Of all minorities, the Transcarpathian Hungarians have suffered the most from the various changes of sovereignty since Trianon. Transcarpathia, annexed to the then Czechoslovakia under the peace dictate of 4 June 1920, was later absorbed by the Soviet Union, and after its dissolution became part of Ukraine. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, for a long time, the pipe of Transcarpathian Hungarian literature sounded the “quietest” in the harmony of the “five-branched pipe” on the scale of minority Hungarian literatures. The first louder sign of literary life among Transcarpathian Hungarians manifested in lyric poetry. “The long predominance of lyric poetry did not develop without reason: the half-century after 1945 seems to have favoured poets” – writes Károly D. Balla [1]. He sees three reasons for this: the first is that, in a certain sense, not only does the author have to “grow up” to prose, but so does literature itself, i.e., the literary workshops reflecting the worldview of the given community. Linked to this is the fact that, parallel to the emergence of workshops, a stratum of writers capable of speaking in the voice of the community and documenting its life situation must also emerge. “However, the Transcarpathian [literature] has always been characterised by a certain unformedness and infancy,” professes Károly D. Balla. [2] The second reason – which was typical of the entire Hungarian literature of the Carpathian Basin from the 1950s onwards – was that, based on the aesthetic guidelines adopted in the Soviet sphere of interest, the heroes of novels or short stories could only be positive characters of an origin and ideology conforming to Socialist Realism; this principle did not allow for the prose treatment of real traumas in any form, and therefore steered Transcarpathian Hungarian authors towards lyrical self-expression with a more personal tone, less concerned with presenting socio-historical reality. “Even those more inclined to compromise could get by better in poetry: by using boringly repeated symbolism (bright October, red star, revolution, people, freedom, Lenin, peace, happy future), they rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and then they could write more honest lines, different kinds of poems” [3]. The third – more specific – reason is that members of the Transcarpathian writing generations began their work as poets, journalists, or literary critics, and only then reached the world of short stories and novels, or – and this is more typical – the various literary-poetic-publicist genres are present in their art in parallel, interacting with each other.
The career of Zoltán Mihály Nagy (1949-) can also be fitted into the literary historical characterisation outlined above. After initial publications in periodicals (his poems and short stories appeared in newspapers in Berehovo from 1963, but the Kárpáti Igaz Szó (Carpathian True Word) also regularly published his writings), his work opens with the 1983 poetry collection entitled Dolgok igézetében (In the Spell of Things), followed by the 1988 short story collection Fehér eper (White Mulberry), and then another volume of poetry: Pírban, perben (In Flush, in Trial) (1990). Based on his first three volumes, it can be stated that Zoltán Mihály Nagy began his career as a poet open to prose. According to the current assessment of literary scholarship, Nagy's writing career truly matures after the third volume, i.e., with the end of “Soviet times”, just as several of his contemporaries (e.g. János Penckófer) began their significant authorial careers at this time. In the case of Zoltán Mihály Nagy, this can be supplemented by the fact that he also began his work as a literary and cultural organiser at this time – I am thinking here of his editing of the journal Együtt (Together) and his publishing activities.
Another decisive factor in his poetic beginnings was that from the mid-70s, the young Zoltán Mihály Nagy was a member of the József Attila Stúdió (Attila József Studio), which mainly nurtured generations of poets. And we might add that the later novels of his career – published in the 90s – undeservedly relegate the poems and short stories in the shadow, in the words of János Penckófer. [4] In the stories of Zoltán Mihály Nagy's first short story collection, Fehér eper (1988), for example, one can already observe those prose-poetic techniques which the author uses in his “great” later novel, A sátán fattya (Satan's Bastard). Thus, the creation of a genre, the creation of a modern prose-style ballad, is not linked to the novels of the 90s in the oeuvre, but – naturally, in a less aesthetically refined way – already appears in the stories of the 80s. In Fehér eper, the narration, in the first or second person singular, consisting of broken long sentences, and traditional prose, alternate continuously throughout the volume, though not within individual short stories. This formal diversity, however, cannot be justified by the theme, so the possibility of l'art pour l'art form-creation arises at such times. Therefore, the formal principles of “Zoltán Mihály Nagy's long-sentence balladry” [5] are already evident in Fehér eper, but in the relationship between theme and form, there is still more instinctiveness than consciousness.
The representatives of Zoltán Mihály Nagy's lyrical world are the poetry volumes Dolgok igézetében (1983), Pírban, perben (1990), and Új csillagon (On a New Star) (2003). This lyrical world is close to Ady in its defiance and to László Nagy in its form. “Z. M. N.'s prose poems with their vernacular language indeed remind one of László Nagy's long songs [...] [but while those structure the world as a whole, Nagy's poems] struggle with social problems experienced within a horizon narrowed to minority existence”. [6] As early as in the poems of Dolgok igézetében, the mixing of the monologic, emotion-conveying character with the tone characteristic of prose poems can be observed: that is, the long sentence becoming a trademark in the later oeuvre and the nature of lyrical expression – form and content – form the same inseparable unity in Nagy's poetry as in A sátán fattya. In this way, too, they prove that in Zoltán Mihály Nagy's works, “prose-inspired narration” (in the words of János Penckófer) and lyrical representation depict the same worldview, the same moral order, struggle, and motivation: the possibilities or hopelessness of the self in an existential situation bounded by the given historical age and social milieu.
But the main work is still the novel A sátán fattya (Satan's Bastard), first published in 1991 and most recently republished in 2012. [7] “The works created before seem almost like preliminary studies to this piece. Those that came after it – including the sequels – do not aesthetically reach the standard set in A sátán fattya". [8] In terms of genre, A sátán fattya is a first-person perspective novel. The reader sees the events from the character perspective, through a monologue told in the first person singular by Eszter Tóth, the protagonist. What is perhaps the greatest virtue of the work is derived from this: the author – in accordance with the aesthetic principles of modern prose – breaks with the expression of value judgements stemming from an omniscient creative attitude, whereby reading simultaneously becomes reception, making way for the multi-layered nature of recipient value judgements. At the centre of the story stands the deportation of the Transcarpathian Hungarians, the malenykij robot (forced labour), and rape as one of the consequences of the reprehensible moral standard of the Soviet army, as well as its effects. Eszter Tóth experiences the former through her family – through the deportation of her father and fiancé – and the latter through her own tragic fate. This experience, however, means a double trauma. The first is the coercion from the foreign, occupying dictatorship, the trauma of helplessness (“the consciousness flickered in me that / we are guiltless / some foreign, / hideous will attacked us unfeelingly, influencing our lives with destructive intent” – 30); the second is the experience of condemnation due to the social conventions of the village: Eszter Tóth is considered a soldier's whore, and her fiancé's mother personally informs Eszter that under these circumstances marriage is out of the question. Added to this is the reaction of her father returning from the labour camp, whose action – beating his disgraced daughter because of what happened, and then getting drunk repeatedly – is symbolic, since it stems not only from the consciousness of accepting social conventions, but can also be understood as an instinctive and obviously misguided rebellion against his personal and family fate. These misfortunes do not strike only the Tóth family; the whole village suffers them, which generally represents the suffering of the entire Transcarpathian Hungarian community. Therefore, A sátán fattya – besides the fact that the perspective of the subject is dominant throughout – can also be interpreted as a historical/social fate novel. However, if we only take the perspective into account, i.e. that we see this world (time and space) through the view of the protagonist and its changes, we can consider A sátán fattya a psychological novel. “The novel, sweeping in momentum, but tightly composed, of dramatic density, betraying a deep knowledge of village society and folk life, with its balladic atmosphere and psychologist-level precision of psychological realism, reminds one of the prose world of Móricz and László Németh” (177) – quotes Zoltán Bertha from Tibor Elek in the Afterword to the 2012 edition of the novel, thereby providing a kind of canonisation for the piece in modern Hungarian prose literature.
The theme of A sátán fattya is not novel in Transcarpathian Hungarian literature. [9] However, the social syndromes caused by the malenykij robot could not be depicted in any form in Soviet times. As we alluded to above, this is why several creators chose poetry as a form of self-expression at the beginning of their careers. With this form, it was possible to confront society with the memory of the horrors experienced in a metaphorical formulation, while “official cultural policy for a long time banned the possibility of open confrontation.” [10] The novelty of Zoltán Mihály Nagy's thematics lies in the filter of the subject between the theme and the recipient, as well as the harmony of symbolic layers of meaning. Such a symbolic voice in the harmony is the repeatedly recurring laughter of the soldiers at the beginning of the novel, the fact that the perpetrators pour wine into Eszter's mouth after the defilement [11], or the father's angry yet wordless reaction when he learns what happened, as well as the location of the birth – “between two sheaves on the Palaj” – which may also evoke evangelical associations in the reader. And finally, Eszter's fate is also symbolic, who survives everything despite the intention of suicide and then infanticide, despite going mad; that is, her body lives and exists, but the loss of her self-identity symbolises the possibility of the loss of identity consciousness of her entire existential community, the Transcarpathian Hungarians.
In Tölgyek alkonyában (In the Twilight of Oaks), published in 1996 as a sequel to A sátán fattya, “two mutually opposing worlds are formed [...]: the good and the bad” [12]. The good: the protagonist of the first novel, Eszter Tóth, as well as her family and the people of Szilas; the bad: the builders of the Soviet system (Hungarians and non-Hungarians alike), the collectivisers (kolkhoz). The long sentences and free-verse line breaks characteristic of A sátán fattya appear in Tölgyek alkonyában, but instead of the first person singular, this work employs the third person singular, closer to the traditions of prose narration. Besides the connected story, the formal similarity and the difference in narrative technique also spur the analyst to comparison. While in A sátán fattya the tragedy of a single person's fate justifies the self-speech, and her state of mind justifies the fragmented mode of speech swelling into a single sentence, in Tölgyek alkonyában the “protagonist” is the historical situation itself, the political. While the first is an ego-novel, the second is a communal historical novel, placing the family and village society in the centre. And as such a work, the similarity of narrative technique (the use of the fragmented long sentence as an adequate expression of the un-narratability of the existential situation) and its difference (narration in the third person singular due to the perspective shifting from personal tragedy towards communal tragedy) are justified on the author's part.
Zoltán Mihály Nagy ends the novel trilogy in 2004, thirteen years after the publication of the first, with the novel A teremtés legnehezebb napja (The Hardest Day of Creation). The narrator of the piece employs the second person singular – just as in some short stories of Fehér eper. However, the protagonist is again a single person, “Satan's bastard”, István Tóth, who has grown into an adult man. The story is a parable built from tragedy (this is certainly connected to the second person singular as the traditional form of parabolic storytelling in general): “the path of the young man >>discarded<< by the Soviet army leads through many, many spiritual struggles, learning, and work to the realisation that he too is a useful, truly important member of the community of Szilas after the regime change, of the Hungarians organising the protection of their own interests”. [13] If, in the first novel, the dominant perspective is psychological, and in the second, the communal, then it can be said that the third, by connecting these two perspectives, is a worthy conclusion to the trilogy of novels.
The writer, who remained very active in the 2000s, surprised readers with a short story collection in 2001 (Az idő súlya alatt (Under the Weight of Time)), a novel entitled Páros befutó (Joint Winner) in 2002, and again a poetry book in 2003 (Új csillagon) alongside A teremtés legnehezebb napja. In 2008, Zoltán Mihály Nagy began another novel trilogy. In the first, Messze még az alkonyat (Twilight is Still Far), and the second, Fogyó fényben (In Waning Light) (2010), the “old man hero, turning to God, but calling Him to account, struggles with the absurdities of the mediatised world and human existence” [14]. The formal world of Fogyó fényben – lyrical speech built from prose sentences broken into pieces – brilliantly presents the writing technique applied in early works, and the duality of lyre and prose can again be linked to the ambivalence of the theme: the accelerated, impersonal world versus the individual struggling with the “trauma” of ageing. It is summarisation and path-finding, confrontation and coming to terms with the world, existential situation, soul, and faith. Just as these path-findings and confrontations frame and simultaneously motivate the phases of Zoltán Mihály Nagy's oeuvre to date, starting from the short stories and poems of the Soviet times, through the magnum opus, A sátán fattya, right up to the most recent novels.
[2015]
[1] Károly D. Balla, Valóságpróza és látszatvalóság (Reality Prose and Apparent Reality). In: Beszélő, 12/7.
[2] Károly D. Balla, ibid.
[3] Károly D. Balla, ibid.
[4] “something keeps a part of both the prose and the poetic world in shadow”. János Penckófer, Morális értékjegyek módosulásai (Nagy Zoltán Mihály írói világa) (Modifications of Moral Value Marks (The Writerly World of Zoltán Mihály Nagy)). In: Penckófer, Tettben a jellem (Character in Action). Budapest, 2003.
[5] János Penckófer, Civódó tündérek prédája – Műfaj és mondat kérdése Nagy Zoltán Mihály lírai történetmondásában (Prey of Quarrelling Fairies – The Question of Genre and Sentence in Zoltán Mihály Nagy's Lyrical Storytelling). In: Magyar Napló (Hungarian Journal), 2000/3.
[6] János Penckófer, ibid. 90.
[7] “This book brought success to its writer; first it won the Book of the Year Award, later he received the Attila József Prize for it as well. It has seen two editions so far, and besides that, various adaptations have been made of it: Ottó Schober adapted it for the stage, and Klári Csaba adapted it for radio” – László Csordás, A malenykij robot és hatásának megjelenítése Nagy Zoltán Mihály A sátán fattya című kisregényében (The Depiction of the Malenyky Robot and its Effect in Zoltán Mihály Nagy's Novella Satan's Bastard). In: Csordás, A szétszóródás árnyékában (In the Shadow of Dispersion), Ungvár – Budapest, 2014. 87.
[8] László Csordás, ibid. 87.
[9] cf. Vilmos Kovács, Holnap is élünk (We Will Live Tomorrow Too) (1965); László Fábián Vári, Tábori posta (Field Post) (2011).
[10] László Csordás, ibid. 88.
[11] “The wine is a double symbol which conveys the absurdity of the situation. On the one hand, it means the prop used at the Lord's Supper, since symbolically we drink Christ's blood for renewal, for the repentance of our sins; on the other hand, quite the contrary, we can associate it with Dionysus, the god of wine, sinful intoxication, ancient orgies.” – László Csordás, ibid. 89.
[12] János Penckófer, Hatvanból harminc – Nagy Zoltán Mihály három évtizedes alkotói pályájának vázlata (Thirty out of Sixty – Sketch of Zoltán Mihály Nagy's Three-Decade Creative Career). In: Együtt (Together), 2011/1. 66.
[13] ibid.
[14] János Penckófer, ibid., 67.