fights in the army 1951 › returns to Hungary 1955 › begins to work as a theatre dramaturge 1978 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1984 › awarded the Tibor Déry Prize 1990 › employed by the prestigious Hungarian literary and cultural weekly Élet és Irodalom 1992 › awarded the Golden Pen Prize 1997 › awarded the Márai Prize 1997 › dies in Budapest

With the publication of his first novel, Avram Bogatir hét napja (The Seven Days of Avraham Bogatir, 1968), György G. Kardos became an immediate sensation, and his book was soon translated into a variety of languages. Set in Palestine, this first book of a trilogy tells of an episode in the summer of 1947, just before the birth of the state of Israel and the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war. It is concerned with a week in the life of Avram Bogatir, a middle-aged Jewish settler who is originally from Russia and is a communist who does not believe in violence, but who nevertheless decides to give shelter to David, a young terrorist on the run from the British forces. Based on personal observations, the novel contains many fine character sketches and provides a colourful and detailed picture of Palestine during the British mandate, when Arabs, Jews and Englishmen lived together in a fragile equilibrium marred by ever-intensifying violence that would soon lead to even more violence and, ultimately, the formation of the state of Israel. The author’s short novel, Sasok a porban (Eagles in the Dust, 1970), a companion volume to Avram Bogatir, was first serialised by the journal Új írás before appearing in book form.

Officially the second book in the trilogy, Hova tűntek a katonák? (Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, 1971) is more experimental and is concerned with a single day in a lung sanatorium in Gedara, Israel. The events are centred around Abed, a young Arab servant, and it 103

is through his eyes that the life of the hospital is described. Doctors and patients, Jews, Arabs, Poles and Italians live together in a state of hopelessness and stagnation which fuels old hatreds and grudges, so that the atmosphere is almost suffocating. The only person who consciously rejects this rather vulgar kind of passionate intensity is a dying Polish colonel, an old-fashioned soldier, the last of his breed, who tries to retain his dignity to the very end.

The last book of the trilogy, A történet vége (The End of the Story, 1977), zooms in on an episode that takes place a year after the first Arab-Israeli war. It concerns a young soldier called Uri who travels from a military camp near Beer-Sheva to Gedara, a distance of fifteen kilometres.

The journey, related from his perspective, turns out to be decisive; as he attempts to retain his sense of irony in order to calm the violent passions of the people he encounters on the way, he realizes that his only option is to leave Israel, and that the short journey he has just concluded is in fact a preparation for the longer one back to Hungary.

This trilogy of novels, Kardos’s most significant achievement, was followed by a long period of creative silence during which he wrote screenplays and columns, and was reportedly working on a novel about the Bor prison camp, which was never completed. (Fluent in eight languages, he also worked for German and Italian television.) His last novel, Jutalomjáték (Benefit Performance, 1993) is about a group of old actors who are reunite on the occasion of the funeral of their former theatre manager—giving them an occasion to tell old anecdotes of theatre life with nostalgia and enthusiasm. Ez is én vagyok (This is Also Me, 1996) is a collection of his columns written for the daily Kurír—short and witty meditations on the state of politics and literature seen from a humorous angle, with no occasion missed for jocular story-telling.

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Avram Bogatir hét napja – The Seven Days of Avraham Bogatir György G. Kardos’s novel is set in Palestine in 1947 and is centred around the main protagonist, Avraham (Abram) Bogatir, a middle aged Russian Jew who lives with his wife, his daughter and his son in the village of Beer Tuvia. The political situation is complex; Palestine is governed by the British forces, while the Jews have formed an underground army which attempts to create an independent Jewish state through armed struggle utilising guerrilla tactics.

One night there is shooting outside the village and the only survivor of the incident, a young terrorist called David, takes refuge in Avraham’s house. Though he opposes violence of all kinds, Avraham decides to help the young man by pretending that David is a farmhand sent to him by the authorities. The relationship of David and Avraham exposes a duality typical of Kardos's novels, according to Béla Pomogáts: ‘György G. Kardos’s writing is about the clash of two systems of thought. The first one is defined by powerful words, slogans such as “the creation of a nation,” “national interest,” and “historical mission”—charismatic concepts that have been utilised by almost all aggressive conquests and wars ever since the creation of European nation states. The second lacks such big words; it relies on the basic fact of everyday life: work, friendship and love.’

Avraham travels to Jerusalem to notify David’s parents of the young man’s whereabouts, but discovers that David’s fate is sealed: his nerves failed him, and by not pulling the trigger of the machine-gun during the crucial moment in battle, he is responsible for the death of the others—and is therefore condemned to death by the terrorists. In Jerusalem Avraham also meets his old love, Anna, the wife of his former employer. Anna is an educated Russian woman locked into an unhappy marriage, and the only person with whom Avraham shares a mutual understanding. They spend some time together, and it is only a couple of days later that Avraham will learn that that was his last meeting with Anna, who has decided to enter a monastery.

Meanwhile, the political situation intensifies. The conflict between the terrorists and the British escalate; the terrorists assassinate a peaceful Arab in Beer Tuvia, and with this, the fragile peace between the Jews and the Arabs is shattered, and the ‘meticulously preserved innocence’ of the village is lost once and for all. In another violent act the terrorists kill three British soldiers, and in retaliation the armed forces mount an intensive search of the village.

Once again, Avraham hides the young Arab from the soldiers, this time in an orange grove, but the young man decides to leave his hiding place in order to protect the old farmer.

The novel ends with Avraham waiting for a British patrol about to descend on him. His fate is uncertain—he will most probably be deported to a prison camp—but as he stands there, waiting for the inevitable, what comes to his mind is a vision of the love he had felt as a young man.

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Ervin Lázár 1936 born in Budapest 1938 family moves to the village of Alsó-Rácegrespuszta 1954 begins his studies in the humanities at the University of Budapest 1959 begins writing for the daily Esti Pécsi Napló 1963 begins writing for Dunántúli Napló and the literary journal Jelenkor 1965 moves to Budapest; proof reader for the cultural weekly Élet és Irodalom 1971–89 devotes himself to writing full time 1982 awarded the Andersen Prize 1989 founding member of the new Magyar Fórum party; editor of its magazine, Magyar Fórum, for one year 1990 begins working for the dailies Pesti Hírlap and Magyar Nemzet; awarded the IBBY Prize for the best children’s book of the year 1996 awarded the Kossuth Prize 2005 awarded the Prima Primissima Prize 2006 dies in Budapest

Though born in Budapest, Ervin Lázár spent his formative years in a small village in Tolna County, where he and his family lived between 1938 and 1951. The love of the people of the puszta he knew so well, the strength they found in unity, and the tales they told inspired his later stories and books. He learned to read before he entered first grade, and his love of literature was also a source of inspiration for his writings. Thanks to their inventive and playful language that takes full advantage of amusing sounds and alliteration, as well as his highly amusing and lovable characters, his books have remained as enduringly appealing to adults as they have to children, and their author has become a beloved household name in Hungary. The quiet, intimate charm of his stories and his manner of telling them speak of a grownup who, despite his years, has not forgotten what makes children happy.

The tale entitled A kisfiú meg az oroszlánok (The Little Boy and the Lions, 1964), illustrated by László Réber, who illustrated Lázár’s other books for children as well, brought Lázár instant success. A hétfejű tündér (The Seven-headed Fairy, 1973), his most popular children’s book to that point in his career, shows him at his best. ‘A hazudós Egér’ (The Lying Mouse) is a parable of how human follies can be loveable, while ‘A Nyúl mint tolmács’ (The Rabbit as Interpreter) show that with a bit of help, those who speak different tongues can understand each other—the rabbit 106

translates the horse’s neighing into the goat’s bleating, and the other way around, providing Lázár with plenty of ammunition for his sense of the absurd. Next in line for publication was Berzsián és Dideki (Berzhian and Dideki, 1979), whose protagonist, the poet Berzshian, gets up in the morning on the right side of the bed and instead of ballads (‘bal’ means ‘left’ in Hungarian), he writes jobblads (i.e., “right-lads” instead of “left-lads”), which for a time makes him very sad.

This book was followed by Gyere haza, Mikkamakka (Come Home, Mikkamakka, 1980); the tale Szegény Dzsoni és Árnika (Poor Johnny and Arnika, 1981); and the children’s novel A hétszögletü kerek erdő (The Seven-Squared Round Forest, 1985), a place populated by Sigfrid Bruckner, the emeritus circus lion, and Lajos Monster, the warm-hearted sloth, among others; and by another such novel, Bab Berci kalandjai (The Adventures of Benny Bean, 1989). Subsequent writings included the story collections A manógyár (The Goblin Factory, 1994) and Hapci király (King Gesundtheit, 1998), as well as Lehel kürtje (The Magic Horn., 1999), based loosely on an ancient Hungarian legend.

Lázár also wrote stories for adults. His first volume of short stories, Csonkacsütörtök (Curtailed Thursday, 1966) was followed by Egy lapát szén Nellikének (A Shovelful of Coal for Nelli, 1969), A Masokó köztársaság (The Mashoko Republic, 1981), Hét szeretőm (My Seven Lovers, 1994), and Kisangyal (Little Angel, 1997). The stories in these books are in every way a continuation of the author’s children’s stories. Though there is less reliance on funny names and alliteration, and despite the fact that they concern issues of importance to adults, not least questions of freedom and freedom of choice, they are ballad-like in their telling, often relying on parables to gently lull the reader into the understanding of the repressive power of society and politics. The focus, however, never strays from the characters.

Lázár’s only novel, A fehér tigris (The White Tiger, 1971), is the parable of a moral quest.

In the book, a majestic white tiger, an ethereal creature that understands human speech, casually walks up to the protagonist of the story, Gábor Makos, as he is about to enter the busy restaurant of a hotel, and from then on refuses to leave his side, fulfilling every wish of his new master, who after a while realizes that this has made him omnipotent. As the story imperceptively slides into the political arena of communist Hungary, it poses the question: Given the power to do good, why does man revert, time and again, to aggression instead? The short story collection Csillagmajor (The Little Town of Miracles, 1996) is based on the author’s experiences as a child growing up in a remote Hungarian village, where the people were poor in goods, but rich in tales, and where miracles were a way of life.

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Csillagmajor – The Little Town of Miracles In this book of interwoven stories, Ervin Lázár pays tribute to the people of the vanishing puszta, the Garden of Eden of his childhood, which he here playfully calls Rácpácegres in reference to the village of Rácegrespuszta on the Great Hungarian Plain, where he spent part of his childhood.

Through the telling of fifteen stories, the cycle of tales brings to life the wondrous world of the countryside as people experienced it, a world that throbs to a different rhythm than the world of city folk, a remote place where miracles enter the everyday life of a village community and are taken in stride. The stories are held together by the locale itself, which exerts a constant presence on the events in the life of the small community, and by the protagonist, who appears only twice, in the first and the last stories, but who narrates the tales.

In ‘Az óriás’ (The Giant), a young boy on his way home from school encounters a sleeping giant the size of a mountain. Afraid and realizing that he has lost his way, he is nevertheless compelled to climb over the giant to the other side if he is to see his family again.

In ‘A csillagmajori’ (The Man from Csillagmajor), a mysterious stranger in a white linen shirt—or is it a shroud?—offers to join in the harvest, and when he vanishes, he leaves whole heaps of harvested corn behind on the field, more than the other harvesters together. In ‘A tolvaj’ (The Sneak Thief), an angel boy pilfers small things from the young narrator’s country kitchen, and when he is caught red-handed, he runs away, with the people of the household hoping for his return. In ‘Az asszony’ (The Woman in Blue), a mysterious lady with her infant son in her arms seeks refuge on the manor against her pursuers, and is sheltered by the people. When she leaves the manor so the people won’t be punished for hiding her, it is Christmas Eve, and the land, as if relieved of a great burden, is finally covered in the first snow of winter. In ‘A kovács’ (The Blacksmith), the devil comes to get his horse fitted with new horseshoes; in ‘A keserűfű’ (The Knotweed), an old couple of Swabian ethnicity (a German subgroup) turn into beautiful flowers before they can be deported by the authorities (many Swabians were deported from Hungary after World War II); in ‘A bajnok’ (The Champion), when a local boy wins a running race against a Russian soldier, he is shot and left for dead, but is resurrected; and in ‘A porcelánbaba’ (The China Doll), a communist party functionary comes to announce that people will be apportioned their own land, but, fuelled by his misguided sense of omnipotence, instead vows to resurrect the dead.

Each of the stories in Csillagmajor take on the quality of a hallucinatory exploration into that part of the soul where beauty, hope, and yearning live in close proximity, and where, despite the turbulent events of history, miracles are a way of life. With its publication, its author created a genre that can safely be called Central-European ‘folk-surrealism’, a counterpart of the magical realism hallmarked by the writings of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.

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Iván Mándy 1918 › born in Budapest 1937 › first short story appears in the journal Magyarság 1945 › co-editor of the literary journal Újhold 1948 › wins the Baumgarten Prize 1949–55 › silenced for political reasons 1954 › becomes a freelance writer 1969 › awarded the József Attila Prize 1988 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1989 › editor of the literary journal Holmi 1992 › president of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and the Arts 1995 › dies in Budapest

Short story writer, novelist and playwright, Iván Mándy focused on the world of the poorer classes living in the Hungarian capital’s out-of-the-way streets and visiting marketplaces, cinemas and taverns. His unmistakeable style is characterized by a sparse neo-realistic tone coupled with rapid changes of scene and an excellent ear for dialogue. In his prose, what is not said and the characters’ actions, curtailed by his quick-cut cinematic cuts, must be filled in by the reader, thus creating the perfect atmosphere for what Mándy’s works are ultimately about— the world of dreams, private mythologies, football and cinema. His early short novels, Francia kulcs (The Spanner, 1948) and A huszonegyedik utca (Twenty-First Street, 1948) are, like his later writings, in some sense autobiographical, and their vividly drawn characters—thieves, bums, gypsies, vagabonds, hawkers living in Budapest’s poor outlying Józsefváros district—are seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy. Later, Mándy invented a child hero, Csutak, who features in a series of juvenile novels, the first of which is Csutak színre lép (Enter Csutak, 1957). Mándy’s originality, however, was fully discovered only after the post-revolutionary era, when after years of silence his works could once again be published. The world of the 1950s first appears in Fabulya feleségei (Fabulya’s Wives, 1959), a short novel ultimately about writers and about writing. The hero, Fabulya, a former poet, then unofficial book hawker and hypochondriac, is a parasite who had four wives; he is a demonic man whose selfishness is, ironically, nonetheless somehow 109

admirable. The other key figure, Turcsányi, is an untalented would-be writer, but there are many other types as well, all poor unfortunates who under the circumstances try to stay afloat without getting on the wrong side of the regime.

Mándy’s much-read novel, A pálya szélén (On the Sidelines, 1963), recounts the story of an untiring self-appointed football coach living on the outskirts of town who is bent on turning his fourth-division team of down-and-out types into a winning team. Undaunted by the realities of the present, he is busy eyeing the street urchins playing on an empty lot. An unsung hero who ultimately stands for something greater than himself, he is turned into an iconic figure over the course of the novel, one with an innate understanding of the dependence of one man on another—in fact, his need for a team. His motto, ‘Egyedül nem megy’—you can’t go at it alone— has became part of the modern Hungarian vernacular thanks, in part, to the popular movie based on Mándy’s book.

In Régi idők mozija (Movies of the Good Old Days, 1967), another book that is typically something only Mándy could have written, the interwoven wreath of stories, some made up by a young boy, others embroidered by retired football coaches and part-time usherettes, evoke the glamour of the silent cinema of the 1920s. The short stories of Egyérintő (Ball Game, 1969), take place in the typical Mándy world of a poor district of Budapest, this time focusing on the violent drives of those destined to live here. In the eleven stories of Előadók, társszerzők (Lecturers, Coauthors, 1970), the writer documents the atmosphere of fear and oppression of the early 1950s, when the stories were originally written. The collection offers an invaluable document of the lives of the circle of Hungarian intellectuals who were condemned to live “on the fringe” and who made their meagre living from lecturing in the provinces, ghost writing, and translating—much of this anonymously, of course. But the book is more than a mere document; thanks to the talent of its chronicler, it is also literature at its best.

The absurd and the surreal are often present in Mándy’s prose, as in Egy ember álma (One Man Dreaming, 1971), in which dreams, with their film-like cuts, play an important role.

The sequence of short stories in Mi az, öreg? (What’s Up, Old Boy?, 1972) take the narrator’s parents as its main characters. Playing an active part in their son’s life, they comment on events as they unfold and give advice, even after their death. In the novella Strandok, uszodák (Baths, Swimming-Pools, 1984) Mándy describes the atmosphere and clientele of the places it describes in minute Mándyesque detail. In Magukra maradtak (Left Behind, 1986), another slim novella, ‘all human presence is, quite inexplicably, gone,’ writes scholar Ferenc Takács. ‘The people have departed and all we have now is the landscape. Alien, artificial, entropic and dead, it is now the man-made world of urban dereliction that comes to life and, in a bold trope of personification, acquires a mind that remembers, suffers and mourns; Mándy, in the ultimate fictional act of collapsing his country and his people into one, makes the world of things [. . .] the protagonist of his fiction, singing a threnody for humanity.’

Mándy’s last writings deal increasingly with ageing and death. Huzatban (In the Draft, 110

1992) comprises a long novella (the title work) and several shorter pieces, offering, in the words of scholar Clara Györgyei, ‘an entire spectrum of narrative and reflexive texts: observations, descriptions, events, dreams, and analyses, personal mythology, fossils of a bygone world, dilapidated apartment houses, memory fragments, disturbing experiences, dream-images, visions and shadows.’ The short stories comprising A légyvadász (The Fly-hunter, 1996) take death as their main topic, but with the typical Mándyan touch of humour.

Régi idők mozija – Movies of the Good Old Days Movies of the Good Old Days is quintessential Mándy—a wreath of stories, many told by a young boy, others by retired football players and usherettes spellbound by the world of the silent movies, as the writer himself was as a boy. A glass of water on a tray, dim and grey glass, grey and stale water—these are only the appurtenances of the exciting world of the silent cinema of the 1920s as he imagines it.

The main protagonist and the other story-tellers are engaged in mythmaking; the stories they tell of the world of the Hollywood stars, many of whom they pretend to have known at one time, are a magical blend of the real and the make-believe. For example, the hero of a story told by the boy is Charlie Chaplin, who attempts to boost his brother’s low self-esteem by telling him that while he is locked into the character he has created, his brother has limitless opportunities to reinvent himself—which is very much what the story-tellers are doing when they reinvent the reality they live in by bringing movie stars into it. The boy’s father, a film critic who has grave financial problems and lives in a shabby hotel room with his son, also turns up in several stories, and is, apparently, just as good a mythmaker as is his son. Without him, fine talents would have been lost, he says, and he knows lots of important people, even if they fail to recognise him, like the old school-friend who owns the local cinema.

Perhaps the most amusing parts of the book are when film stars come alive in the boy’s imagination. He keeps a scrapbook with Greta Garbo’s movies and the list of her co-stars.

Between its pages, the former lovers indulge in discussing Garbo’s new partners. ‘She shines best opposite me,’ brags John Gilbert. To which Nils Asther retorts, ‘Because you make the perfect background.’ The boy listens to them with sympathy, and only occasionally, with good-humoured criticism.

As in Mándy’s other writings, here, too, the past and the present, reality and fantasy mingle to create something that is more than its parts as it pays tribute to the world of the cinema that held him in thrall, too, when he was a child.

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Miklós Mészöly 1921 born in Szekszárd 1942 finishes Law School in Budapest 1943–44 fights into the army; is taken POW in Serbia 1947–51 newspaper editor in Szekszárd; first volume of short stories published 1952 becomes a freelance writer 1990 awarded the Kossuth Prize 1992 founding member of the Széchenyi Academy of Arts 2001 dies in Budapest

Vadvizek (Floodwaters, 1948), Mészöly’s first short story collection, was too contemplative and self-analytic for the emerging world of communism, and so was not well received. His second collection, Sötét jelek (Dark Signs, 1957), also provoked the critics devoted to party politics and socialist realism. Under the circumstances, Mészöly continued to be ignored by the critics until the publication of Az atléta halála (The Death of an Athlete, 1966) in French translation. After this event he was able to open his drawer, and the works he had written while unofficially silenced appeared in quick succession. Thanks to this circumstance, a whole generation of young writers considered him their master.

Mészöly characteristically deals with the inner workings of the psyche, and his characters are absorbed in dispassionate self-analysis. They are unsettling in their objectivity and non-involvement as they observe the minutiae of everyday life—lonely individuals tortured by the burden of existence felt but not analysed. ‘The most a writer can do,’ Mészöly observed in a diary entry, ‘is to present obscurity with clarity.’

The title story of Magasiskola (The Falcons, 1956), one of Mészöly’s best writings, is about a remote place on the Hungarian Plains where falcons are raised, but where the life of the falconers is even more regulated than that of the birds. Az atléta halála (The Death of an Athlete, 1966) is a psychological novel and an impressionistic delineation, an open-ended book 112

that, according to Albert Tezla, ‘offers no explanation of the novel’s meaning, no description of the times; the author “demonstrates” the character of the fatally obsessed long-distance runner through the use of precise details characteristic of his short stories.’ The same impersonal, meticulous observation characterises the novel Saulus (Saul, 1968), the short stories comprising Jelentés öt egérről (A Report Concerning Five Mice, 1967); and Pontos történetek útközben (Precise Stories Along the Way, 1970), a realistic novel made up of separate stories linked by a first-person narrator recounting her visits to her family in Transylvania—a work that uses the techniques of cinéma vérité, highlighting nothing, progressing in each story with strict objectivity. Térkép, repedésekkel (Map with Cracks, 1971) is a similar account of a journey, with time and space interwoven seemingly chaotically.

Film (Movie, 1976) marked a turning point in Mészöly’s œuvre. Taking an old couple as its subject matter, the novel observes their slow movements with extreme precision through the cold eye of the camera. In an interview, the author spoke of this narrative presentation as ‘a further stripping to nakedness . . . to such an extreme point in the consideration of human events, to such posing of questions, that it would call everything, the component of all things, into doubt.’

Mészöly was also a prominent essayist and dramatist. A tágasság iskolája (The Discipline of Unrestrictedness, 1977) contains literary and philosophical essays, interviews, diary notes, and studies on film and drama, while Volt egyszer egy Közép-Európa (Once There Was a Central Europe, 1989) contains a collection of short fiction and essays on the region. In it Mészöly writes, ‘The only thing that can happen here is what happens. And the concern is how you can be someone’s servant while enjoying the pleasures of the prisoner within the limited unrestrictedness of the pillory.’

In his two plays, Bunker and Az ablakmosó (Bunker, The Window Washer, 1977), Mészöly employs the techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd. Among his last works, two novels are of special importance: Családáradás (Family Flood, 1995) and Hamisregény (Faux Novel, 1995), the latter based on the writer’s short stories.

‘A s a n i n n o vato r a n d e x per i m en ter, M é s z ö ly ’s em pha si s ha s a lway s b een o n w r it i n g a s a n i n tel lect u a l o r phi lo so phi ca l en d eavo u r.

H i s n o vel s a n d sho r t s to r ie s a re co n cern ed w ith the pa ra d o x i ca l relat io n sh ip b et ween e x per ien ce a n d its f i ct io n a l tra n sm u tat io n s, [a n d] hi s sel f- refl e x ive co n cern w ith the epi s tem o lo gy a n d ethi c s o f the l itera r y a ct ha s its co u n ter pa r t i n the Fren ch n o u vea u ro m a n a n d A m er ica n po s t- m o d ern i s t f ict io n . [. . .] In a l l hi s wo rk he i s a w r iter o f m u ted po i se , s pa rse el eg a n ce a n d qu i et sel f- d i scipl i n e. ’ Ferenc Takács

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Saulus Saulus is a historical novel, but the complexity of its concerns and the manner of its narration are very much of the twentieth century. Based on the Bible, the novel is composed of mosaic-like parts illuminating the psychological transformation of Saul that lead to his conversion told with minimal embellishment and great economy of words.

The novel is set in Jerusalem four years after the crucifixion of the ‘treacherous rabbi’.

Saul, who at that time was not present in Jerusalem, and who is a zealous persecutor of the early followers of Jesus, is a man of heightened sensibility and perceptions; he is a man at the crossroads unaware of the momentous changes of the future, and beset by a philosophical yearning for understanding. A Pharisee and an upholder of the Law, Saul is nevertheless not an unquestioning, passionless follower of the Law like the rabbi Abiatar, a man apparently devoid of any sort of passion and who is ruled by the paradoxical logic of the dogma he represents.

As a persecutor, Saul is in command of a small task force as he journeys into the desert in pursuit of two rebels. But the hunt is not successful, and the rebels are not captured. The futility of the journey heightens Saul’s sense of spiritual intensity and shakes the solidity of his former beliefs. Back in the paranoid atmosphere of Jerusalem, where his superiors watch his every move as he combs through the city in search of the followers of Jesus, he finds himself beset by doubt and haunted by the memories of his dead son and the repressed burden of his past. As he witnesses miraculous events such as the collapse of a tower, where his friend is unhurt by the avalanche of stones, his belief in the truths he had taken for granted is slowly shaken.

When Saul meets with the Christian fugitive Istefanos, he is not aware of the other’s identity, yet in a curious way the talk turns to the subject of Saul’s relentless search, and he comes to the realisation that the relationship of the hunter and the hunted is a complex affair, where the hunted may love the hunter, and the hunter may only be capable of hunting him down because of this love.

Later, when Istefanos is captured and stoned to death, Saul, on a whim, decides to swap his sandals with those of Istefanos as he sets off on the road to Damascus to arrest the followers of Jesus. On the road, however, he gradually begins to identify with those he is persecuting, and towards the end of his journey he is blinded by a powerful light, brighter than the noonday sun.

When he regains his vision, he is a changed man who sees the world through the eyes of those he had been hunting down.

Instead of following a chronological logic of story-telling, the text of Saulus is a veritable whirlpool of descriptions and events, where action is suspended in the frequent time-shifts, and the only cohesive force is that of turbulent spiritual intensity, where every image seems to carry some hidden meaning. Saul’s desperate urge for comprehension, however, is doomed to failure, as the blinding power of the sharp light that strikes him is a spiritual force that transcends the bounds of understanding.

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‘ H i s s to r ie s a re en shro u d ed i n a tra g i c a u ra . They o f fer rea d ers the a rd u o u s b u t n o t a b so l u tely f u t i l e la b o u r o f Si syphu s: the ho pe that the persi s ten t qu e s t io n i n g s o f the hu m a n co n d it io n , tho u g h n o t l ik ely to l ea d to a n s wers, a re cer ta i n to em po wer them to fa ce rea l it y. ’ Albert Tezla

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Géza Ottlik 1912 › born in Budapest 1923–29 › attends military academy in Kőszeg and Budapest 1931–35 › studies mathematics and physics at Budapest University; first writings published in 1931 1939 › short story published by Mihály Babits in Nyugat 1945–46 › works for Hungarian Radio 1945–57 › secretary of the Hungarian PEN Club; prevented from publishing his own works; earns his living by translation 1948 › with the advent of Communism, takes the first version of School on the Frontier back from his publisher 1952 › declared a kulak, he is saved from deportation by the Hungarian Writers Association; for years earns a living as a translator 1960 › grant from the British Government for his translations 1981 › awarded the József Attila Prize 1985 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1990 › dies in Budapest

Despite the slim body of work he produced, Géza Ottlik has proved to be perhaps the most decisive influence in post-war Hungarian fiction, and certainly the most respected writer of his time. For him, writing was a constant, passionate presence. His first stories, published separately in the late 1930s, were collected in Hamisjátékosok (Swindlers, 1941). Its characters—swindlers, people from parties, tennis courts and everyday life—all know that there is an element of play in life. (Ottlik himself was a passionate bridge player internationally renowned for Adventures in Card Play (1979), the book he wrote on bridge with Hugh Kelsey.

Ottlik, a trained mathematician, always strives for precision; his dialogues are neatly cut, and nothing is irrelevant. Silenced in the 1950s, he contributed to Hungarian literature through his translations of English authors (Dickens, Shaw, Osborne, Evelyn Waugh) and German ones (Thomas Mann, Keller, Zweig). The stories he wrote after the war were published in Hajnali háztetők (Rooftops at Dawn, 1957). Péter Halász, the protagonist of the title novella, originally written in 1943, is an unreliable swindler—one with an artist’s air and who thus bears the writer’s sympathy—who explores the unfathomable richness of living through him. The novella was later made into a successful movie.

Ottlik’s most popular novel, Iskola a határon (School at the Frontier, 1959), originally 116

written in 1948, explores the theme of childhood and adolescence, the frontier that boys cross when they enter boarding school. On a deeper level, however, it calls attention to what happens to an individual when confronted with rigid rules and regulations—basically, the inhumanity of regimentation, and how it breaks his spirit. The book continues to enjoy a cult-like status in Hungarian literature decades after its publication. Péter Esterházy, who as a young writer decided to copy the book on a single sheet of paper by hand, chronicles the depth of his admiration for the novel in these words, from his own book A Little Hungarian Pornography: ‘Morning and night he [Esterházy] was copying, as if he were engaged in prayer, Ottlik’s School at the Frontier on a single sheet of white paper. . . . When he started on the last page his heart began to pound as if it were in a cage, really, and wanted to leap out. He was overcome by trepidation. His hands were shaking, and after every sentence he had to put down his pen. He was terrified by the thought that just before the finishing line he’d ruin it, three month’s work down the drain.’ (transl. by Judith Sollosy)

Ottlik’s stories were collected in Minden megvan (Nothing’s Lost, 1969), whose revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1991. Underlying his work of fiction, there is a conscious and coherent system of thought articulated in the miscellaneous writings of Próza (Prose, 1980), concerned with the writer’s and the translator’s craft and the role of the modern novel in literature. The volume also contains reviews and essays on Hungarian authors, as well as personal memories and interviews: ‘For me, writing is a slow and painful process; even the shortest review or essay takes a bitter effort. For this, of course, you need a precious inbuilt instrument that silently but stubbornly resents whatever you have put on the page.’

The novella A Valencia-rejtély (The Valencia Enigma, 1989) deals with the necessity and impossibility of love, while Hajónapló (Logbook, 1989) is ‘a Borgesian exercise in ‘transfictionalizing’ certain obsessive paradoxes of national identity, authorship, writing and language; it uses, with much ingenuity and wit, fictionalized versions of the personality of some of his Hungarian literary coevals,’ notes Ferenc Takács. The posthumous Buda (1993), whose existence surprised the reading public, continues the story of School at the Frontier. According to George Gömöri, ‘Buda is to some extent a nostalgic retrospection, an attempt á la recherche du temps perdu. Its diachronic and not particularly cohesive structure brings it closer to the literature of post-modernism.’

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Iskola a határon – School at the Frontier The novel describes the life of a military academy in north-west Hungary, near the frontier, where the main characters—Gábor Medve, Dani Szeredy, and Benedek Both (Bébé for short)—and the other young cadets lose their innocence and learn ‘the world’s stupid improbability.’

The book begins with an introductory chapter about the difficulty of writing. Unlike in his essays on writing, where Ottlik claims that our image of the world has to rely on language, which itself is an abstraction, here he presents a dialogue of half-mumbled words between two of the novel’s main characters, with a detailed explanation by one of the narrators of how and why they do not need fully articulated sentences to understand each other. The scene takes place in 1957 at a public swimming pool, with the two friends looking back on the years 1923–26 and an incident in 1944 that seems to be of utmost importance, but which is never related, suggesting that what makes up the world of a person could never be summed up by a traditional plot, but must, by its very nature, remain fragmentary.

The story itself is related by two narrators. First, there is Medve’s posthumous manuscript, which provides an almost exact inventory of the circumstances of their lives—the dormitory, the alley, and all the details the boy at the time thought he could rely on as interesting, all this to form the background of his constant effort to depict thoughts and moods as precisely as possible. This text is then commented on by Bébé, who rounds out his friend’s memories with his own as he ponders the difficulties of finding the right words or angles for capturing narrating events, and translating them for the benefit of outsiders. The shifts in perspective and time provide a more objective approach than traditional linear narration, but as Medve observes, ‘No, No. There were plenty of things missing here. Words were no good. [. . .] The more substantial the truth, the thinner the words grow. The ultimate gist of things must be somewhere in the region of silence; only silence can contain it.’ (translated by Kathleen Szasz)

The first three months Bébé and the others spend at the academy are related in the fullest detail. The seven new pupils painfully learn the order of their new lives, assuming (wrongly) that they will eventually understand matters. They come under the domination of two officers, the harmlessly shouting Bodnár and the viciously snarling Schulze, who drill and supervise them day and night. Civilian friendship has no meaning here; instead, the newcomers are subjected to the senseless and cruel bullying of a group of older boys, who humiliate them in every possible way.

It is Medve who takes these matters most to heart; he is the last one to yield—the one, perhaps, with the strongest sense of morals and individual dignity, who writes a letter home but finally refuses to leave when his mother comes to fetch him. He usually escapes into his memories; trying, for instance, to reconstruct the mood of the bay in Trieste he knows only from his readings, but which nevertheless symbolises freedom for him. When he finally attempts to escape, he is locked up for two days—his ultimate freedom as a viewer rather than a participant 118

in a life of regimentation.

There are other ways of breaking out of this world. A peasant boy who will not yield to commands is taken home by his father, while another, who tries to tell on the bullies, is expelled.

Szeredy’s modus vivendi is to narrate the events of their common life, healing their sufferings by articulating them. But, generally, the new cadets are taught by experience how to survive in their alien environment—their survival depending on using words sparingly and being economical with their movements.

After their first semester at the academy, they go home to be confronted with the relativity of civilian norms. Back at the academy, with time they learn to secure respect for themselves among the others, and eventually, one of them even manages to get the older bullies expelled. But by that time they have grown ‘old and experienced,’ hardened and careful of their deeds as well as their thoughts.

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Is t vá n Örk ény 1912 › born in Budapest 1932–34 › studies pharmacology 1937 › joins Attila József’s circle of progressive writers; a story of his is published in József’s journal Szép szó 1939 › lives in Paris 1940 › returns to Hungary 1943–46 › prisoner of war in the USSR 1949–51 › works as a scriptwriter 1958–63 › banned from publication for his participation in the 1956 revolution 1955, 1967 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1971 › collected works begin to appear 1973 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1979 › dies in Budapest

As a dramatist, novelist and short story writer, István Örkény remains one of Hungary’s most popular writers. His sense of the absurd and his special genre, the ‘one minute story’, are unique in world literature. He is distinguished from the other masters of the absurd in his special choice of setting and character; his writings are always about Hungarians struggling with the absurdities of life in the twentieth century.

Örkény’s first published story, Tengertánc (Charade, 1941), caught the attention of the authorities, for it foretold the Nazi terrors: in the title story the inmates of a lunatic asylum seize power over a city and introduce many insane, dictatorial measures; for example, a linguistic revolution.

After the war, Orkény began to write his recollections: Emlékezők (Remembrances, 1946) is a memoir based on Örkény’s wartime experiences. Lágerek népe (The People of the Camps, 1947) is also documentary prose, a diary written between 1942 and 1946 that draws on the writer’s experiences in a Hungarian forced labour battalion, and then as prisoner in a Soviet POW camp. The same subject is treated in his drama Voronyezs (Voronezh, 1948).

After making an unsuccessful effort to comply with the tenets of socialist realism, Örkény, trained as a chemist and chemical engineer, developed an economical, disciplined style and a certain grotesque view of the world that became his unmistakable trademarks. Jeruzsálem 120

hercegnője (The Princess of Jerusalem, 1966), a short story collection containing realistic pieces as well as grotesque parables, was hailed as an important literary event.

Örkény’s most popular genre is the so-called ‘one minute story’, usually developed from some absurd idea narrated in dialogue. The first volume of these stories, written between 1937 and 1968, was aptly titled Egyperces novellák (One Minute Stories, 1968). In the fitting words of the critic László Varga, ‘The essence of Örkény’s experiment is to break down the short story into its basic components, stripping off individual layers until he reaches the core.’ Though undoubtedly grotesque or absurd, each so-called ‘story’ is ultimately about the absurdity of life as lived by modern man. As Örkény once commented, he didn’t have to invent his stories, because they lay ready at his feet. Perhaps this is why they are so profoundly human, a fact often hidden from immediate view by Örkény’s exceptional mastery of the grotesque.

As a dramatist, Örkény, who invented the Hungarian absurd, shows inimitable qualities.

In Pisti a vérzivatarban (Pisti in the Bloodbath, 1983), Örkény tried a new dramatic technique based on his own absurd one minute stories. Although the play had been completed years before, it could not be produced until 1979. Lacking traditional plot and character, it offers a sweeping and devastatingly funny and thought-provoking view of twentieth-century Hungarian history.

Its hero, Pisti —short for István (Stephen)—appears in different guises depending on what is expected of him, whether under Hungarian Nazism or Russian communism. The absurdity of the situation lies in the fact that Pisti’s development begins normally, until it turns out that ‘there are two of him’: one pro-German, the other pro-Russian, so that he can come out as the winner, regardless of who wins the war. In short, Pisti develops schizophrenia in order to survive the ‘bloodbath’, though at times his own survival is threatened as, for example, when his mother takes him to school as a bunch of hot air in a bottle, which she considers the most natural thing in the world. Örkény’s Macskajáték (Cats Play, 1963) and Tóték (The Tóth Family, 1967) are also absurd pieces about ordinary people in extreme situations. Rózsakiállítás (Flower Show, 1977) is a play about capturing death on film and thus a comment on the exploitative nature of the media, while Forgatókönyv (Script, 1979, 1989) is a tragedy dealing with the dilemmas of the typical Eastern European forced by history to assume a role he may not want . Örkény completed the work on his deathbed. Örkény also wrote two other often-produced plays, Vérrokonok (Blood Relatives, 1975) and Külcskeresők (Looking for the Keys, 1977).

Örkény’s philosophy is best summed up in his own lines concerning the predicament of the Greek mythological king Sisyphus: ‘I have my own take on Sisyphus. I see him down on the plain as he begins to push the boulder to the top of the mountain once again. What is he thinking? He is fully aware of his punishment. He knows that the boulder will roll back, again and again, until the end of time. He knows this for certain, but it is useless knowledge, since man is more than a bundle of experience. His instinct speaks differently from his experience; it tells him that this is perhaps the last effort needed, and once again, confidently, he begins to toil his way upwards. All of us live in the same paradox: our understanding recognises the destiny that awaits us, but our vital instincts prove stronger than our intellect.’

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Macskajáték – Cats Play Tóték – The Tóth Family Alongside his one minute stories, these two grotesque tragicomedies are Örkény’s most famous works. Both are based on novellas written in the early 1960s, which were later developed into plays, and eventually, film scripts. Both feature ordinary people as heroes, and in both the setting is Hungary.

Cats Play (1963) is a comedy about an aged Budapest widow whose only joy in life is to treat a once celebrated tenor to dinner, but another woman, who is even older, manages to seduce the object of her affections. The dramatic version is even more efficient than the novel. Örkény’s authorial instruction to the drama is the following: ‘This play should be acted throughout as if it consisted of a single sentence. It does not admit to any slowing down, interval or change of scene, for from to beginning to end it is nothing but an increasingly tense and nervous argument which the increasingly tense and nervous heroine, Mrs. Orbán, carries on with herself, her sister and the world.’

Cats Play is in fact a drama about the freedom of the individual. Mrs. Orbán is a typical Eastern European pensioner. She has little money, is always bickering with those around her, and is not interested in formalities; she is, however, a good-hearted, passionate woman, who stands alone against the whole world, brave and proud enough to act according to her own wishes. Her loud and unreserved personality is juxtaposed with that of her sister living in Germany, a rich, elegant, self-restrained and formal woman who is, however, wheelchair-bound, unable to express her feelings and extremely lonely. At one point she admits that she envies Mrs. Orbán, who, though unsuccessfully, dares to show her love.

The play is absurd in tone, for passions are hot while those experiencing them are aged, and the highest pleasure they can give each other is serving a good lunch. (Mrs. Orbán catches her beloved opera singer eating lunch at her rival’s table). They are not ridiculed, though, for their efforts border on the heroic. Mrs. Orbán wants to commit suicide, but fails; at the end of the play, however, she emerges victoriously from the whirlwind of emotions and is reunited with her sister. The tension throughout find release through a childish cat-and-mouse play between Mrs. Orbán and her only friend from next door—a source of the grotesque, but also of laughter.

The Tóth Family, which is funny, tragic, and absurd, bears a strong resemblance to Cats Play. It too has at its heart the struggles of zealous middle-class people trying to survive. The book presents a village family, the Tóths, who are visited by a neurotic major, who, despite the appearance of being a meek guest, gradually comes to terrorize his hosts. Thinking that this is their one chance to help their only son, who is fighting on the Russian front, survive, the Tóths bend over backwards to please the major, who is his commanding officer. The absurdity of this comic treatment of the relationship of the common man to authority that is keeping it in humiliating subjugation comes from the fact that the hosts’ son, although they do not know it, 122

is already dead. Yet there is another ‘twist’, because the major himself is a victim suffering from a nervous breakdown, and his mad whims are nothing but the direct consequence of war. The situation is ridiculous to its extreme, and the ending is inevitable: the major is killed, hacked into three pieces, and Tóth, the head of the household, can take command over his own fate once again as the mother cries for her son. Apart from the reader or spectator, only one person is familiar with the son’s fate: the village’s demented postman, who, playing God, has torn up the telegram containing the sad news.

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Im re Sa rk a d i 1921 › born in Debrecen 1939 › studies law, works simultaneously as a clerk, a chemist’s assistant and a proofreader 1942–44 › contributes to the newspaper Debreceni Újság, then from 1945, to another paper, Népszava 1946 › moves to Budapest, writes sociography for Szabad Szó, the journal of the National Peasant Party; joins the progressive journalists associated with the publication Válasz 1948 › works for ‘Village Radio’ broadcasts of Hungarian Radio, but is soon dismissed for political reasons 1949 › script editor at the National Film Studios 1950 › assistant editor of the newspaper Művelt Nép 1951–54 › awarded the József Attila Prize 1955 › starts working for the Madách Theatre as a dramaturge; awarded the Kossuth Prize 1956 › troubled by political hopelessness, silenced 1960 › works as an unskilled labourer in a factory 1961 › dies in Budapest of a (supposedly suicidal) fall from a window

As literary historian Lóránt Czigány so perceptively notes, Imre Sarkadi is ‘a case history of those who could not cope.’ Sarkadi was indeed one of the many young, talented poets and writers from Hungary’s peasant class who ‘espoused the cause of socialism with genuine enthusiasm, only to be bitterly disappointed during the 1950s.’ A writer torn between the polemics of predestination and free will, commitment and independence, a longing to reinforce law and a dread of being dependent on anybody or anything, Sarkadi wrote prose and drama that embodied the dilemmas of the age, and he did so with great clarity and a no-nonsense attitude. His first stories deal with basic human concerns—the memory of war (A szökevény, The Refugee, 1948) and the conflict of the individual and society, often through a re-interpretation of Greek myths or folk legends, the most lasting work of which is Kőműves Kelemenné (The Wife of Mason Kelemen, 1947, later titled The Mason Kelemen), in which its author examines the dilemma of sacrificing human life for a higher cause.

After the political changes of 1949, Sarkadi turned his interest to chronicling the transformation of rural life in Hungary; for example, in Gál János útja (János Gál’s Way, 1950), 124

a novel bearing the influence of Zsigmond Móricz’s A Boldog ember (A Happy Man, 1935). This period of his oeuvre ends with the drama Út a tanyákról (The Road from the Farmlands, 1952), the tragedy of a peasant losing his fields and the less convincing life story of a communist party official. The talented and energetic protagonist’s lust for power in the novel Tanyasi dúvad (The Farm Beast, 1953) is emblematic of the age. Sarkadi’s short story Kútban (In the Well, 1953) was turned into a highly successful film by Zoltán Fábri titled Körhinta (Carousel, 1955). A rural variant on the Romeo and Juliet theme, it presents the story of the conflict between changing family values and tradition, as well as between private farming and the new agricultural cooperatives. The short stories collected in Verébdűlő (Sparrow Row, 1954), with their intensive treatment of realistic detail, proved to be similarly popular.

Sarkadi’s novelette Viharban (In a Storm, 1955), portraying the crisis of rural intellectuals, prepared the way for his last creative period, which began after 1956, when he depicts the general disillusionment coupled with the determination to overcome the crisis of faith. Sarkadi’s heroes defy fate but are powerless against it, and ultimately lose their moral stance. The writer, however, does not judge them, but portrays them with sympathy. Two of his later novels—Bolond és szörnyeteg (The Fool and the Monster, 1960) and A gyáva (The Coward, 1961)—deal with this post-1956 predicament.

Sarkadi was also one of the best playwrights of his generation. His last two dramas, Oszlopos Simeon (Simon of the Desert, 1960), and Elveszett Paradicsom (Paradise Lost, 1961) treat the theme of conscious-instinctive self-destruction and a life of contemplation. The protagonist of Simon of the Desert is based on the figure of Simon of the Desert, the fifth-century ascetic-hermit from Syria who exiled himself from society and stood atop a pillar for decades. In Sarkadi’s adaptation, the painter János Kis blames the world for a series of failures and discovers in this world a drive for evil. He decides to test his theory through his own example. However, when a woman he had wronged and left stabs him with a knife, leaving him struggling on the verge of life and death, he gives up this endeavour. Paradise Lost concerns an old character on a new road towards a more moral life. In The Fool and the Monster, the protagonist Zoltán Sebők, a doctor at a rural hospital, appears in his father’s home after a fatal mistake: he has performed an abortion on his lover, who died during the operation. Sebők plans to commit suicide to escape his prison term when he meets people leading an exceptionally meaningful life—an experience that prompts him to reconsider his decision. The nostalgic tone, however, indicates the distance that separates him from such a meaningful life; his paradise is already lost, and the viewer cannot be certain about Sebők’s final solution to his moral dilemma. The drama was successfully adapted to the screen in 1962.

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A gyáva – The Coward This famous novella, a psychological tale and the portrait of an age, tells the story of a failure.

Upon seeing the useless and snobbish presents she’s given by her husband, a sculptor, for her thirtieth birthday, the narrator Éva realizes that she detests him; she finds him hysterical, struggling and incompetent. Their life together, she concludes, is nothing but a contract, with Bence providing wealth and comfort, and Éva the ’decoration’, willing to provide ample praise for his art.

Bence has just finished Eva’s nude sculpture, a ‘plump cow’, according to her. However, she says nothing, but leaves for the weekend. She takes the car, which breaks down. This is how, in a nearby village, she meets Pista, a young mechanic with impressive muscles, a veritable Apollo, who sets about fixing it. During the course of their conversation, it turns out that he remembers her from his boyhood, from the swimming pool where she used to be his idol. After a dinner and a single kiss, Éva continues her trip but suddenly decides to return home, where, to her surprise, she finds her husband having a party to celebrate his new sculpture. Bence and the guests are surprised by Éva’s unexpected return. When Pista calls her, on an impulse, she invites him to the party.

The next morning Éva drives to a village and meets Pista on the way. While they are talking, she notices an adder, and against Pista’s warning, she grabs the animal and is bitten.

She takes a knife and very rationally cuts the wound and lets it bleed. Pista praises her for her courage. He wants a life together with her. They spend the night at Pista’s, whose mother is away for the week.

The morning after that, Pista takes Éva to a state agricultural cooperative to show her the type of life he plans to embark on. Their conversation with the cooperative’s agronomist and director is as pleasantly boring as is the ensuing dinner. They next stop by Lake Balaton, have an elegant meal and dance nostalgically. But Pista has to be back by morning. Once back home herself, Éva learns that Bence has sent a telegram to her father, where she said she would be. She tells him she wants a separation and to live a meaningful life of her own. She admits how much she hates his new sculpture. Bence destroys his work and argues that they need each other. He predicts that Éva will not be able to leave because she is a coward and is chasing a rainbow. When she meets Pista in the city, she tells him everything, and to prove she is not a coward, she eats a worm. But, in the end, she is drawn back to a life of comfort and security doomed to failure, rather than answering the call of a new, challenging life with Pista away from the city.

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Feren c Sá nta 1927 › born in Brassó (today Braşov, Romania) 1945 › student in Debrecen 1947 › works for a mining company, and later a tractor factory 1954 › first short story published 1956 › joins the Petőfi Circle of writers and intellectuals who helped ease the way to the Revolution of 1956; awarded the Attila József Prize 1958 › begins working for the Literary Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a librarian 1967 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1973 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1994 › member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts 2008 › dies in Budapest

Ferenc Sánta was working in a factory when his literary talents were discovered by the well-known writer Pál Szabó. His first short story, Sokan voltunk (There Were too Many of Us, 1954), was soon published, and Sánta was greeted as a prose artist representing the great realist tradition of Zsigmond Móricz. As a writer of Transylvanian origin, he was also influenced by the anecdotal naivety, the mix of naturalism and magical realism, of Áron Tamási. “There Were too Many of Us,” about a poor family with many children, recalls the death of a grandfather who goes to a gas-filled pit to kill himself in order to free the family of the burden of sharing their meagre food with him.

Sánta’s first short story collection, Téli virágzás (Winter Bloom, 1956), which contains recollections of his childhood about real-life heroes who fight poverty, is told with an ingratiating mix of dignity and humour. His second volume, Farkasok a küszöbön (Wolves on the Threshold, 1961), however, depicts a darker and less mythological world related in a more complex style.

The stories, as often in Sánta’s works, are close to being parables. His main concern—the relationship between man and history—becomes increasingly emphatic: Sánta examines the moral responsibility of the individual in situations where domestic values and historical interests clash. History is always beset with war and cruelty, but man must retain his humanity even amongst the most inhuman circumstances. This is the central topic of his iconic novel, Az ötödik pecsét (The Fifth Seal, 1963).

Ethical and philosophical concerns also mark the author’s novel Húsz óra (Twenty 127

Hours, 1964), which explores not only the crimes and responsibilities of the recent past, but also the controversies faced by the Hungarian peasantry. The book is the fictitious reportage of a newspaper reporter investigating a murder committed during the 1956 Revolution. Through the story of the shooting under investigation, a whole historical period unfolds: the years between 1945 and 1960, when major transformations occurred in the Hungarian village (land was distributed among the peasants, only to be taken from them by forced collectivisation). The author contemplates whether it is necessary for one man to destroy the other, and the question remains unanswered, but Sánta’s philosophy of history is pessimistic: humans, the novel suggests, are motivated by the same essential drives as animals. Just like The Fifth Seal, Twenty Hours was also made into a successful movie.

Sánta’s interest in history led to the writing of the traditional historical novel, Az áruló (The Traitor, 1966). The story, which takes place during the Hussite wars, is in fact the meditation of the writer about four possible types of human behaviour. Made up of a series of monologues and dialogues, the book examines the conflict between those who make history and those who are exposed to its upheavals. The four characters are the priest, the student, the soldier, and the peasant; the first three fight against each other, only to be buried in the end by the only survivor, the peasant, the most vulnerable but also the most human character in the book. Sánta’s sympathies always lie with those at the mercy of history, those who cannot control their fate but wish to adhere to basic moral principles. The book is more a philosophical essay than a novel: theses and maxims are treated; history is examined in the extreme. The dramatic version of the novel, entitled Éjszaka (Night, 1968), was also well received.

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Az ötödik pecsét – The Fifth Seal Set in Budapest in 1944, when the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross has many Hungarians in fear for their lives, The Fifth Seal is an examination of human conduct under extreme conditions and an inquiry into the nature of heroism and moral responsibility. As the story begins, four men are introduced who regularly gather in a pub, and who seem to be the exact opposite of heroes: they sit in the pub and talk about such banal matters as preparing meals. They joke and tease each other as good friends do; their talk is presented with minimal authorial interference.

The first part of the book consists of their dialogues and lengthy monologues; there is only one interruption from the narrative voice, where the writer explains that his only aim is the faithful presentation of these people, and in order to understand them, the reader must be patient and become acquainted with the insignificant details of their lives.

Gradually, however, the easy banter turns to talk about ethics and morality, but they agree that such questions are beside the point, because they have nothing to do with history.

Their only wish is that history should forget them altogether and let them live in peace. At this point, Gyurica, the cynical watchmaker, introduces a parable about the fate of man. On a remote island, he says, lives a god-like king whose might is uncontested, and who treats his slaves with extreme cruelty, cutting off their hands and feet, and raping their wives and daughters. One slave, on the other hand, whose family he has taken from him, continues to lead an exemplary life. The question is, whose life would Gyurica’s friends choose? They say that they would rather be the slave, because he can at least sleep at night, because he has a clear conscience. At which Gyurica counters that the king’s conscience is clear as well, because he is convinced that he is doing what is his right. At this the men fall silent, and only an unfamiliar newcomer, a crippled photographer, contends that he would choose to be the slave just the same. Gyurica mocks him and calls him a liar, whereupon the man, who thinks himself an immaculate human being, takes revenge for his hurt pride by going to the neighbourhood’s fascist commander and reporting to him that the men were voicing anti-fascist sentiments.

Meanwhile, the men return to their respective homes, and the reader learns about their intimate moments with their wives (or mistresses), even as they remain preoccupied with the problem raised by the watchmaker; and before they turn off the light, deep in their hearts they each decide to choose the position of the cruel king instead of accepting the hopeless sufferings of the devoted slave. Only the watchmaker remains unconcerned by the issue he has raised; he has more important things to do—he must look after the eleven children he is hiding from the fascists in his home. A new child arrives, a sad little girl whose parents have been killed; Gyurica speaks to her gently and tries to console her while he puts her to bed; then he spends the night mending their socks, preparing their meal, and going over their lessons. This is ethics in action: the man whom his friends think of as a hard-hearted cynic is in fact a loving and caring guardian of the innocent.

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The following day, the four companions from the pub are arrested and tortured, but are not told what their crime might be. They are bleeding and terrified; they fear for their lives. The fascist commander prepares a devilish test for them: in order to prove their loyalty, they must slap a dying man who, they are told, had plotted against the Hungarian Nazis. Three of the men who had decided that they would rather be the mythical cruel king are unable to hurt the dying man hanging suspended from the ceiling of his cell like Christ on the cross, bleeding from his wounds. They know they will die, but their moral sense prevents them from slapping the man, who probably wouldn’t even be aware of it. Only Gyurica steps up to the bleeding, distorted figure.

He is shocked and almost mad with pity for the tortured man, but he slaps him nevertheless. He must obtain his freedom. The children are waiting for him—twelve innocent souls dependent on him. Unaware of Gyurica’s motives, the others look on with awe and revulsion. When the Hungarian Nazis let him go, he walks the streets in a stupor. An air strike is approaching; soon planes are dropping bombs, and everything around him is destroyed, but he does not stop until he reaches his home and the children.

This last scene of the book recalls the Revelations of St. John, the source of the title of the book: ‘When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who have been slain because the word of God and the testimony they had maintained.’

The reader is left to himself to solve the question of martyrdom. Who made the right decision? In fact, is it possible to come to the right decision in an extreme situation? One thing, however, is clear: these men all proved to be heroes, each in his own way.

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András Süto“ 1927 › born in Pusztakamarás (now Cămăraşu, Romania) 1945 › first piece published in the Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) paper Világosság; begins studies at the Zsigmond Móricz Kollégium, where teaching is done in the spirit of the népies folk writers 1948–49 › studies theatre directing in Kolozsvár (Cluj) 1949–54 › editor in chief of the weekly Falvak Népe (Village People) 1953 › first collection of short stories and other writings published 1954 › moves to Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş, Romania), works for the literary monthly Igaz Szó 1957–89 › editor in chief of the illustrated magazine Új Élet 1965–77 › Member of Parliament 1974–81 › vice-president of the Romanian Writers Association 1979 › awarded the Herder Prize 1980 › writings banned in Romania; begins publishing in Hungary 1990 › elected honorary president of the World Federation of Hungarians 1992 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1996 › member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts 2006 › dies in Budapest

András Sütő was a regionalist writer who focused his attention on the problems of his native land, but especially that of the Hungarian community in Transylvania. His sympathies always lay with the poor—those people most exposed to the vagaries of history and those in danger of losing their mother tongue and even their very lives in face of the dictates of communism and extreme nationalism. Sütő’s sense of ethical responsibility may be compared to that of Irish writers in Northern Ireland.

Like many intellectuals of his generation, at the beginning of his career Sütő was an idealistic follower of socialist realism—Emberek indulnak (A New Start, 1953) and Egy pakli dohány (A Roll of Tobacco, 1954) belong to this period. However, his hope that the problems of the peasantry would be solved by the new world order was soon dashed. Both as a reporter and short story writer, he was faced with the humiliating realities of the fifties: ‘I realized that I must get rid of colourful descriptions and deal with our very existence; for the question remains—to be or not to be?’ Still, despite their committed stance, some of these early works already evidence Sütő’s penchant for humour, recalling the writings of another ethnic Hungarian in Transylvania, Áron Tamási. In Félrejáró Salamon (Solomon Astray, 1956), for example, Móricz-like realism is 131

combined with the absurd as the writer relates the story of his parents humiliated by communist bureaucracy—namely, the struggle of an honest man, his father, against a world that considers him abnormal for his honesty.

After his disillusionment, it took Sütő years to find his new voice, but when his autobiographical novel, Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (Mother Promises Light Sleep, 1970), was published, it became an instant success. The book marked the beginning of a new period in the writer’s career, when he started on the road to becoming the unofficial spokesman for the community of ethnic Hungarians living in Transylvania. His essays and travel notes, Rigó és apostol (Blackbird and Apostle, 1970), Istenek és falovacskák (Gods and Wooden Horses, 1973), and Engedjétek hozzám jönni a szavakat (Let the Words Come to Me, 1977), showed his growing concern with the restriction against the public use of the Hungarian language in Romania and the systematic infringement of the internationalist principles of communist doctrine. Little wonder that his diary notes, Szemet szóért (An Eye for a Word, 1993) and Heródes napjai (Herod’s Days, 1994), were published only in Hungary, as were many other of his works after he fell afoul of the authorities.

Sütő’s plays also deal with the uneasy relationship between man and power, the individual and the community. Of these, the best known are Káin és Ábel (Cain and Abel, 1977), a biblical play about servility versus individual pride; Suzai mennyegző (Wedding at Suza, 1981), based on Alexander the Great’s notorious order to his Greek and Macedonian soldiers to marry Persian maidens (a work that thus spoke out against the enforced homogenisation of ethnic minorities); and Csillag a máglyán (Star at the Stake, 1974), which portrays the tragic clash between two Protestant reformers, John Calvin and Michael Servet, one of whom is already compromised by his involvement with the authorities—thus exposing the conflict of a victorious ideology and the rebellious individual crushed by those in power.

Egy lócsiszár virágvasárnapja (The Palm Sunday of a Horse Dealer, 1974) is a variation on the famous Heinrich von Kleist novella, showing how revolution can turn into its opposite and devour its protagonist, and how a man of rigorous honour is doomed from the outset, while Advent a Hargitán (Advent on the Hargita Mountain, 1985) is a lyrical drama about mountain people that projects the vision of the death of a people. Az álomkommandó (Dream Commando, 1987) hints at the similarities between the Holocaust and Romanian neo-fascism. It was staged only in Hungary.

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Anyám könnyű álmot ígér – Mother Promises Light Dreams This novel, which bears the subtitle Diary Notes, is a unique combination of moving lyrical descriptions, realistic observations and documents (family letters, anecdotes, reports, folk songs, and so on.). The different elements are organized into a perfect whole, so that Mother Promises Light Dreams is both fiction and autobiography, the genuine yet symbolic story of a family, with the history of a small Transylvanian village furnishing the background. In many respects, it bears comparison with The People of the Puszta by Gyula Illyés, and Homeland by Áron Tamási.

The story begins with a dialogue between the writer and his mother, who asks him to write a book about them. His dreams will be lighter, she promises, if he sets down the chronicle of the family, for time passes and soon there will be no one to remember the troubled times they have seen. The setting is Pusztakamarás, a small village in the heart of Transylvania, and the time is the late 1960s. Only a third of the local population is ethnically Hungarian; the other three quarters are Romanian. The people of the village live in peace and harmony, but communism has exposed them to great hardships and poverty.

It is with admirable objectivity and precision that Sütő here recounts the situation of Transylvania’s Hungarian minority, the cultural and personal connections between such Hungarians and their Romanian neighbours, and the problems of agricultural collectivisation.

His observations about intercultural marriages, folk songs, poverty, migration, religion and schooling are still valid and pressing issues today. His chronicle tells about the terrible ordeals of the 1950s, when people were imprisoned for decadeswithout any reason given, when peasants were humiliated and considered the enemy of the state for owning a few acres of land, and when everything was taken away from those who had a little private wealth and was either collectivised or left to fall into decay. (Private orchards, for example, were limited to only a few trees—the rest taken away but not taken care of.) Every aspect of life was permeated with communist ideology, and the people were left with nothing but a pressing struggle against a selfish and heartless system.

The workings of communism are shown through the fate of Sütő’s father, a talented technician who, with years of hard work, had built a threshing machine, but had no time to use it, because when it was finished, the communist bureaucrats arrived with the verdict that he had to move out of his house together with his family, because as the owner of a thresher, he must be a rich man and an enemy of his own class. By the time Sütő wrote the book, his parents were back in their house, but the machine had to be given to the state in exchange for a bottle of wine.

The novel, however, is not tragic in tone. Though the book portrays history as inhuman and ideology as always stronger than the individual, Sütő’s exquisite metaphorical style and unyielding wit suggests that life is worth living. Those that cannot shape history, the writer suggests, can still be a part of it; the strength of a community lies in its language and its solidarity.

Mother Promises Light Dreams is more than a document of a small community or the history of a region; it is a parable of the absurdity of the human condition.

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Magda Szabó 1917 › born in Debrecen 1940 › receives teacher’s diploma in Latin and Hungarian from Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen 1940–45 › teacher at the Protestant Girl’s Boarding School, Debrecen 1945–49 › works as a civil servant at the Ministry of Religion and Public Education 1949 › awarded the Baumgarten Prize; banned from publishing 1950–59 › teaches in Budapest; becomes a freelance writer 1959 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1972 › awarded the Attila József Prize for the second time 1978 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1985–90 › lay superintendent of the Reformed Parish of Tiszántúl 1992 › Getz Corporation Prize, USA 2003 › awarded the Prima Primissima Prize 2007 › receives the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic; dies in Kerepes

A prolific author and one of the most often translated of Hungarian writers, Magda Szabó began as a poet but soon turned to prose and produced over forty-five works including novels, short stories, children’s and young adult literature, plays, film scripts and essays. Her style is objective yet passionate; in her novels she portrays the clash between the old and the new value systems and describes with great psychological insight the powers that form the fate of her characters.

Her best-known novels are about women trying to retain their independence and dignity in the midst of historical and domestic turmoil.

In her first two volumes of poetry, Bárány (Lamb, 1947) and Vissza az emberig (Back to Man, 1949), Magda Szabó speedily established her reputation as a poet of bold and powerful verse portraying the fragility of man in an alien world. She was awarded the prestigious Baumgarten Prize for her poetry in 1949, but it was withheld for political reasons, and she was banned from publishing until 1958.

While silenced, she began a novel, Freskó (Fresco, 1950), about a young woman and her struggles as an artist. The book, which brought her instant recognition, is made up of a series of interwoven interior monologues presenting the stream of consciousness of the members of an old puritanical family gathered for a funeral through which the history of the family unfolds and lies are exposed. Szabó’s second novel, Az őz (The Fawn, 1959), is the interior monologue 134

of a woman who gradually discloses the secrets of her life and makes a desperate attempt at attaining love and happiness. Similar in structure, Disznótor (Night of the Pig-Killing, 1960) is a novel of passion, murder, poverty and corruption—another family tragedy related through interior monologues. The heroines in Pilátus (Pilate, 1963), a novel on country gentry, and in A Danaida (The Danaid, 1964) are among Szabó’s most characteristic protagonists. Both face the same dilemma—what to do in face of change—but one lives up to the coldly rationalistic present, while the other’s life is governed by her past.

Szabó’s story collection Alvók futása (The Run of the Sleepers, 1967) mirrors the concerns of her novels—family history, death, and human relationships. Her book Zeusz küszöbén (On the Threshold of Zeus, 1968) is a subjective travelogue of a holiday in Greece and the author’s first meeting with the culture of ancient Greece. The novel Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969) depicts the relationship of three families during the Second World War. In the book, Katalin Street evolves into the central symbol representing youth and a past that is irretrievably lost, and the dead who remain part of the characters’ lives.

A turning point in Szabó’s oeuvre came with the publication of novels that bore strong autobiographical elements. Ókút (Old Well, 1970) is composed of the writer’s memories of her parents and her magical childhood. Szabó continues relating the story of her family in Régimódi történet (Old-Fashioned Story, 1971), a novel of careful and objective analysis placed in the service of uncovering the motivations for the actions of people long dead. It was also one of the first books in Hungary to deal openly with women’s sexuality. Two women are also the protagonists of Az ajtó (The Door, 1987), a novel that is part historical document and part a moving story about endurance and resolution. One of Szabó’s most widely read novels, Für Elise (2002) is a contemplation on morality and the passing of time wrapped in the guise of autobiography.

Szabó had also written a number of plays and radio plays collected in Az órák és a farkasok (The Hours and the Wolves, 1975). Her essays were published in the volume A félistenek szomorúsága (The Sadness of the Demigods, 1992).

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Az ajtó – The Door The Door paints the double portrait of a writer, Magda, and her housekeeper, Emerence. It begins and ends with a dream in which the narrator can’t manage to open a gate for the ambulance. In the first chapter she confesses that it was she who had killed Emerence, even if she wanted to save her with all her might. It is the tension of such sentences that governs the novel as a whole.

The narrator and her husband, both writers, need help to look after their home so that they can work in peace. Someone recommends Emerence, the strong old woman who works for several families living nearby. From the beginning, the eccentric woman guards her privacy more than the writers do theirs. She never mentions her past, she keeps one of her rooms closed, and she is said to have a cat and God knows what treasure in there. She lives up to her own ‘constitution’. Whenever someone falls ill, she is seen carrying a bowl of nourishment to them, but refuses to accept presents in return. Her political views are simple—there are those who sweep, and those who make others sweep, and she thinks little of an artist’s lazy life. She left her religion when she helped a friend commit suicide. Like the animals that play a crucial role in her life, her intuitions are exceptional.

Once, wanting to calm the narrator, whose husband is having a major operation, Emerence tells her the story of her childhood. It is like a ballad. As a little girl, Emerence is suffering from the bitterness of her widowed mother and decides to leave her. She takes the little twins, her siblings, along. On the road they get thirsty and she goes to fetch water, but in a sudden storm, the little ones are struck by lightning. On hearing the news, the mother commits suicide, and Emerence starts her career as a housekeeper. The full story of her life, however, unfolds only later, when the writer-narrator gives a reading in Emerence’s village, and learns how Emerence used to serve at different families, and how she helped and hid people during the troubled years of Hungary’s turbulent history.

Emerence and Magda are both reserved, each in her own way. Their relationship changes when the couple find a stray dog in the snow, and Emerence manages to save it. She names the male dog Viola (after the memory of a heifer, as we learn later), and although she cannot keep it at home, she becomes its real owner. Viola is like a child to Emerence. Indeed, having this dog fills the emotional void left by a rich Jewish couple’s daughter Emerence looked after for a year until, with the end of the Second World War, they came to get her.

Then one night, Emerence announces that she is expecting an important guest, and she would like Magda and her husband to play the role of her family. She prepares delicious dishes, but the guest never turns up, whereupon she destroys what she has made. Magda is very angry, but the same night she goes over to Emerence and asks for food, thus playing the part of the mysterious guest, Emerence’s lost ‘daughter’.

It is Magda’s husband—Emerence’s ‘master’, as Emerence calls him—who stands for rationality in the relationship of these two irrational women. But Emerence’s eccentricity proves 136

to be stronger than his wisdom. One day Emerence learns from the news that her former lover has died, and decides it is time to make her own will. She leaves Magda everything she keeps in her secret room, which she tidies up, and where she is keeping nine cats. She makes Magda promise that after her death she will look after the cats, meaning that she will kill them off mercifully. That winter, Emerence comes down with influenza, but refuses to lie down. When the illness exhausts her so much that she cannot leave her room, she takes what people bring to her door, but she refused to let anyone in, least of all a physician. Magda, mindful of Emerence’s need for privacy, goes to receive a literary prize that comes after decades of neglect and forced silence, and so she is not with her when the concerned neighbours force open her door. They find Emerence lying in the dirt. She has suffered a stroke, and the whole flat is in such a terrible state that its contents have to be burnt, and the place disinfected. Emerence is taken to hospital, where she feigns amnesia, but covers her face when anyone approaches, so Magda realizes that she must know what has happened. In a desperate moment she tells her a fatal lie, saying she has taken care of the flat and its inhabitants herself. Emerence is overwhelmed, and her health suddenly improves. But just before she is about to leave the hospital, she learns the truth. She cannot bear it and dies within a day. And so, Magda has in fact killed her; the novel thus concludes with the dream it began with.

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Mik ló s Sz entk u thy 1908 › born in Budapest 1926–31 › studies English, French, and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest; begins publishing in the literary journal Napkelet 1931–32 › spends a year on a scholarship in England 1932–39 › substitute teacher at the Madách Gymnasium, Budapest 1939–48 › teaches at the Árpád Gymnasium, Óbuda 1948 › receives Baumgarten Prize and a one-year scholarship to England 1949–58 › teaches at various schools until his retirement; earns his living from translation 1956 › after the publication of Divertimento, devotes himself to writing full time 1975 › publication of his translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses 1977 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1982 › awarded the Milán Füst Prize 1988 › awarded the Kossuth Prize 1988 › dies in Budapest

The acknowledged master of modern Hungarian experimental prose, Miklós Szentkuthy left behind an impressive body of work that in its method and scope—they are centred on the conflict between art and life and the aspiration for holiness and eroticism—have been compared to the novels of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. His early writings went either unpublished or neglected, while in spite of receiving instant critical acclaim, his first major novel, Prae (1934), had to be sold in second-hand bookshops by the author himself.

Prae has often been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, which Szentkuthy translated into Hungarian. It breaks with tradition and classical structure in favour of linguistic and intellectual associations, the free insertion of thoughts about art and philosophy, and the introduction of synchronicity as a compositional technique. Joyce and Szentkuthy had a corresponding frame of mind; they were both intent on creating a grand structure comprising mathematics, theology, biology, psychology and architecture—a whole pseudo-world of their own created out of fragmentary textual structures. In order to reach the Great Synthesis, Szentkuthy wrote fictionalised biographies of musicians such as Haydn (Doktor Haydn – Doctor Haydn, 1959) and Mozart (Divertimento, 1957), projecting his own self into them, as well as novels about artists like Dürer (Saturnus fia – The Son of Saturn, 1966) and Cranach (Hitvita és názsinduló – Religious 138

Debate and Wedding March, 1960), writers such as Goethe (Arc és álarc – Face and Mask, 1962) and Cicero (Cicero vándorévei – Cicero’s Wanderings, 1945) and historical figures such as Superbus and Luther.

The peak of his historico-phislosophical writings is his Szent Orpheus breviáriuma cycle (St. Orpheus Breviary, 1939–1993), a satire and travesty of European culture, a colourful cavalcade of Roman, Renaissance and Baroque scenes and characters, of bishops, popes, artists, politicians, saints and lascivious women, expressing the writer’s disbelief in historical progress. Originally planning it as a ten-volume cycle, Szentkuthy published the first seven parts of the series: Széljegyzetek Casanovához (Marginalia on Casanova, 1939), Fekete reneszánsz (Black Renaissance, 1939), Escorial (1940), Europa Minor (1941), Cynthia (1941), Vallomás és bábjáték (Confession and Puppet Show, 1942) and II. Szilveszter második élete (The Second Life of Sylvester II, 1973).

The appearance of the last volume marked the beginning of Szentkuthy’s renaissance. Thereafter he wrote two more Orpheus books, Kanonizált kétségbeesés (Canonized Desperation, 1974) and Véres szamár (Bloody Donkey, 1984). His last book to appear in his lifetime was Frivolitások és hitvallások (Frivolities and Confessions, 1988), a series of interviews conducted with the author by literary historian Lóránt Kabdebó in 1983.

The St Orpheus Breviary cycle, which annihilates the border between fact and fiction, is like an eternal theatre; it is a dizzying opera of humanity, a catalogue of human foibles and a precise but at the same time exuberant play with art and language. Like his earlier Fejezetek a szerelemről (Chapters on Love, 1936), the first volume of the series, it marked a dramatic shift in the author’s style, the quasi-scientific language of Prae giving way to the baroque prose typical of his later works.

Szentkuthy was also a remarkable essayist. His essay collections Meghatározások és szerepek (Definitions and Roles, 1969) and Múzsák testamentuma (Last Will and Testament of the Muses, 1985) and his two volumes of interviews, Frivolitások és hitvallások (Frivolities and Confessions, 1988) and Harmonikus tépett lélek (Tempestuous Harmony, 1994) are sparkling cascades of wit and erudition and are as enjoyable as his novels.

Szentkuthy also left behind thousands of pages of diary notes, not yet published, though his second book, Az egyetlen metafora felé (Towards the One and Only Metaphor, 1935), billed as a collection of essays, in fact contains short diary-like epigrams and reflections.

Miklós Szentkuthy’s work demonstrates the encyclopaedic intent of literature. ‘When he is writing’, observes Mária Tompa, ‘he is not in the least concerned with posterity; he is writing because the world for him becomes real only through putting it on paper.’

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Barokk Róbert – Robert Baroque Szentkuthy was only nineteen when he wrote Robert Baroque, about his seventeen-year-old self.

It is a great adolescent diary in which the author is flexing his writerly muscles. The various layers can be peeled apart, the thoughts contained therein can be interpreted in many ways, and so can the dreams the narrator relates. If Prae is the Hungarian Ulysses, some critics contend that this novel is the Hungarian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The story begins at a theatre (a recurring metaphor in Szentkuthy’s writings). The play has ended, and Robert is heading home alone in the Budapest night. He is a hyper-sensitive young man, vain and egotistical, toying with picturesque fantasies, secretly preparing for his great collage of a book entitled Creta Polycolor, a colourful procession of dreamy, escapist tales.

Art, however, clashes with reality, and Robert has to return to his dull, middle-class existence and to school, which he finds boring. He is an only child, spoiled to the extreme, the apple of his parents’ eyes; the three of them live in relative peace and harmony in the gloom of their three-room apartment. The world outside, on the other hand, is fraught with danger; the elegant surface of the novel is rippled from time to time by the realistic scenes of the street—a prostitute, a dying workman on the pavement, a passionately kissing couple glimpsed from the window.

Robert is deeply religious, but is troubled by erotic fantasies and dreams, of which there are several in the book, coupled with earnest soul-searching. Robert is confronted with a few girls—his cousin, the coquettish Giza, a dying girl he met at a hospital, the pianist Magda Perl, and a girl he spots in church—and he is aroused by their beauty. Brought up as a good Catholic, Robert thinks he is a terrible sinner; he examines his conscience for hours on end, then goes to church and confesses to a primitive priest who can hardly understand his complex problems. Confession alone cannot cure his anguish; he returns home and prays to the Virgin Mary to save his tormented soul, his only consolation being his lonely prayer. The next day, however, he flees from Holy Communion, for he cannot resist the temptation to stare at a pretty girl. The significance of confession is thus double-fold in Robert’s life. The book itself is a diary-like confession, an unflinching took at the self in the form of a diary, a mirror of the soul, and thus an act of confession. At the same time, it is an awed description of the nature of the preparation for confession as a rite of passage. Be that as it may, since the writer-protagonist is able to see himself from the outside, his descriptions of agonising moments are tempered and rendered richer by his playful sense of tragic-comedy, fine nuance and irony, which were to remain a hallmark of his works throughout his life.

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Sándor Tar 1941 › born in Hajdúsámson, Hungary 1959 › finishes training as an arms, munitions and detonating technician 1960–92 › works at a surgical instruments factory 1970s › begins publishing as a samizdat writer 1991–99 › member of the editorial board of the cultural monthly Holmi 1997 › awarded the Attila József Prize 1998 › awarded the Sándor Márai Prize 2005 › dies in Debrecen

Sándor Tar’s biography can be summed up in a couple of words. Though he worked most of his life as a tool-maker in a medical equipment factory, he began publishing as a samizdat writer with the support of the democratic opposition. After his works appeared in the progressive journal Holmi, he lost his job, but his writing career took off. One of the most highly respected novelists and short story writers of recent years, he was as popular with his fellow writers as with the public.

(Péter Esterházy and Pál Závada are among his admirers.) He died on January 30, 2005, at the height of his popularity, leaving behind what many consider the best depiction of the human cost of the Kádár era and the democratic changes of 1989.

Tar was an immaculate writer, whose every word and every sentence functions to bring the reader directly into the world of his characters, and so, in this sense, his prose approximates music. There is nothing redundant, nothing that could be deleted or replaced. There is only the confined world of small towns or crowded commuter trains on which manual workers go home for Sunday. There are only their feelings and reactions that, despite their circumstances, remain profoundly human, and not infrequently, comic.

Tar’s output consists almost entirely of collections of interconnected short stories, including A 6714.-es személy (Person No. 6714, 1981), A te országod (Your Kingdom Come, 1993), A mi utcánk (Our Street), 1995), Lassú teher (Slow Freight, 1998), and Az alku. Gonosz történetek (The Compromise: Unpleasant Stories, 2004). The stories in each of these books treat the world of poor workers in communist and post-communist Hungary as they go about the business of survival, each in his or her own way, thus raising, along with the prevalent atmosphere, the 141

human factor to the status of main character.

Tar also wrote a novel, the existential-surrealist political thriller Szürke galamb (Grey Pigeon, 1996). The unnamed town where the story unfolds is suddenly beset by a strange epidemic—people begin to bleed, and the bleeding cannot be stopped. At the same time, a number of violent killings occur within families, and police are called in to investigate as the mysterious curse eats into the fabric of the town. Even the main investigator almost falls prey to the violence, which, as we come to realize, does not originate with the pigeons allegedly spreading the contagion, but is the concrete manifestation of the dark side of human nature freed from its everyday confines—the legacy of a repressive era that must find release.

What Tar sought is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race. The reader could easily take much of what he wrote as black humour if not for the awareness that it is deadly serious. His impact on Hungarian literature will be felt for a long time to come.

A mi utcánk – Our Street Our Street, Sándor Tar’s most lauded collection of stories, comprises thirty-one portraits and events centred around the inhabitants of a small unnamed village situated in southern Hungary.

It is a vivid description of the people of Görbe utca (Crooked Street), bounded at both ends by a kocsma, a down-and-out pub where most of the characters find their consolation in alcohol, banter, sex, the yearning for love and recounting far-flung tales. In this, Tar’s work is a clear predecessor to that of László Krasznahorkai, and each of the stories of Our Street reflects on and extends the next, whereby a gallery of memorable characters gradually emerge, victims of the socio-political transformations in rural Hungary subsequent to the regime change of 1989.

Honing in on each character’s struggle to live as dignified a life as possible in their literally as well as metaphorically confined spaces, Tar dramatizes the difficulties of survival after a period of collapse that has left many without jobs or sustenance, and with little reason to hope. Tar’s contemporary Ádám Bodor remarked that “Sándor Tar chose to remain where the other writers have left. He has not forgotten what brings a sudden silence to a pub.”

The gallery of distinctive characters in Our Street ranges from Uncle Vida, an old man who grows vegetables he cannot sell, and his consumptive son, a man whom no one will shake hands with for fear of contagion, to the always proud Mancika, who one day is found lying on railway tracks waiting for a speeding train, and the priest Márton Last, who administers to the needs of the villagers with an equanimity that springs from resignation, not moral or spiritual resolve.

Through these figures, all of whom suffer from the drastic political tolls of the Kádár 142

era, one is drawn into a world both captivating and harrowing, a reality which, due to the moral insight of Tar, is unveiled with considerable perceptiveness and also imbued with a magical realism equal to the finest achievements of Garcia Marquez.

Yet the stories in Our Street are told with such unobtrusive humour, understanding and sympathy that, paradoxically, the book reaffirms the characters’ humanity and endows them with dignity. Though Tar did not believe in hope or solutions, let alone deliverance—his dark vision came to fruition in his existentialist-political thriller, Grey Pigeon (1996)—and though the moral qualities of his characters surface only briefly and in rare instances, he writes with such discipline that, despite its tragic nature, while haunting, Our Street is at once bracing. Though it is a wreath of short stories, critics have observed that Our Street is in fact akin to a modernday novel—much like some of Isabel Allende’s and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books—since its individual stories are all ultimately interconnected, revealing that the book’s form actually corresponds to the reality of the characters’ lives. While seemingly separate, individual, and isolated from one another, they are all interwoven, part of a greater social and political fabric, bound at every edge, just as each end of Crooked Street is bound by a kocsma.

Ultimately, Tar’s work illuminates the genealogy of modern Hungarian literature, which has gained considerable prominence in the Anglophone world in the last decade. It is the flawless work of a highly gifted writer who leads us into terrain that we would never have known were it not for him. It is not by chance that nearly every contemporary Hungarian writer expresses the most unreserved admiration for Sándor Tar. I.

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Contents Prose & Poetry from Early-20th-Century Hungary Mihály Babits p.6 Miklós Bánffy p.9 Géza Csáth p.12 Jenő Dsida p.15 Milán Füst p.18 Béla Hamvas p.21 Zsolt Harsányi p.24 Attila József p.28 Margit Kaffka p.32 Frigyes Karinthy p.36 Dezső Kosztolányi p.39 Gyula Krúdy p.42 Sándor Márai p.46 Ferenc Móra p.49 Zsigmond Móricz p.52 László Németh p.55 Károly Pap p.58 Miklós Radnóti p.60 Lőrinc Szabó p.64 Antal Szerb p.68 Áron Tamási p.71 Józsi Jenő Tersánszky p.74 Lajos Zilahy p.77 Béla Zsolt p.80 144

Prose & Poetry from the Second Half of the 20th Century Hungary Tibor Déry p.84 Endre Fejes p.88 Erzsébet Galgóczi p.92 Péter Hajnóczy p.96 Gyula Illyés p.99 György G. Kardos p.103 Ervin Lázár p.106 Iván Mándy p.109 Miklós Mészöly p.112 Géza Ottlik p.116 István Örkény p.120 Imre Sarkadi p.124 Ferenc Sánta p.127 András Sütő p.131 Magda Szabó p.134 Miklós Szentkuthy p.138 Sándor Tar p.141

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Writing for the ages is distributed to international editors and publishers Published by the Hungarian Books and Translations Office – Petőfi Literary Museum Editor: Paul Olchvary | Text: Mónika Mesterházi, Anna Szabó T. Revised and translated: Judith Sollosy | Design: Csaba Varga ISBN 978-615-5517-00-6

Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum

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