“... I feel that I became a writer because, in my most receptive years, I came into possession of a body of experience that charged me for a lifetime – something an artist can actually do something with.”
(Ádám Bodor: A börtön szaga [The Smell of Prison])
“For today’s reader, the name Ádám Bodor denotes a fully realised, almost magical authorial universe, unmistakable and unlike any other” – this is how literary critic and scholar Gergely Angyalosi introduces the inner logic and defining features of Bodor’s creative presence in Hungarian literature. He is the one who “became a great writer in silence, whose unyielding strictness is expressed through the deliberate installation of silence in his writing”. He is the chronicler who says only what is most essential, perhaps because he possesses “a dignity above things, a sense of superiority in being astonished by nothing”. Ádám Bodor is one of the most significant figures in contemporary Hungarian literature.
In the reception of his oeuvre – as the quotation above also suggests – a peculiar emphasis is placed upon the personal dimension, upon the myth woven around his temperament – that is, upon the objective and subjective mapping of the writer’s lived experience as a writer. His aversion to any form of verbosity is not merely a matter of temperament. His texts are characterised by a resigned narrative tone (even at the publication of his most recent volume, critics were keenly interested in what might be known of his ars poetica – never elaborated in theoretical form – or of his writing methods […]. Does some form of role-consciousness and/or role-ideal reveal itself behind the mask of the resigned outsider?).
The objectivity and discipline of the narrative voice constitute a moral choice. Judgement is simply not at the centre of his world. It is as if he sees facts as judging themselves. Where does this strength come from? What is that external point, the source of this force, which stands beyond good and evil, yet does not become unethical?
This self-identical poetic attitude is a defining feature of the entire oeuvre. One of the central questions of his writing is how the possibility of fundamental decency can be justified through artistic means, even under the most adverse circumstances. Although the moral and ethical–aesthetic aims are, for the most part, explained by the facts of the author’s biography, Ádám Bodor firmly rejects the interpretative practice that attaches his work to the narrative forms of minority experience [frequent framework in the analysis of Hungarian–Romanian borderland writers after the Treaty of Trianon, 1920], and it is observable that his reception, too, repeatedly manifests the desire to disregard this.
Not to burden the reader with superfluous words, to write only what is unavoidable, to leave behind works in whose absence the world would be poorer; to cleanse the text of every false note – this is the supreme moral command of Bodor’s hidden aesthetics.
Yet, on the basis of the lessons drawn from the history of the oeuvre’s reception, we cannot neutralise the influence of the author’s life story in the act of reading. When engaging with the works of Ádám Bodor, we therefore have to return to the original question: alongside imagination, what weight does historical reality carry, what kinds of representations are formed of historical change, and in which motifs of the prose flow do we discern the presence and after-effects of dictatorship? In order to gain an overview of how the emphasis of these considerations has shifted across the oeuvre, it is worth surveying both the critical reflections on the published texts and the author’s own self-reflexive remarks. For “no work’s mode of existence can be read off from its supposed, object-like presence ‘facing’ its reception but can only ‘reveal itself’ in the event of the encounter with its audience”.
Through the cultural and social context of the period of emergence, interpretation may be further enriched by the insights of various theories of historicity. New narratopoetic approaches likewise provide a firm ground for such investigations. The so-called impact history of the Romanian state-socialist dictatorship [authoritarian Communist regime in Romania, especially under Nicolae Ceaușescu], the social reality experienced in the author’s youth as an affective experience of time, all offer a surplus of meaning to which we can also connect through questions of culture and the cultural codes of literature. In Ádám Bodor’s works, alongside meta-reflexive textual units and a distinctive metapoetic complexity, there is an extraordinary force in the way he writes – at times with irony and humour – from visceral knowledge about the experience of constant vulnerability and threat. This is further intensified by the fact that, through figures living in fallen, almost vegetative forms of existence, pushed to the margins of life, the inverted experiences of human existence appear with universal validity (it is worth adding that Bodor’s novels and short stories have been translated into more than twenty languages).
Behind all these aspects, then, are the often-invoked personal experiences and their pervasive presence. The special readerly experience of being personally addressed is also shaped by real, life-altering events. The writer’s father was convicted on fabricated charges in the political trial associated with Áron Márton [Roman Catholic bishop of Transylvania, persecuted by the Romanian Communist regime] and was only released in 1955. In 1952, Ádám Bodor, then a student at the Reformed College, was sentenced on charges of distributing leaflets, for ‘anti-state conspiracy’: “I was put behind bars at an age when a person’s moral outlook and value system are formed and solidified for life,” he recalls. After imprisonment in the city prison of Cluj [Hungarian: Kolozsvár, major historical cultural and intellectual centre of Transylvania, long associated with the Hungarian scholarly and literary tradition, today Cluj-Napoca, Romania] and then in the high-security prison of Gherla [Hungarian: Szamosújvár], following his release he worked as a factory labourer, while his living conditions grew increasingly difficult. His recollection of this period is revealing: “We could not be forgiven for the fact that we were genuinely political victims. We reeked of prison. And why should I deny it – there was contempt as well.” Later, with seemingly only one possibility left to him, he applied to study at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Although he treats this period with some distance, in his memoirs he evokes the memory of the lectures of his remarkable teachers – András Nagy, Albert Maksay, István Juhász.
He completed his studies in 1960, and from 1965 onwards he published his first writings in Utunk [Hungarian-language literary journal of Cluj / Kolozsvár; today Helikon]. His first short story, Téli napok (Winter Days), appeared in Utunk on 5 November 1965, followed by the story Kivégzés (lit. Execution). The period of his literary debut links Bodor to the so-called Forrás generation (young writers published in the Forrás series of Kriterion Publishing House, showcasing Hungarian-language talents in Transylvania from the early 1960s onwards). In his textual universe, the multicultural Transylvanian environment and its mountainous landscapes – above all Cluj, and more broadly Eastern Europe – form his point of departure; this is where the source of his sense of synchrony with nature and its cyclical rhythms can be found. He offers an overall vision of an entire region (although, after relocating to Hungary, not only did his idyllic image of Transylvania change, but the experience of a layered Budapest also emerged – the city, in literary terms, proved less usable for him). As he himself puts it: “I was primarily inspired by the existential image of my homeland and of the entire Eastern European region, with its rudimentary morality and lethargic mood; I could hardly have written about anything else, or in any other way. And so, from the very beginning, my writings appeared as if they had been produced under the press conditions of a democratic society, far removed from the terminology of any power structure.”
Within the system of motifs in his writings, the cultural influence of Romanian and German society becomes a decisive factor, as does the effect of in-between cultural spaces – for instance, the experience of encountering a Rusyn [East Slavic ethnic group in the Carpathian region] environment. The recurring reference framework of multilingualism thus also signals a layered set of questions from the perspective of poetic language. None of this, however, diminishes the ‘truths’ of the fictional texts as they apply to our present cultural reality. At other points in the texts, the foreignness of nature and culture – and, in certain contexts, even the foreignness of the Hungarian language itself – generates important issues for a language-poetic reading.
In the approach of Éva Bányai, who has studied the oeuvre in depth, the spatiality of Bodor’s prose constructs a complex system of relations of otherness and estrangement. The authentic and mediated layers of meaning associated with peripheral regions deepen interpretation in the direction of an ontologically grounded understanding.
As Györgyi Pozsvai explains in her monograph, Bodor typically writes neither for the average reader nor for an elite, and the same outsider position can be observed in relation to literary tradition as well. For a long time, literary scholarship assumed the influence of Hemingway when examining his prose-poetic features; the world of his works was also associated with magical realism and with the absurd and grotesque. Bodor, however, consciously maintains a distance from these readings, as well as from postmodern literature and the various schools of literary theory. In this respect, the observation made by Péter Balassa remains valid to this day: “Bodor’s is a short-story art that is perfectly sufficient in itself, that justifies itself.”
On the basis of the reception of the early works, Ádám Bodor appears as a master of the short story, of brief narrative forms (even though the large-scale novel is already visible in the background), and to his technical mastery there is added an exceptional originality. With his emergence, a world without precedent comes into being – in its tone, its visuality, its prosody, and its grammar alike. Beyond the works’ peculiar atmosphere, imagery, and imaginary presence, motifs of passivity, animalisation, and the progressive dehumanisation of characters call forth new interpretative tendencies. The multiplicity of possible readings is indicated by the fact that his works are now also interpreted through biopolitical and zoopoetic approaches. A correlative perspective on the revealed interconnections supports a complex exploration of the internal layers of meaning within the texts.
A tanú (lit. The Witness, 1969)
Ádám Bodor’s first collection of short stories appeared in 1969 under the title A tanú (lit. The Witness). As Györgyi Pozsvai observes, when this volume – compiled from short sketches written week by week – was published, it differed little from the works of his contemporaries in terms of subject matter and formal repertoire, yet it projected an unmistakably individual worldview. The striking opening sentences of the early pieces, together with their distinctively toned dialogues, lent the work a unique character; at the same time, comprehension of the texts (which nonetheless elicit a strong sense of readerly sympathy) remained partial and often contingent.
The stories offer insight into the characteristic narrative techniques and structural features of Bodor’s prose, as well as into the fundamental units of his narrative construction. Alongside the use of a traditional narrative perspective, the hallmark features of his narrative organisation are already recognisable: the brief tales do not wish to transcend themselves, and the questions they raise often remain unanswered. This may be related to the fact that, in most textual locations, an unexpected event interrupts the course of action, and these interruptions, by virtue of their semantic weight, are difficult to decode. As Péter Balassa noted, in Ádám Bodor’s work there is no ‘behind’: what is visible ‘is’ the behind. Most of all, words occur; nothing is revealed of the antecedents or consequences of the situations, and thus no genuine conflicts can unfold. The actions are driven primarily by private, solitary protagonists.
This thematised condition of the world – the inner space of existential possibility – resonated with artists working in other media as well. The desire for medial adaptation of Bodor’s prose appeared relatively early, already in the early 1970s. In 1972, film director Péter Bacsó adapted Bodor’s short story A borbély (lit. The Barber) into his film Forró vizet (Hot Water), while film director Zoltán Fábri produced a film adaptation titled Plusz-mínusz egy nap (Plus-Minus One Day). In the same period, in 1974, Bodor’s second volume Plusz-mínusz egy nap (lit. Plus-Minus One Day) was published by Kriterion Publishing House. As in The Witness, these texts, too, depict circumstances that overpower the characters, yet at the same time the stories function as small-scale sociographies, offering testimony to everyday life.
In 1978, the selection Megérkezés északra (lit. Arrival in the North) was issued. Milyen is egy hágó? (lit. What Is a Mountain Pass Like?) was published in Hungary by Magvető in 1980, followed shortly afterwards by A Zangezur hegység (lit. The Zangezur Mountains, 1981), Bodor’s last Hungarian-language volume to appear in Romania to date.
Az Eufrátesz Babilonnál (The Euphrates at Babylon, 1985)
In 1982, Ádám Bodor relocated to Hungary. This decision brought about a significant shift, as the interpretation of his work is greatly influenced by an examination of possible changes in emphasis resulting from this relocation. From 1984 onwards, he worked as an editor at Magvető Publishing House [a major Hungarian publisher], while a new short-story collection containing thirty-five stories appeared with the rival Szépirodalmi Publishing House. The publication of the volume was again accompanied by lively critical reception. His artistic career was recognised with the József Attila Prize [prestigious Hungarian state literary award], yet even at this point he did not truly participate in what is customarily called ‘the literary scene’; he did not attempt to replace the ‘missing’ legend, nor did he seek to perform in borrowed roles. Perhaps it is also in this light that Péter Szirák observes that Bodor had already passed beyond the phase of his literary debut and the establishment of his reputation by the time he was canonised by Hungarian criticism.
His works of this period display the stylistic features of a specifically East-European absurd. The communicative situations are marked by emotional restraint; the narrator most often conveys events without any digression, and “the hardness of the dialogues arises from the fact that one of the parties remains silent”. The poetic function of proper names, and the prosody of personal and geographical names, become increasingly distinctive, while the narration is organised by motivic and structural repetition. In these texts, one of the most striking internal compositional bonds – the recurrence of characters and the motif of animalisation – already appears at a technical level: dogs and cats become frequent figures in the stories.
In this world, spatial and temporal uncertainties are presented within a muted everydayness; the basic situation is dominated by the atmosphere of “nothing happens”. And not only do human relationships empty out, but, in parallel, the linguistic register is hollowed as well, while the “impact history” of dictatorship – the social reality experienced by the author – continues to write itself into several elements of the fiction.
Sinistra körzet (The Sinistra Zone, 1992)
“From the perspective of three decades of experience, it can now be stated with certainty that The Sinistra Zone is one of the most original – and, in this sense, most memorable – prose works of more recent, and more specifically millennium-era, Hungarian literature” – thus writes literary theorist and critic Ernő Kulcsár Szabó in a recent study on Ádám Bodor’s first novel, Sinistra körzet (The Sinistra Zone) – in other words, the major work of the oeuvre.
The peculiar fact that, from the year of his relocation onwards, Ádám Bodor produced no literary work for ten years generates a series of questions from a literary point of view. What changed in him during this time? How did his worldview as a prose writer shift after the move? These questions are all the more pressing since the themes and problems of border existence, of border identities, and the experience of in-betweenness are among the novel’s essential points of departure. The volume was published in 1992, a few years after the 1989 Romanian Revolution [overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist regime], and this year thus marks a significant dividing line in Bodor’s creative career. An important part of the work’s prehistory is that the short story Természetrajzi gyűjtemény Sinistra körzetben (The Sinistra Natural History Collection) won first prize in 1990 in the short story competition announced by the literary journal Holmi.
In formal terms, The Sinistra Zone is written in the form of a novel, yet it is constructed out of short-story-like units; in certain genre designations it is therefore referred to as a ‘district novel’. Whereas in The Euphrates at Babylon the coherence of the volume was created not by thematic unity but by similarity of mood, atmosphere, and worldview, here the individual narrative units are bound together by the figure and motivation of the protagonist, Andrej Bodor – a bond that is nevertheless decisively shaped by his condition as a foreigner.
From a prose-poetic perspective, the technique of naming also deserves special attention: the problem of name-identity, and in other passages the procedure by which characters are sometimes distinguished only by a demonstrative pronoun, play a crucial role. Andrej Bodor’s narrative position brings about a change in the narrative situation, and this, at the time of the book’s appearance, gave rise to serious genre debates. For a long time, it remained an explicit question whether the text should be read as a novel or rather as a sequence of interconnected short stories. Through the consciously constructed novel structure and the unifying effect of the frame narrative, the large-scale form makes its appearance in the oeuvre. This is not merely a matter of the primacy of the novel as a genre, but rather the successful elaboration of a new compositional technique.
The Sinistra Zone once again made it necessary to take local and regional perspectives into account. A significant part of the texts analysing this major work effectively practised a form of critical literary studies which, according to Peter Bürger [German literary theorist], differs from traditional scholarship in that it reflects upon the social significance of its own activity. This may indirectly explain why the boundary between the world-fragment represented in the work and external, experiential reality became blurred. It proved impossible, in the course of interpretation, to remain within the confines of the text itself.
As Béla Lóránt Kovács points out in his study Etika és poétika között (lit. Between Ethics and Poetics), which analyses The Sinistra Zone, “the assertions concerning the novel’s moral order primarily do not pertain to the text itself, but to the political milieu from which, according to many views, the book originated.” Yet neither this aspect, nor the observation of the settlement structure as a reserve, district, or border zone, can replace the perspective that approaches the work within the framework of minority experience, engaging with the metaphors of value preservation and mediation, as well as with the linguistic position through which these are articulated.
Taken together, The Sinistra Zone remains one of the great enigmas of contemporary Hungarian literature to this day (its significance is underscored by the fact that, at the Ádám Bodor oeuvre conference organised at the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (Petőfi Literary Museum) in 2023, almost every paper dealt with this text). It can be read equally as a sociological report, a political situation report, a supplication, or as a postmodern feat of poetics. Many have already pointed to the ominous resonance of the name “Sinistra” – suggesting both the district’s isolation and its dark secrets. The same atmosphere pervades Sinistra’s closed space. Because contact with the outside world is restricted, a climate of tension and foreboding prevails. We witness the everyday life of a sealed community, and the concealed interrelations between landscape and characters may be revealed through a geopoetic reading. According to this perspective, the austere beauty of the mountainous environment corresponds to the characters’ inner states; the barren landscape encodes the pressure and anxiety weighing upon their lives. Bodor’s great innovation lies in the fact that, after the previous century and the age of modernity, he rediscovers landscape anew – his inner world, too, is enriched by densely textured descriptions of place.
In Sinistra, everything is subordinated to power. Time is imperceptible because the relations between events are shaped according to the will of power (power may here represent any form of authority). Within the coordinates of space and time, even the title suggests that place, the locus, is more important than time; the relegation of time to the background belongs among the fundamental characteristics of Bodor’s prose. János Mekis D. writes of “time-fields behaving as spaces” in connection with this distinctive procedure. In the Sinistra district there is, in fact, no time at all – there are only moments; to a certain extent, narrativity itself is dissolved. In this reduced linguistic universe, it is speech-acts that come into being. Through its rich store of knowledge and its powerful imaginative world, we are made participants in why it is of historical significance when, within the world of the district, a voice is heard.
Vissza a fülesbagolyhoz. Válogatott elbeszélések (Back to the Long-Eared Owl. Selected Short Stories, 1997)
The selection Vissza a fülesbagolyhoz (Back to the Long-Eared Owl) – published in 1992, 1997, and 2003 – is in fact a prefiguration of The Sinistra Zone, gathering together texts from the period of Bodor’s literary beginnings. The volume is a selection of seventeen years of writing (1968–1985). Alongside works published in the journal Utunk but not previously issued in book form, it also includes pieces from the early volumes The Witness (1969), Plus-Minus One Day (1974), and Arrival in the North (1978). In this way, it creates a distinctive textual field, as the overall structure suggests a sense of continuity between the texts. Because the table of contents is not subdivided, the temporal gaps arising from the circumstances of publication disappear; the recognition of analogies between the texts thus partly depends on the suspension of these external conditions. At the same time, the internal structure of the works and the frequently recurring thematic and motivic similarities also point towards the conclusion that there is no significant poetic or thematic shift between the writings.
The volume, published at the same time as The Sinistra Zone, has the chief merit of placing Bodor’s early works in the same textual context as his major work. As a result, the initial phase of Ádám Bodor’s literary activity comes into sharper focus. It is perhaps for this very reason that it has not received due critical recognition – it stands too close to the “stiflingly magnificent moment of Sinistra”. Such proximity does not generate dialogue; the thematic and poetic kinship of the texts remains largely unreflected in criticism. Yet by interpreting the mode of operation of these early writings, fundamental insights can be gained. Since the period of the author’s literary debut constitutes the most important thematic and poetic background of the entire oeuvre, familiarity with the early texts is a precondition for meaning-production; the writings included here therefore possess a constant referential authority.
With this selection, Ádám Bodor creates a kind of genre that goes beyond short fiction: through cyclical organisation and the structural transformation that follows from it, the texts are placed in a no-man’s-land between the short epic and the long form. The stories are imprints of a world governed by its own internal rule-system and almost all of them radiate an end-of-the-world atmosphere (the closing text of the most recent selection, Sehol [lit. Nowhere, 2019], takes nuclear catastrophe as its subject – yet the most frightening element of the end of the world is the absence of another human being). Landscape, social condition, and the human being together manifest themselves as forces of resistance against radical political norms.
The functioning of command-and-control systems in Bodor’s world recalls that of writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [Russian novelist and dissident], Danilo Kiš [Serbian-Yugoslav writer], Milorad Pavić [Serbian novelist and postmodern author], Karlo Štajner [Croatian-Austrian writer and Gulag survivor], Miklós Mészöly [Hungarian prose writer], József Méliusz [Hungarian writer and critic from Transylvania], and Ervin Sinkó [Hungarian writer and political thinker].
Az érsek látogatása (lit. The Visit of the Archbishop, 1999)
In the novel Az érsek látogatása (lit. The Visit of the Archbishop), published in 1999, the mythic landscape recedes, while the thematic focus on space and territory continues to permeate the narrative. The defining feature of The Sinistra Zone had been its localised closure. Bodor’s new novel adopts a lighter, more understated narrative mode, but it nonetheless intimates a similarly tragic horizon. Sketch-like both in textual technique and in compositional terms, the work’s generic classification remains unstable. Its central location, the world-isolated Bogdanski Dolina, is governed by a totalitarian system somewhere in the Carpathians, and any supposed change of power or system has merely affected appearances.
Although it is an urbanised settlement, Bogdanski Dolina is a dilapidated terrain, where the forms of loss of self are such that ultimate decay dominates the situation. The town’s state of dereliction – particularly the descriptions of the rubbish dump – presents a stark, oppressive image. The district thus remains as a basic motif, yet with two significant modifications: the relationship between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ becomes simpler and poorer in connotative meaning, while the East–West problematic disappears altogether.
The world of the novel is populated primarily by absence: even the title itself is, in a striking way, nothing more than a promise. While every event revolves around the endless preparations for the archbishop’s visit, the novel’s atmospheric elements suggest that we are already living in a time beyond the last day. It is symptomatic that there is scarcely any hierarchy among the characters; they exist in deconcretised relations. Their common traits are exclusion and illness; their actions, if they occur at all, have no real stakes. Life itself becomes a form of alienated vegetation, and the figures are defined above all by idleness and mere subsistence – revealed here as a fundamental mode of existence at the margins. Within the district, the mode of exercising power and the structure of authority are linked to the clerical order (primarily through Orthodox representatives, though in fact all the characters belong to some religious denomination).
The fundamental motif of The Visit of the Archbishop is inaction. Nothingness, as a point of reference, a forgetting of being, assumes the form of a kind of exhaustion. The absence organising the work cannot be grasped merely at a formal level: the novel contains no elements that would suggest transcendence, harmony, purpose, or even aspiration. In these formalised human relations, even the priests are no longer spiritual guides but servants of power, and among the prescribed forms of behaviour it is precisely the human essence that is lost. The vulnerable figures are revealed not through their inner qualities, but through their actions – or, more often, through their failure to act.
A börtön szaga (The Smell of Prison, 2001)
In Ádám Bodor’s works, it is characteristic that, alongside various acoustic impressions, smells come to dominate the landscape (in The Visit of the Archbishop a stench of refuse prevails, while in the novel Verhovina madarai [The Birds of Verhovina] the suffocating odour of sulphurous hot springs permeates the air). The interview volume A börtön szaga (The Smell of Prison) marks a significant shift within the oeuvre, since it establishes a self-reflexive discourse – even though Bodor himself repeatedly emphasises that in his literary works he avoids attachment to lived reality and generally refrains from integrating actual experience into his writing. He clearly rejects the autobiographical implications of the texts and maintains a marked distance even from his own personal life story.
In his essay Egy önéletrajz fejezetei (Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire) (lit. Chapters of an Autobiography [Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions]), Zoltán Danyi analyses The Smell of Prison on the basis of Paul de Man’s theory of autobiography. According to this approach, autobiography constitutes a complex process of constructing narrative identity: it provides a narrative framework for memories and stories, and in the process of remembering, reality and imagination take place simultaneously, so that referentiality becomes intertwined with fiction.
In interpretation, it is therefore essential to distinguish between the autobiographical subject and the authorial world, between life-world and work-world; The Smell of Prison presents the reader with the features of two portraits that lie close to one another yet remain distinct – the private individual and the prose writer are both present.
According to János Fekete J., in his essay Folytonos ítélet alatt (lit. Under Continuous Judgement), it is characteristic that the critic does not quite know what to do with this genre: one may tentatively explore the extent to which the confession opens onto the individual pieces of the oeuvre, but, in his view, it is not worth doing so. In the case of the interview conducted by Zsófia Balla [poet, writer, and journalist], however, such an approach lacks sufficient legitimacy, since what we read is an idea-memoir rewritten with clear literary ambition, whose primary material derives from a series of conversations recorded for Bartók Rádió in 1995–96. The programme A hold udvara (lit. Moon Halo) featured interviews with important figures of Hungarian intellectual life beyond the borders of Hungary [i.e. in the Hungarian minority communities of neighbouring countries]. One such radio interview constitutes the core material of The Smell of Prison, supplemented by inserted essays on the border situations of those living on the periphery, the double sense of yearning experienced by relocated communities, and related themes.
On this basis, at least four or five distinct modes of discourse intersect within the volume, all oriented towards the same goal: to give language a voice, to summon up memory. The act of remembering is akin to writing and reading; both are primarily accessible through the gesture of self-interpretation. At the same time, the genre designation in the subtitle (“responses”) also points to dilemmas of authorship, since the final form of the interview was shaped by the interviewee himself. The paratexts unambiguously clarify that we are dealing with a work by Ádám Bodor – this is reinforced by the title and by the fundamental ontological status of the volume as a written, composed text.
In The Smell of Prison, the interview volume compiled on the basis of Zsófia Balla’s questions, Ádám Bodor gives an account of the way in which attachment to one’s homeland gradually loses its meaning. The work can therefore also be read as a kind of counter-myth: a resigned, closing prognosis for the future of Transylvania.
Verhovina madarai (The Birds of Verhovina)
Similarly to the narrative construction of The Sinistra Zone, this text, built from thirteen chapters, unfolds as a sequence of numbered stories; its narrative perspective is aligned with the storytelling technique of Bodor’s earlier works. The Birds of Verhovina can be interpreted as “a social cartography of dictatorships”, if we accept that power functions here as the central organising force. In the interpretation of Emese László, we are witnessing “the self-dissolution of an exhausted, barely vegetating system”, as the everyday life of a community condemned, both culturally and morally, to its “last days” is laid bare. The revealed web of references recalls the thematic nodes of Sinistra. We encounter the traces of strangers who “have power over the fate of the characters”, and power itself is concentrated in their hands. At the same time, the continuation of genre tradition, the identity of the narrator, or more generally the construction of names, the essential unchanging nature of the basic situation and of the spatial features, all point back towards the major work. The connection between the two texts is also established by their opening paragraphs – the most significant linguistic events of the narratives: in both cases (similarly to the opening sentence of the short story Back to the Long-Eared Owl), the narration begins from a distance of two weeks.
In line with the motif systems of the earlier works, Ádám Bodor also offers a broad interpretation of the theme of the stranger, further deepening the relational network of foreignness. In Verhovina, a land of “wavering mists, sulphur-scented hot springs, abandoned mines and slag heaps”, everyone is present as a stranger. Nika Karanika “must have arrived at some secret hour of the night” (70). According to Klara Burszen, even Anatol Korkodus, the foreman, and Balwinder, the office handyman, arrived in the settlement one spring (leading a donkey). Yet in Verhovina, the concepts of guest and stranger are interchangeable. Those awaiting “re-education” arrive as strangers, but through Anatol Korkodus’s attitude they come to be present as guests. The depicted world misleads us, presenting a process of degradation in which, through the encounter and subsequent interchange of foreignness and familiarity, human ‘essence’ itself becomes fragmented. Although, by virtue of a kind of collective pact, Ádám and Balwinder also assist Anatol Korkodus in the arrival of the guests – that is, in the initial phase of reception (they go out to meet them at the station) – the status of getting to know the stranger belongs, in the end, to Anatol Korkodus alone. The emergence of strangers at times creates a dramatic situation: “You should know perfectly well that it makes a great deal of difference whether a stranger is walking about here or not, and whether we know his intentions or not” (74), he reminds Ádám. And although he occasionally evades responsibility, postpones his meeting with the stranger and communicates only by messages (cf. 18), the right of disposal over the stranger consistently remains in his hands. He is also responsible for ensuring that the silence resulting from the absence of birds – broken only now and then by the sniggering of stoats – can find no voice.
In The Birds of Verhovina, language itself appears as a foreign entity, not only because one of the novel’s central motifs is structured around a language that nobody in Verhovina speaks (namely, Hungarian), but also because, in place of spoken words, it is often the letter or a background sound that becomes the true curiosity. It is characteristic that the characters encounter sounds, smells, and traces; frequently, the silence is shattered only by the barking of dogs. The foreign bodies living side by side acquire animalised features: a “horse-faced stranger” arrives in Verhovina, and Roswitha appears as something like Anatol Korkodus’s “pet”. The trembling bodies of the guinea pigs, the bodies of the dogs (and the fragments of sound of their barking), the gelatinous silence settling over the settlement, and the footprints frozen into the snow all carry metaphorical meanings. The episodic images embedded in the possible world are imprints of an identity-consciousness that underlies individual experience. The references to the disappearance and extinction of humankind predestine the threatening proximity of the end times.
Sehol (Nowhere, 2019)
The oeuvre, too, contains familiar yet alien spaces, and in traversing them new readerly strategies can be formed. The emergence of a new kind of perspective within the work’s inner order undoubtedly possesses performative force. Upon the publication of Sehol (Nowhere), Lajos Jánossy noted in his review that Ádám Bodor’s implacability and radicalism remain undiminished in this volume as well. In contrast to his earlier, characteristically locus-oriented titling practice, here it is the adverb that incorporates negation which draws our attention. By its primary meaning, ‘nowhere’ refers to no (conceivable) place whatsoever. One of the most characteristic “world-creators” of contemporary literature thus withdraws a crucial structural element of narrative – space itself – from the sphere of interpretability. Alongside its novelty, the title of the volume is in several respects programmatic, offering a response to the dilemmas mediated by the complex of references that emerge from experiences of place. The significance and uniqueness of Nowhere are duly acknowledged by that generation of scholars and critics who have followed the transformations of the oeuvre from the very beginning.
Beáta Thomka draws attention to the fact that Nowhere appeared exactly five decades after Bodor’s first volume, and that a clearly discernible impulse towards experimentation is present in these texts (for example, irony functions as a structural organising principle and at times crosses into parody). The book consists of seven short stories and includes two pieces verging on popular fiction. Through an allegorical mode of speech, we encounter unusual and extraordinarily amusing texts, unburdened by explanatory or motivational commentary. This playfulness, combined with the characteristic features of East-Central European sensibility and landscape-experience, creates a distinctive atmosphere; at the same time, on the basis of the familiar motif system of Bodor’s prose, we can still move with a sense of orientation within the texts. The landscape is populated by motifs of great suggestive force – such as cold, twins, lime-burners, the presence of armed formations – and within the chain of unusual events, strange deaths also attract attention.
The initiatives that may also be read as a short-story sequence come close to a mystical experience; the story Milu moves nearest to what Tzvetan Todorov termed “fantastic literature”. At the same time, the deeper web of references in Nowhere establishes a nuanced relationship to the past as well. In A Matterhorn mormotái (lit. The Marmots of Matterhorn), the mining metaphor is linked to an investigation into the past, connected to the narrator’s exploration of his former identity, and gives expression to the inner conflicts of a human being trapped within the oppressive atmosphere of dictatorship, insofar as the texts – constructed around the traumas caused by a totalitarian system and the compulsion to remain silent – are now more strongly determined by the sphere of human relationships.
In many respects, the shift is significant: Sinistra and Dolina could be left only with permission, while from Verhovina one could already depart – but to what end? The characters are prisoners of themselves and of space itself, the only entity possessing an identity, and one that can most aptly be interpreted in olfactory terms – as the “smell of Bodor’s space”. And yet this space, at the very end of the most recent collection of short stories, in the final piece of Nowhere, Rebi, closes in upon itself once more and – introducing the motifs of relativisation, latency, and loss of meaning – appears, in all likelihood, to cease to exist.
Az értelmezés útvesztői (lit. The Labyrinths of Interpretation, 2021)
The interview volume Az értelmezés útvesztői (lit. The Labyrinths of Interpretation) organises the contours of the career into a coherent whole, offering, through a series of individual conversations, a complex insight into the intellectual economy of Ádám Bodor’s oeuvre. Across fifteen interviews, he speaks with notable candour about the key stages of his career, reflecting on many of the questions that have shaped the reception and interpretation of his work. At the same time, he avoids the traps inherent in such dialogic situations and elegantly deflects those questions that might divert the interview from its carefully defined course.
The recurring themes of the interviews are structured around the decisive points of his life history: the experience of his youthful years in prison, an understanding of the conditions of creation, memories of Cluj (Kolozsvár), the relocation to Hungary, and the worlds of author and text brought into being in The Sinistra Zone. Through these, we read a new idea-memoir of genuine literary value. The principal testimony of the conversations is that Ádám Bodor continues, consistently, to distance himself from any attempt to establish direct references between work and reality. For him, the world offers a special kind of freedom – and the primary condition for experiencing that freedom is precisely solitude, the deliberate disregard of “useful” connections. According to the main trajectory of The Labyrinths of Interpretation, his most formative experiences remain bound to the time spent in the Transylvanian highlands, and the interviews now provide new impulses for setting out once more in search of these geographical and mythical landscapes.
Beyond its literary and aesthetic significance, the interview volume also appears as a further extension of the unique set of values embodied by Ádám Bodor’s oeuvre. The presentation of the main traits and motifs forms part of the interpretative practice; yet the essential understanding of the oeuvre belongs to an order whose testimonial explanation is embedded in a deeper system of connections and lived experience:
“The borderlands do exist – if nowhere else, then within us, in our thinking. Ultimately, that is also where the viewpoints are located. It depends on our insight what, gazing out through the fissures, we consider worth noticing.”
Note: This scholarly study is published with the approval of Mr Ádám Bodor.
Prepared by: Dr Zsófia Pál-Lukács
Date: Budapest, 7 August 2024
Az avantgárd elmélete (lit. The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Universitas Szeged Publishing, Szeged, 2010, p. 9. Translated by Tamás Seregi.
Gergely Angyalosi: Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga (lit. Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison), Kritika, 2002/3, pp. 27–28.
Gergely Angyalosi: A kiismerhetetlen remekmű (lit. “The Unknowable Masterpiece”), in Tamás Scheibner – Gábor Vaderna (eds.): Tapasztalatcsere. Esszék és tanulmányok Bodor Ádámról (lit. Exchange of Experience. Essays and studies on Ádám Bodor), Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2005, pp. 49–57.
Gergely Angyalosi: Az érsekre várva. Bodor Ádám: Az érsek látogatása (lit. Waiting for the Archbishop. Ádám Bodor: The Visit of the Archbishop), Alföld, 2000/7, pp. 93–97.
Gergely Angyalosi: Változóban a világ (Bodor Ádám: Sehol) (lit. The World in Transformation [Ádám Bodor: Nowhere]), Új Forrás, vol. 52, no. 5 (May 2020), pp. 75–81.
Péter Balassa: Bodor Ádám novelláiról (lit. On the Short Stories of Ádám Bodor), Életünk, 1986/8, pp. 756–759.
Éva Bányai: A Bodor-apa. Apafigura-változatok a Bodor-prózában (lit. The Bodor Father. Variations of the Father Figure in Bodor’s Prose), Irodalmi Szemle, October 2023.
Available at: https://irodalmiszemle.sk/2023/10/banyai-eva-a-bodor-apa-apafigura-valtozatok-a-bodor-prozaban-tanulmany/ (last accessed 22 November 2025)
András Beck: Szavak történnek. Bodor Ádám: Az Eufrátesz Babilonnál (lit. Words Happen. Ádám Bodor: The Euphrates at Babylon), Napjaink, 26.7 (July 1987), pp. 34–35.
Erika Csontos: Körkörös áramlások (Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire) (lit. Circular Currents [Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions]), Élet és Irodalom, vol. 46, no. 1 (4 January 2002).
Zoltán Danyi: Egy önéletrajz fejezetei (Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire) (lit. Chapters of an Autobiography [Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions]), Híd, 2002/2, pp. 283–287.
Péter Esterházy: Ki? – bekezdések egy nagy műről (lit. Who? – Paragraphs on a Great Work), Kalligram, 1995/9, pp. 70–73.
János Fekete J.: Folytonos ítélet alatt. Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire. Egy korábbi rádióinterjú változata (lit. Under Continuous Judgement. Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions. A Version of an Earlier Radio Interview), Új Forrás, 34.2 (February 2002), pp. 37–43.
Éva Harkai Vass: Hegyek, börtön, határhelyzetek (Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire) (lit. Mountains, Prison, Border Situations [Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions]), Híd, 2002/1, pp. 144–149.
Lajos Jánossy: Mindig (lit. Always), Litera, 2019.
Available at: https://litera.hu/magazin/kritika/mindenhol.html (last accessed 22 November 2025)
Ernő Kulcsár-Szabó: Honnan jön a Sinistra? A poétikai eredetiség kérdéséhez (lit. Where Does Sinistra Come From? On the Question of Poetic Originality), Alföld, vol. 74, no. 10, pp. 56–70.
Zsolt Láng: Verhovina madarai. Mi történik? (lit. The Birds of Verhovina. What Is Happening?), Kalligram, 2012/6, pp. 95–97.
Dániel Lányi: Andrej a városban (Bodor Ádám: Az érsek látogatása) (lit. Andrej in the City [Ádám Bodor: The Visit of the Archbishop]”), Holmi, 1999/10, pp. 1294–1300.
Emese László: “Lassan múló bánatos napokra”. Bodor Ádám: Verhovina madarai (lit. “For Slowly Passing, Sad Days”. Ádám Bodor: The Birds of Verhovina), Jelenkor, 2012/2, pp. 207–211.
Csongor Lőrincz: Elbeszélés és fordítás. Bodor Ádám: Verhovina madarai (lit. Narrative and Translation. Ádám Bodor: The Birds of Verhovina).
János Mekis D.: Bodor Ádám: Vissza a fülesbagolyhoz (lit. Ádám Bodor: Back to the Long-Eared Owl), Kritika, [21].7 (July 1993), p. 40.
Ferenc Mező: A tisztesség esélye (Bodor Ádám pályaképe) (lit. The Chance of Decency [The Career Profile of Ádám Bodor]), Mozgó Világ, 11.9 (September 1985).
Gábor Németh,: Tudni illik, hogy mi illik, avagy a rezignáció méltósága (lit. One Ought to Know What Is Appropriate, or the Dignity of Resignation), Műút, February 2023.
Available at: https://muut.hu/archivum/45328 (last accessed 22 November 2025)
Györgyi Pozsvai: Bodor Ádám. Pozsony (Bratislava): Kalligram, 1998.
Róbert Smid: Egy körzet természetrajza. Zoopoétika Bodor Ádám regénytrilógiájában (lit. The Natural History of a District. Zoopoetics in Ádám Bodor’s Novel Trilogy), Alföld, June 2023.
Zsófia Szilágyi: Otthoni létünk emlékei. Bodor Ádám: A börtön szaga. Válaszok Balla Zsófia kérdéseire (lit. Memories of Our Homebound Existence. Ádám Bodor: The Smell of Prison. Responses to Zsófia Balla’s Questions), Tiszatáj, 2003/4, pp. 103–105.
Tamás Tarján: A sötétségről való tudás. Bodor Ádám: Vissza a fülesbagolyhoz (lit. Knowledge of Darkness. Ádám Bodor: Back to the Long-Eared Owl), Forrás, October 1993, p. 79.
József Takács: Ismerős idegen terep (lit. A Familiar Alien Terrain). Budapest: Kijárat Publishing House, 2007.
Beáta Thomka: Déli témák. Kultúrák között (lit. Southern Themes. Between Cultures). Zenta: zEtna, 2009.
Beáta Thomka: Bodor Ádám imaginárius térképe (lit. Ádám Bodor’s Imaginary Map), Pannonhalmi Szemle, 2019/4.
Available at: https://epa.oszk.hu/03100/03136/00010/pdf/EPA03136_pannonhalmi_szemle_2019_4_122-126.pdf (last accessed 22 November 2025)
[2024]