The Art of the Offside

It is early 1949. The location is the Presidential Palace in Budapest. The last president of the Second Hungarian Republic, soon to become the Chairman of the Presidential Council of the People’s Republic of Hungary, Árpád Szakasits presides over the evening. Gathered are the better part of three generations of writers. The ailing, surviving giants of the 1910s and 20s, the established behemoths of the 1930s, and those young writers who have only just taken up their pens at the time of the war’s end. Food and drink unlike any seen since the first wartime shortages of fruits, meat, tea, coffee, and chocolate line the table. The mood is decisively festive. Shortly after dining begins, signaled perhaps by the President or the Minister of Culture, the philosopher György Lukács rises. His deep, gravelly voice silences the room. His speech is simple, his request is clear. Behind him, the nodding smiles of the Hungarian Working People’s Party apparatus. He explains, all the Party wants is the writers’ praise—militant writings on their side.

With László Krasznahorkai’s win of the Nobel Prize in Literature this past winter and David Szalay’s Flesh having won the Booker Prize shortly thereafter,1 Hungarian literature has experienced unusual visibility amongst foreign readers these last few months. Hungary pierced the news once again this year with Péter Magyar’s successful and resounding overthrow of the Orbán regime. To some, these events created a specter of kinship between Hungarian literature and politics, as if literary acclaim boldly paved the way for political change. While this is an assertion we may not be able to substantiate, we know for certain that politics and literature in Hungary have had an uneasy relationship over the course of several centuries, a fact which has bolstered the importance of a specifically Hungarian literature for many Hungarian readers.

Since the national poet Sándor Petőfi’s role in sparking the 1848 Revolution, Hungarian governments have often attributed particular potency to the literary. After Hungarian literature flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Fascist regime (1920-1944) saw the frequent blacklisting of certain left-wing writers and in facilitating the mass murder of about 500,000 Hungarian Jews, his government wiped out many of the leading literary lights of the period. The two Socialist regimes (1948-1956 and 1956-1989) imposed centralized direction and supervision of Hungarian writers, while simultaneously and fundamentally reshaping the Hungarian language. Hungarian writers working today all write under the legacy of that People’s Republic of Hungary (1949-1989). Almost half a century of Hungarian literature, the half that young writers in the ‘90s could turn to as the most recent depictions of Hungarian life, was written in the shadow of that regime, shaped by it and responding to it. Indeed, Krasznahorkai’s generation began publishing under editors still answering to Party functionaries. Two novellas, Niki and Fabulya’s Wives,2 by two paradigmatic writers of the Socialist period, Tibor Déry and Iván Mándy, crisply sketch the literary inheritance that this history left behind.

From 1948 to 1956 (the Stalinist period of the People’s Republic), the Hungarian government strangled literary life. It closed all literary journals not in perfect accord with the Party-line and centralized publishing through the Party Central Committee’s cultural secretary, as it would remain until the 1980s. If you were a great Hungarian writer of the 1950s, you had a dazzling variety of ways to pursue your craft . You could head West like György Faludy or Sándor Márai, and bustle amidst the Hungarian émigrés of New York or Paris, like John von Neumann or André Kertész. No less noble was to inspire the imagination of the youth with children’s books as Iván Mándy, Ervin Lázár, and Sándor Weöres would go on to do—while not “rewriting” better or lesser known plays for the Hungarian Radio. For those in need of a reliable existence, the muses gave songs in celebration of the sanguine virtues of the Hungarian Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi; so chose Zoltán Zelk and Gábor Devecseri. And for the less gregarious, secluded jail cells were never in short supply. It was the latter option that prose writer Tibor Déry chose for himself. 

Déry (1894-1977) was a writer whose career happened to weave through the foundational institutions of both the twentieth-century Hungarian literary and political worlds. Toward the end of the First World War, the editors of the most prestigious literary periodical of the time, the Nyugat (published 1908-1941), discovered and began publishing him generously. He came to be known as a member of the “Second Generation of the Nyugat,” (a title which references those three generations of writers who together created modern Hungarian literature). Around 1918, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party. During the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils (it lasted 133 days), he would be named a member of the Writers’ Directoire alongside Lukács. His politics waxed and waned, he travelled Europe, took part in the 1934 uprising in Vienna, fled eventually returned to Hungary, went into hiding (himself a Jew) in 1944-45, and then began publishing extensively beginning in 1947 as a longtime Socialist/Communist. And yet he was by no means orthodox in his political commitments, and, as always throughout his life, the closer he came to political favorability, the more he resisted his public’s expectations. This is where Niki: The Story of a Dog becomes interesting.

The novella is, as Déry tells us, the story of a dog, specifically a fox terrier who, “adopted the Ancsas in the spring of 1948.” Déry gives little detail about the couple and what he does write casts them as people very typical of their time. János, the husband, is a skilled laborer, a technician, and longtime member of the Communist Party. His wife is a homemaker. The couple’s only child, a son, was killed by the Don River in the leadup to the Battle of Stalingrad, in which some 90,000-130,000 members of the Second Hungarian Army perished. The Hungarian Working People’s Party led by the Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi is now consolidating power and cementing Hungary’s position as a Soviet satellite state. The plot is straightforward: Niki joins the Ancsas shortly after János is reassigned to a Budapest factory from Western Hungary. After briefly living in the outskirts of Budapest, the family moves into the heart of the city onto the famous Pozsonyi út. János receives promotions, demotions, until one day he suddenly disappears, arrested by the ÁVH (the State Protection Authority, i.e. the Hungarian NKVD/KGB-style secret police). While the setting of Niki is a very particular moment in time and politics, the Ancsas and their neighbors are thoroughly apolitical. We never hear them talk of food shortages, arbitrary professional reassignments, the discomfort of having strangers moved into unused rooms in their apartments, and not a single politician’s name ever crosses their lips. But I am telling you the story of the Ancsas – and Niki is the story of a dog. 

Niki is young and energetic in that spring of 1948, choosing her new family after having left behind a retired former Fascist officer. She is drawn to the couple because of their pleasing smell and loves them with all her heart. City life is challenging for Niki, but nothing seems insurmountable until János is arrested. Readers grow to understand the absurdity of János’s years-long captivity through its effect on Niki. She ages prematurely, slows, falls ill, and eventually dies. She cannot understand what happened to János because she lacks the human brain to understand his arrest and whereabouts, even as the humans around her slowly piece it together. This is the story of a dog. She cannot understand who the secret police are, that they make inexplicable arrests, or that János is actually captive in a prison very near to Budapest (as his human community finds out a year after his disappearance). Yet, the limited knowledge the humans do obtain does not put them too far ahead of Niki; they are all equally helpless in the face of the Stalinist regime. Perhaps the only quality that meaningfully distinguishes the humans and Niki is agency, though even this is tenuous: the humans could rebel against their state of affairs, but they do not. Niki’s rebellion takes the form of becoming apathetic to the point of starvation.

In Hungary, politics stains every street and infiltrates all human relationships, even the familial. The narrator of Déry’s novel repeatedly notes each mentioned street and square’s name before and after the rise of the then-current regime. Again and again, we are reminded that the Jászai Mari Square on which the Ancsas live in Budapest was formerly Rudolf Square (for Crown Prince Rudolf, son of the Emperor and King Franz Joseph, sometime heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire), the nearby Victor Hugo Street was once Wahrmann Street, the Visegrádi Street was Visegrádi first then briefly Kiss József Street until it recovered its original name (one shudders at the thought of how Kiss József fell out of favor so quickly), and so on. In Budapest, as Déry illustrates, not even an unsuspecting street can survive a change in political tide. Even on a sleepy neighborhood stroll to walk your dog, you will invariably encounter an impression of the reigning regime and a memory of the fallen one. 

What gives Niki its universal edge is that the power upon which all characters, Niki the dog included, depend gains a metaphysical dimension in its invisibility or absence. General Secretary Rákosi or the various Party underlings never make an appearance in the novella. The only power with a face we see briefly are the few men from the dog pound who try to capture Niki to harass Mrs. Ancsa. Otherwise, the powers that be in Niki are like deities of a religious tradition. The story’s characters are entirely dependent upon some mechanism over which they have no control and of which they have no knowledge. In this sense, we can catch a whiff of Kafka’s Trial or Castle. Unlike Kafka, however, Déry does not actually spend much time discussing the inexplicable decisions passed down upon the characters. Déry’s attention is not actually directed towards this faceless power. Instead, he examines with extraordinary care the consequences of this state of dependency that power creates, dependency on faceless power that takes countless forms as it arbitrarily determines: where the characters work and live, who they have to share a roof with, what foods they have available, what their income is, whether they are free or captive, live or die–and if they live, what the quality of that life will be.   To the extent that humans may delude themselves into believing they have more agency over their fate than dogs such as Niki do, Déry shatters this delusion. A key passage in Niki reads,

In her total dependence on man, Niki was like those detainees who have no idea why they have been put in prison nor how long they will stay there; or like those [Party-appointed] company directors who, when appointed, have no idea of how long they will remain in their new post; or the assistants in their nationalized Közért food shops [the state-owned grocery store chain in Socialist Hungary] who are completely ignorant of why, from one day to the next, they have been transferred to a branch at the other end of the city, an hour and a half by tram from their home; or like those writers who do not know why they are writing what they are writing; or again, like their readers, who don’t know why they are reading it. Only a strong reciprocal affection can render such dependence bearable.

Niki is at once like a prisoner, Party cadre, grocery store cashier, writer, and reader. She is like any Hungarian of the period—like any Hungarian of almost any historical period. She is thrown by the current of history. She too struggles in her state of dependence but cannot escape it.

In centering the life of a dog rather than the life of Janos, for instance, Niki becomes a sort of guide for the novelist writing under censorship. I should note, there wasn’t usually formal censorship per se–instead the Party selected the editors and directors of periodicals and publishing houses who simply ensured that the content they put out conformed to the Party’s expectations.3 Although János returns at the very end of the story just as inexplicably as when he first disappeared, readers never learn about his experiences in prison. Not a word. He is not Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich whose every gulag grimace crinkles the pages of Novy Mir. Instead, we begin to read Niki’s mental, emotional, and physical deterioration as stand-ins for János’s experiences. It is through a dog’s aging, whimpers, thinning, idleness, depression, and eventual death that the reader gains some sense of the prisoner’s travails. The writer in Stalinist Hungary might not know why she is writing what she is writing, but whatever it is, that narrative can survive the momentary plight. In Hungary, history in even its slightest motions is experienced and not read about: government decrees and political changes enter into people’s everyday private lives. If politics and the force of history in Hungary—independent of era—pervade each person’s life, then reaching for that narrative becomes important for many. 

It is that reach for narrativization that the writer Iván Mándy took up in his novella Fabulya’s Wives just a few years after Déry published Niki.

Mándy (1918-1995) is often considered the last of the Hungarian “café writers.” Skipping school as often as he possibly could, he attended kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school at the various cafés of interwar Budapest, particularly the Simplon Café (an institution we lost in the early 1950s), where he would accompany his journalist father and look on to start learning about the city’s many people. His subjects are the city folk of Budapest. He had an impeccable ear for dialogue, despised leaving his city, and was an extraordinarily modest man. His stories capture every angle of certain districts of Budapest. He passionately documented the speech of every Budapester in his writing and sought to wring words out of even the furniture and objects of the urban landscape. Unlike Déry, he never sat in prison, though from 1949-1955 he was banned from publishing. Even after 1955, for years, he mainly wrote children’s stories. 

Fabulya’s Wives, Mandy’s first “adult” work after the blacklisting, is a conversation between two silenced writers in a café. Zsámboky and Turcsányi discuss the many successive, failed marriages of their mutual acquaintance “Fabulya.” At the opening of the story, Zsámboky’s gaze vacillates between an empty slip of paper in front of him and his surroundings. He cannot force himself to write yet another short lecture for the Youth Radio about any one of the generic required school readings they assign to him. Turcsányi enters and tells him he just ran into Fabulya. Zsámboky is dismissive, remarking that he does not even know the man—despite their apparent 20 years of friendship (by now, over)—“I know him… hm, but what do I know about him? Nothing! You think Fabulya ever says anything about himself, have you ever heard of him getting this or that assignment, that he is working on something or other? Never! He just stops in front of you. ‘What’s going on?’” That is all Fabulya ever asks. Slowly, Zsámboky begins reminiscing. The narrative shifts back and forth suddenly between Zsámboky and Turcsányi’s conversation, earlier encounters that either man had with Fabulya, and spots of free indirect discourse emanating out of either of the three men’s thoughts. The novella loosely follows the chronology of Fabulya’s three to four marriages. 

Throughout the entire novella, all the story reveals about Fabulya’s character are his marriages and a scarce list of physical and biographical eccentricities. He is insufficient in every sense of the word. Insufficient as a writer. Insufficient in his character development through the novel. Insufficient as a man for his wives—he readily accepts their affairs believing he would not be able to fully satisfy them physically or emotionally. In Zsámboky’s account, Fabulya is profoundly stingy and selfish, unwilling even to lend a friend a book, let alone donate any money. In Turcsányi’s opinion, he is generous and supportive. The two men’s understandings of Fabulya are largely irreconcilable, and if anything, suggest that neither man knows all that much about Fabulya. As for Zsámboky and Turcsányi, what our author, Mandy, gives us about them is even more threadbare. We come to learn that both are writers without work who (presumably) cannot publish their own writing and depend on the Radio for jejune assignments to adapt mediocre plays or pen simple introductory lectures for schoolchildren. Otherwise, Mándy supplies terse and repetitive depictions of their facial reactions to each other’s Fabulya anecdotes. Almost always, the only individuation any further characters receive is a single physical characteristic, a hairstyle, gait, posture, expression, or eccentricity. Insufficiency becomes a motif for the period. Shortages and insufficiencies define the era’s grocery stores, sartorial options, electoral ballots, professional opportunities, and—in Mándy’s writings, completeness of character.

But the novella bursts at the seams with interiority and concise free indirect discourse. It is a depiction of Zsámboky at work, writing. As Zsámboky tells of Fabulya, he frequently interrupts himself, edits, and corrects—sometimes verbally to his friend, other times solely in his internal monologue. It is ambiguous whether the story itself is Zsámboky’s writing removed to the third-person or if it is in conversation with Turcsányi that he ponders precisely how to commit to paper Fabulya’s life. “Zsámboky began writing Fabulya. He couldn’t help himself, he was writing it in his mind, as he recounted that night to Turcsányi. Those characters who swarmed into Fabulya’s room one after the other.” As his reminiscence continues, Zsámboky is constantly testing how a given memory or image of Fabulya could work in a text.  “I’ll leave this out— thought Zsámboky –, this street conversation. It is very sharp. Or should I? …  —His manuscripts were in front of him, the crossed out, jumbled lines, the circled names. This time, Fabulya’s name was circled.” Near the end of the story: 

He felt it then, in that moment he felt it so clearly and obviously that he will never be able to write it. Neither Fabulya, nor his wives, nor this friendship or whatever it was. After two sentences, the whole thing dies, before he can even ‘unravel the material.’ He was overtaken with cowardice just thinking about writing. It was a feeling as humiliating as when he suffered from vertigo and didn’t dare cross from one side of the street to the other. How long has it been since he last wrote something? How many years?

If we never receive any complete and developed characters in Mándy’s story, all the elaborate interiority we do discover is in Zsámboky’s attempt at writing. Following the canine tracks of Déry’s Niki, it would seem as though, in the Stalinist Hungary, the person and their individuality had been dulled, reduced to those of a dog. The deficiency of Mándy’s characters stems out of the state of dependence that Déry illustrates. In a system which seeks to centrally plan and control not only the national economy but also the community’s culture and individuals’ private lives, self-individuation through creative pursuits becomes precarious. If you are dependent entirely on the Party’s whim for where you live and what you can do, you cannot grow as a person–or as a writer. Mándy’s characters are insufficient in the sense that as individuals, they are not readily distinguishable. That they are different people comes not from distinct emotions or personalities, but rather simply because their external experiences—namely, the mundane experiences of daily life—are slightly different. We know Zsámboky and Turcsányi are two people because Zsámboky receives slightly more assignments from the Radio. Fabulya’s distinctiveness comes entirely from the fact that he has been married so many times. The only personal, internal trait those marriages illustrate is that they all fail because Fabulya is emotionally and physically insufficient for his wives. Yet if neither man were dependent on the Party’s whim as to whether they can publish–if all three could publish their own writing–the novel seems to suggest that their writing would at once distinguish and complete them. For example, we learn Fabulya was once a poet and at least some of his wives were drawn to that fact about him and grew quickly disillusioned when they found out that the only writing he does now is epigrams for his friends.  

All of the characters as individuals in Fabulya are, as we have suggested, flat. They do not develop. They have no depth. Like animals, they are largely the product of staccato-like impulsive physical reactions: facial expressions and perhaps sexual desire. But if the political regime succeeded in constraining these characters’ agency and restraining their thought, if this is a regime that blurred the color of a free life, it could never reach one site of human endeavor. Narrativization. Zsámboky may not have too much material to write about or only have material that he cannot write about for fear of repercussions, but still he can write if not publish the mundane story of his friends. It is here that Mándy shows where completeness and growth could come from. Storytelling, Mándy suggests, is what remains in even the harshest political circumstance. 

Of course, this is no great revelation. Whether it is young people secluded in a Florentine villa telling tales while the Black Death slithers around them in Boccaccio’s Decameron or the Jews of Warsaw scrupulously recording every detail of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto for Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes Archive, narrativization is a time-tested mode for resisting the onslaught of disease or dictator. Where this practice becomes more singular and formative for Hungarian literature is in what it means when it is impressed upon an entire literary tradition for an extended period.

Zsámboky ultimately concludes that he cannot write Fabulya’s story. Yes, there is an ironic, metafictional reading of the novella, which sees the text as Zsámboky’s text. But if we take him at his word, we are met with a distressing possibility. In a very literal sense, Zsámboky may believe that the story of Fabulya’s marriages and his own friendship with Fabulya is too mundane, that good stories cannot unfold in dire repression. I should argue, however, that Zsámboky cannot write because his abilities as a writer could not grow in his circumstances.

A profound anxiety pervades Zsámboky’s thought: after writing so much for children and for the radio, will he still be able to write as he once did, for an adult reading audience? Unlike Niki, Fabulya’s Wives is an ostensibly apolitical text. There is no mention of the Party, there are no arrests, no talk of censorship, and the financial and existential hardships our characters face are not shown as especially devastating or unusual, the effects of a war or economic depression. The unspoken reality obvious to readers with some awareness of the historical context, however, is that Zsámboky, Turcsányi, and Fabulya all rely on the Hungarian Radio (or on small-scale dealings like bookselling) for work because as writers they cannot publish their own work. If all three of them write exclusively for their own desk drawers, as the Hungarian saying went—assuming their day jobs even left them time to write—then each wrote texts that no editor could polish, critic could dissect, or reader could savor. Editors, critics, and readers each have a distinct role in a writer’s formation. Depriving a writer of either one—let alone all three—prevents them from developing their craft. Zsámboky may once briefly have enjoyed some literary acclaim as the story suggests and may even have shown promise then as a young writer. That promise became meaningless when he could no longer publish.

Let us take this a step further.

Writing about the novel Karnevál by Béla Hamvas,4 Péter Esterházy asked, “What would have happened if Karnevál had appeared in ‘51? [...] What would Déry have done reading Karnevál? What else would he have written and what would he have written differently? György Lukács? Ottlik [a major twentieth-century Hungarian novelist, friend of Mándy’s]? Etcetera? And finally the hardest question: what else would Hamvas have written and what would he have written differently?”

When a single writer cannot publish, his own growth becomes stunted. What does that mean for him and what does it mean for his peers? In a vibrant literary tradition, texts respond to each other. One writer’s novel is challenged by another’s play and vice versa. Whether explicitly or subconsciously, literary works are in constant conversation with one another in any given tradition (and certainly with works from other traditions too). When Zsámboky in Fabulya’s Wives cannot publish, it is not only his own loss, but also Turcsányi’s and Fabulya’s losses. How would their writing change and grow if they could read Zsámboky’s story? 

Here we find that disjointed quality that came to characterize much of postwar Hungarian literature. After 1956, the ruling Party’s culture tsar informally divided writers into “supported,” “tolerated,” and “prohibited” categories as a mechanism for deciding how to adjudicate their works. Some writers, particularly the “supported” ones, published often; others, the “tolerated,” published sporadically and perhaps only those works which were at least minimally palatable to the Party; still others, the “prohibited,” almost never published. Writers in all three categories had texts that were only published years and years after their authors penned them, sometimes decades later and sometimes only after their authors had already passed away, and the Socialist regime had already fallen after 1989. Hungarian literature could not develop with the natural evolution of a free literature. Many writers never had the benefit of editors and readers for even their best manuscripts. As each other’s peers, writers could often only exchange ideas over coffee instead of through paper and text. This old Party urge to control literature keeps reappearing: between 2020 and 2023, the Orbán aligned Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a conservative think tank fellowship program hybrid, acquired a controlling stake in the largest Hungarian publishing and distribution group, the Libri Group. Independent publishers remained, so the Orbán regime’s control over Hungarian publishing was not absolute whatever their aspirations may have been. As Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government dismantles the anti-democratic entrenched protections that nonprofits like the MCC enjoyed under Orbán, the future of the Libri publishing houses remains unclear.

So what makes the moment when Krasznahorkai bows before the King of Sweden so sweet? Why do literary acclaim and political change chime in adjacent octaves? In a general sense, every Hungarian book attests to the survival of the Hungarian language—an important feat for a narrowly-spoken and challenging tongue. But in a more particular sense, since at least the 1930s (with brief gaps in between), every great Hungarian text is a cause for celebration because of all the restraints it had to overcome to see the light of day. Each is a triumph against the political megalomania that tried to subdue it and a record of the imagination that endured it. Each text astonishes for how it could join the greater literary conversation even when political leaders sought to stifle writers’ voices.

In a characteristically Hungarian twist of events, Niki and Fabulya’s Wives were, in fact, published more or less at the time they were written and at a time when political control over literature was especially marked. Niki greeted readers in 1956, in the final throes of Hungary’s Stalinist period. Fabulya’s Wives came out in 1959, after the fall of the Stalinist Rákosi but before the reforms of the 1960s. Of course, Déry was imprisoned for four years beginning in 1957 for his participation in the 1956 Uprising and Mándy’s work for the next decade until the end of the 1960s still consisted largely of assignments for the Radio and children’s stories. Ironically, the Party’s attempts at restraining these writers ultimately worked to refine the subtlety of their critique. Perhaps that is where the vigor of Hungarian literature comes from. To draw upon one of Mándy’s most beloved themes, that of soccer: however many restraints were in place, the Hungarian authors of the 1950s wrote subversive texts from behind the government’s last defensive line. There can be no offsides in literature. The Hungarian governments whose reach consistently shot through Hungarians’ everyday lives often took literature so seriously that they stumbled. In attempting to exercise control over writers, they inadvertently let great works nevertheless be published, so that—to use the words of the Swedish Academy’s justification for László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize—“in the midst of apocalyptic terror, [Hungarian literature] reaffirms the power of art.”