György Ferdinandy has long been associated with those familiar literary-theoretical clichés such as ‘Western Hungarian literature’ or ‘émigré literature’. Yet the oeuvre of this author – who has been creating in Hungary again for many years – contributes far more to twentieth-century Hungarian writing than such labels can encompass. As the writer born in 1935 – described by literary scholar Zsófia Szilágyi in her appreciative portrait – belongs to one of the most intriguing contemporary generations of authors, it is, as she puts it, “undeniably difficult at a literary evening or in an interview with Ferdinandy to bracket off that singular life-trajectory which begins on Sashegy [a district of Budapest] and returns there, yet winds its way through France and Spain all the way to Puerto Rico and Miami.” [1] The same ambivalence is noted by literary critic Krisztina Kovács: “It hardly facilitates a reading detached from the autobiographical narrative that several of the author’s book covers feature photographs of himself or his family (e.g. A mosoly albuma [lit. The Photo Album of Smiles], A francia vőlegény [lit. The French Bridegroom], A Pourtalés-kastély lakói [lit. The Inhabitants of the Pourtalés Manor]) – not to mention the subtitles that consign these texts to the realm of documentary fiction (The Inhabitants of the Pourtalés Manor, Ducument; A bolondok királya [The King of Fools] – factual novel).” [2] All of this readily recalls Roland Barthes. For it raises the question of how applicable the theory – elevated to the status of a doctrine – that “the author is dead” [3] can be in the case of a writer whose work is largely inspired by autobiography.
Already in his early stories of the 1960s (Sziget a víz alatt [lit. Island Beneath the Water], 1960; Futószalagon [lit. On the Assembly Line], 1965; Az év egyetlen napja [lit. The One Day of the Year], 1967), the sense of estrangement, of belonging neither here nor there, and the anxiety of impossible arrival – at times rendered with dry humour – were underpinned by the author’s own emigration of 1956 [after the crushed Hungarian Revolution]. A shared characteristic of these early narratives – likewise evident in Ferdinandy’s later writings – is the avoidance of the absurd. The naturalness of events prevents the reader from succumbing either to shock or to anger. Ferdinandy achieves this chiefly by depicting, in an even tone, both the advantages and the reversals of emigration and of life abroad.
It is evident that the writer’s forced departure after participation in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution is a decisive experience, yet it does not appear in his fiction as a single, all-defining trauma. In 1956 the twenty-year-old György Ferdinandy not only had to leave his homeland, but was compelled to part from his ailing father as well. This double severance recurs throughout his stories, becoming a central motif most explicitly in his 2008 novel The King of Fools. “I have never been able to forgive myself for leaving him alone in ’56,” he writes of his father’s death. These words reveal how profoundly such an experience is capable of shaping an author’s writings over several decades. In this 150-page text – which may also be read as a family novel – not only does the figure of the father come alive, but “beside the concrete, biographically verifiable events, the subjective tatters of memory also receive considerable emphasis. The son feels it his duty to gather together his recollections, of which the childhood memories prove the most vivid.” [4]
In his most recent volumes, Ferdinandy interprets prose (especially short prose) more broadly than the conventional short story. In Kérdések Istenkéhez (lit. Questions to the Little God), published in 2011, and in the more recent Álomtalanítás (lit. Dream-Removal), the mechanisms of memory-driven composition operate, in the author’s own words, as species of “genre-misbehaviour”, refusing to keep the texts imprisoned within rigid formal boundaries. Rather than the event-centredness of the traditional short story, these writings are marked by a retrospective, diary-like mode that allows the associative freedom of the creative mind. Thus, certain pieces in Questions to the Little God become diary-narratives or essays. In these texts, it is the reflective, summarising observations of the remembering author that prove more significant than plot: “Here in this street, even without greeting each other, people know everything about one another. […] and no one’s place ever grows cold.” (Tante) Most tellingly, perhaps, the concluding piece of the volume, the essay whose very title is revealing, Mielőtt a semmibe hullunk (lit. Before We Fall into Nothingness), articulates the dual formative experience – emigration and the loss of the father – already mentioned above. His words are unsettlingly clear even without interpretation: “Ever since the wider world opened before me, I have been searching for what is to be done in this new situation. For what the task is now and here for a so-called ’56er youth.” Or again: “I tried to bring order to my head: I set about writing my life. […] This became my chore, for many years, the writing of an autobiography.” And finally: “My father never uttered a word about me. […] I was not present, and being present is the only duty. The only task.” These sentences illustrate the recurring thematic cornerstones of the oeuvre: the impact of the 1956 events on the personal life-trajectory; the traumatic experience of losing the father; and the persisting stance of seeking and assuming one’s task.
The French Woman is likewise a first-person novel, an embrace of self-presentation and fiction in one of literature’s most capacious forms. Ferdinandy is not only the émigré revolutionary seeking – and ultimately finding – his path, writing out everything within him, good and bad alike [5], but also a husband and father. He speaks of his marriage in an interview volume, Robinson úr töprengései (lit. The Meditations of Mr Robinson), with Katalin Kulcsár: “In truth, I married my French wife three times. My French wife and I loved each other very much, from beginning to end, perhaps even today one might say, although I have not seen her for twenty years. We tried, come what may, to bridge the enormous gulf that separated us.” In her review, critic Ibolya Czetter highlights this statement when she observes that in Ferdinandy’s novel The French Woman “the solitary re-living of the past and the recording of the recollected reveal dissatisfaction and lack of success (‘There is no meeting between destinies’, ‘This life was a great misunderstanding’), while the act of memorialisation, the gathering of the past into an autonomous volume, its reconstruction, is at the same time an attempt to overcome the troubling formlessness of life – in other words, an experiment in giving form.” [6]
If I were to characterise the works of György Ferdinandy with a single adjectival phrase, it would be ‘immediate cheerfulness’. When he recounts a story, he does so in the anecdotal manner of Kálmán Mikszáth [Hungarian novelist, master of anecdotal prose]; when he depicts, humour breaks through the tone, and his essays are suffused with a sense of directness. Yet for all (or perhaps in spite) of this lightness, his subject matter is profoundly and humanely serious. Ferdinandy’s literary world “continually raises the question of what ‘homeland’ might actually mean, and when (or from what) we may genuinely feel at home. […] The search for homeland, however, does not take place solely in the physical sense, nor is it used in its habitual conceptual meaning: it signifies a place where we feel at home.” [7]
Behind Ferdinandy’s sentences lies the ambivalence of an authorial formation spanning five decades: the quest for a task, the condition of being without a homeland and the discovery of one, departures and arrivals, the experience of estrangement and of confronting one’s fate. His writing – his autobiography – is a vocation that means far more than mere self-exposure (or self-healing): it is the articulation of a life-path in which self-respect and self-surrender are natural constituents of living, not gestures of artistic pose.
[2016]
[1] Zsófia Szilágyi, Ismerős idegen (A nyolcvanéves Ferdinandy Györgyről) (lit. Familiar Stranger [On the Eighty-Year-Old György Ferdinandy]).
[2] Krisztina Kovács, Emigráns pozícióból (Az idegenség alakzatai Ferdinandy György prózájában) (lit. From an Émigré Perspective [The Configurations of Estrangement in the Prose of György Ferdinandy]). Forrás, 2008/6.
[3] More extensively: “writing will once again have a future only if we reverse the myth: the price of the reader’s birth is the death of the Author.” (R. Barthes, A szöveg öröme [lit. The Pleasure of the Text], 1996.)
[4] Orsolya Kolozsi, Ferdinandy György: A bolondok királya (lit. György Ferdinandy: The King of Fools). Source: http://www.kortarsonline.hu/2008/07/ferdinandy-gyorgy-a-bolondok-kiralya/4705 (last accessed: 5 June 2016)
[5] The author’s confession: “I wanted to see everything. The good and the bad alike. I have personal experiences of the revolution. Today this is unfortunate, for I find that posterity is scarcely interested in the bad.”
[6] Ibolya Czetter, Akit meglátogat a múlt. Ferdinandy György: A francia asszony (lit. The One Visited by the Past. György Ferdinandy: The French Woman). Magyar Napló, 2014/12.
[7] Evelin Farkas, Egy nem létező otthon tudattalan lakója (Ferdinandy György: A vadak útján) (lit. The Unconscious Inhabitant of a Non-existent Home [On the Path of the Wild Ones]). Source: http://kulter.hu/2012/04/egy-nem-letezo-otthon-tudattalan-lakoja/ (last accessed 20 December 2025).