"A tangled stack of undeveloped negatives"
László Bogdán's creative career is closely conneöcted to Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe): not only because this city in the Trisicene is his hometown, and he lived and worked in this city (except for two years of conscription service between 1967-69 and then a few years of absence in Bucharest, only two years for the first time, between 1974-76) and he still lives and works there today. And not only because the city, with all its places and figures, or rather the created copies of all these, are incorporated into several of his early novels.
What we have in mind, rather, is the network of intellectual relationships and the cultural environment that shaped his beginnings, especially within the editorial office of the newspaper Megyei Tükör, founded in 1968, and which continued, at least to some extent, to influence Bogdán László’s character as a poet and writer.
First secretary Károly Király brought Sándor Dali (former editor-in-chief of Ifjúmunkás) to the Megyei Tükör in Sepsiszentgyörgy, while László Csiki, also born in Sfântu Gheorghe, and Attila Vári came from the university. Lajos Magyari left his cathedra near Fehéregyháza, remembers Árpád Farkas, and Péter Tömöry, Zoltán Czegő, who left his teaching job in Korondi, and "Cs. Dániel Veress, who corresponded with Szabo and László Németh, and was a Mikes researcher: there are already 8 poet-writers at the paper who had their own published volumes". Attila Vári, who moves from the Brasov Newspaper to the Megyei Tükör, has his first book of short stories in 1967, Csiki's first volume appears in 1968, as does Árpád Farkas' in 1968, Lajos Magyari's in 1969, Dániel Veress' too, Czegő's debut is in 1970, Péter Tömöry's book of short stories is the 1970 volume of Forrás, and László Bogdán's first book appears in 1972: A truly exceptional group of writers and poets, and even if with small time differences, eight founders of a magazine with eight volumes, a strong intellectual and spiritual environment, a free team, said Károly Kós about them.
László Bogdán joined the newspaper in 1971 after his military service, although he had already contributed to the 1970 Szentgyörgy anthology Kapuállító (Gate Setting). Saying that he came straight from the army is somewhat generous, since after being discharged he tried two other jobs before becoming a journalist: in 1969 he worked as a ceramicist at the stove factory in Sepsiszentgyörgy – the exact official name is uncertain, this is what Bogdán calls it – and in 1970 he joined the House of Folk Art in Covasna County. In the author's narration, "In 1974, after Sándor Dali's dismissal, I was made redundant, and so I was sent to Bucharest, to the Művelődés (Culture). In fact, I was already here in 1971 on a year-long training course, I loved the Balkan atmosphere of the city, its pubs, its theatres, it was the heyday of Bulandra, the great directors who were later expelled were still at home, Esrig, Penciulescu, Pintilie, Ciulei... Then in 1977 I returned to the Mirror, from where I was accidentally transferred to The Week in 1985. So Bucharest was constantly present in my life, although I never gave up my apartment in Szentgyörgy during my longer stays there" - This proved farsighted, since he later returned to the town once again. In June 1995 he became the chief editor of the successor to Megyei Tükör, called Háromszék: he still works for this paper.
Alongside the eight poets and writers who founded the newspaper, the volume featured six further authors: Ernő Holló, Béla Markó, Viktor Nagy B., Sándor Péter, Sándor Sombori and Ernő Tompa. It opened with a section entitled “Homeland: A Literary Programme,” making the book appear almost like a publication intended for festive occasions and public performance. The anthology was published, with a broadly educational purpose, by Bogdán’s employer, the House of Folk Art of the Covasna County Committee for Culture and the Arts. "It was the idea of Lajos Sylvester, who was already the head of culture in Sepsin, not to run it as a literary anthology, but to publish it with the House of Folk Art, because only they had the money for it, as a kind of programme booklet for ensembles, to turn their own weapons against the cultural bureaucrats, I also wrote a linking text between the pieces, the "patriotic" publication sold tens of thousands of copies, many recitation groups performed it, it was even published, it sold even more, and since then not many people understand what kind of strange literary wave ran through the villages and small towns of Szeklerland in the late sixties and early seventies.”
In the anthology, László Bogdán makes his debut as a poet-writer with a cycle of poems and a four-part, numbered, subtitled short prose piece. Dedicated to Dániel Veress, hűség – Mikes K monológjai (Fidelity – The Monologues of K. Mikes) evokes the yearning, melancholy seaside meditations of the “tongue-tied Székely” of his native landscape, burdened by the loneliness of exile. Remarkably, even at this early stage Bogdán was already using the poetic device that would become the most distinctive stylistic feature of his entire poetic and prose oeuvre: the mask, or alter-ego form. The sections of the short prose work délutáni randevú (Afternoon Rendezvous) likewise anticipate Bogdán’s characteristic narrative method – and, at the same time, his view of life: a story broken into fragments and presented through shards of scenes; a plot divided into parts; a narrative to be pieced together from separate elements – in other words, a reflection of a world perceived in fragments.
The creative momentum of Bogdán’s early career is defined even more clearly in the poems of Matiné (Matinee), his 1972 volume in the Forrás series, published a year later. At the same time, the collection brings into sharper focus the poetic and intellectual traits that distinguished his work from the very outset from that of his colleagues at Megyei Tükör (County Mirror), most of whom were associated with the second Forrás generation and wrote from a characteristically community-focused perspective. Bogdán’s poetry, by contrast, is fundamentally self-reflexive, presenting a fragmented, disintegrating subject, engaged in constant self-interpretation, almost compulsive self-address, and an existence experienced through scenes.
After a rather eventful few years, László Bogdán eventually found his way to poetry, literature and journalism – in other words, to paid intellectual work. He spoke about this path in numerous interviews and personal accounts, including at considerable length in a conversation published in the journal Székelyföld (Szekler Land).[1] “For the sake of historical accuracy, I worked as an unskilled labourer in a furniture factory while I was still at secondary school, during the summer holidays. I needed the money so that I could go camping at Lake Saint Anne. On its shore, every summer until the early 1970s – when that idyllic place too was ruined after a deranged Securitate officer opened fire – I experienced the indescribable joy of freedom. After finishing school, I unsuccessfully applied to study literature. I wrote a dialogic essay on Csokonai, which the examiner probably found a little too much. So I ended up first in a textile warehouse and then on the disinfection truck of a veterinary laboratory. Wearing gas masks, we disinfected the stables in the surrounding Szekler villages. Then came military service. I served for two years in a guard unit, spending my time guarding prisons and arms depots, before being sent for the final months to the construction works at Luciu–Giurgeni, where the bridge was being built. My first writings appeared while I was in the army, under rather scandalous circumstances.”
His short story Talán az ördög (Perhaps the Devil) was published in the autumn of 1967 in the New Pens column of Ifjúmunkás (Young Worker), and the March 1968 issue of Igaz Szó (True Word) also carried a piece by him: a poem written at the age of nineteen. The essence of the “scandalous circumstances” was this: “János Székely wrote a pamphlet entitled A selejt lázadása (The Revolt of the Dregs) about the recently published anthology Üvöltés (Howl) and the American Beat Generation. In it, anonymously, he quoted the poem Halotti beszéd (Funeral Sermon) by a promising young man from Sepsiszentgyörgy.” Bogdán had written the poem in the manner of the Beat poets represented in Üvöltés (Howl). Székely’s view of the Beat Generation was as follows: “…the central theme of their poetry is despair. Oh, not the despair of Camus or Heidegger, not despair born of guilt – not at all! Having gulped down every conceivable excitement and pleasure to the point of nausea, they despair over how miserable they are. Poor things. Having deliberately – though of course in obedience to their desires – chosen the easy over the difficult, they despair over how lonely and mortal they are, and what a wretched world they are forced to live in. Poor unfortunate souls! They express all this in the language of jazz and through free association, sometimes with considerable talent. Their prose is confined to a vivid description of their own way of life – that is its entire message.”
Of László Bogdán and his poem, János Székely wrote that in it “decency is movingly combined with Beatnik practice, and […] its author makes a serious attempt to confront his contradictory situation.” The writer wished him “much well-deserved success also now and in his future career,” Bogdán recalled, adding: “I would never have imagined that anyone could suppose I was reproaching Bogdán for failing to rebel against America in Sepsiszentgyörgy in 1967.”
And to continue from the interview: “Meanwhile, my supposed or actual intellectual confusion – I was reading the contributions to the debate in the guard tower – grew deeper and deeper, swelling like the little dumpling in the folktale until it became an amorphous mass radiating an overgrown, indefinable Transylvanian eclecticism. […] Others also joined the debate in True Word: Kálmán Szőcs, András Sütő and Ernő Gáll. To bring the discussion to a close, the journal returned once more to my humble person in an unsigned postscript summarising the editors’ position, referring to ‘the intellectual confusion of some of our aspiring writers who have not yet reached publication.’”
In other words, unlike those who criticised manufactured poses, affected world-weariness and “programmatic” despair, the young poet did not rebel against America or the Beat poets’ outlook, nor did he regard the Beat generation’s focus on depicting its “own way of life” as an inadequate artistic aim. This is hardly surprising: the poems in his first volume, Matiné (Matinee), are built from snapshots of images and thoughts captured through free association, while their defining tonal feature is the spleen-laden portrayal of the self, of a particular “way of life,” and of the poet’s own model of existence.
In the highly expressive blurb to the volume, László Bogdán states that the poet sees and contemplates the world as a kind of “replay cinema,” and that in this cinematic world “films on different subjects, set in different parts of the world and in different periods, are screened one after another.” The four lines of the first poem – all of them untitled – illustrate precisely this explanatory guidance addressed to the reader: “lives like tossed coins / spin this way, and so does thought / I toss myself up – look at me / and do not say that I must not.” In the poems of the book, visions and imagined film sequences do indeed seem to turn and spin like coins tossed into the air, with individual images occasionally flashing out from the agitated flow of words. These almost axiomatic sentences also serve as a kind of support for the reader: they are the conclusions of self-interpretation, projections of inner monologues, the summations of self-address and of the poet’s dialogues with himself: “I sat with myself, exchanging nothing”; “oh, my myth with scorched wings”; “I walked straight towards awakening / shedding my dreams”; “slowly I dwindled into a puppet of my ideals”; “snow will cover our memory / the fog will help and hide it”; “I drifted out / from the multitude of pornographic associations”; “silence humiliates me into a madcap fool… / time chases itself”; “I spin on the merry-go-rounds of my fear / things surround me and kill me”; “I sit facing myself, accusingly / in silence.”
A group of poems, through their subtitles, already reveals at the very beginning of Bogdán’s career the poetic technique of entering into others that would later become so characteristic of him: the names of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, the reciter Kinga Illyés, Beethoven, Mayakovsky, Che Guevara, Miklós Radnóti, Milán Füst and Béla Bartók all appear, and from each of them the poet draws something into himself, finding in each a shared image or scene that can be lived through universally. Decades later, in one of his Vasily Bogdanov volumes, he would write: “No one loves another, only the one / Who carries something of himself.” “Why deny it / sincerity is my final veil / I cast it off – there” he writes in Matiné (Matinee), and this already marks the starting point of concealing the self, of seeking refuge in others. In this sense, Matiné (Matinee) sketches the early and defining features of Bogdán’s view of existence – features that remain valid, almost as an ars poetica, across his entire oeuvre. The poet exists simultaneously as the subject and protagonist of the films, and as a spectator standing outside the self: “we ought to set out on a journey around ourselves / until nothing remains but feather-plucked nothingness / until there is nowhere left to go / the world is threatening, like an open sewer / in the street, when the step is drunk / the whole is always justified, always justified / but the detail is dispossessed.”
Although numerous critics have rightly observed, looking back over his career, that in terms of productivity and versatility – he wrote more than forty books – László Bogdán could rival Dezső Tandori, this “prolificness” was not yet characteristic of his early creative period: six years passed after Matiné (Matinee) before the writer published another book. The title of the 1978 novel Helyszínkeresések forgatáshoz (Location Scouting for a Film Shoot) already refers back to his first volume: this work, too, evokes the idea of film; it is another matinée, another screening and sequence of images, now transposed into a different genre (the author even calls the chapters “images”). It presents the micro-environment of a flat in a prefabricated housing estate, the city visible through the window and gradually emerging before the narrator, and the associatively proliferating images of the imagination. The objective, microrealist depiction of reality merges with the evocation of dreams: atmospheric scenes, snapshots, interpretative and self-commenting metatexts, irregular grammar, narrative passages at times approaching the rhythm of free verse, and elsewhere philosophical, self-analytical digressions. These flow into and overlap one another like superimposed shots that distort and transform the image of reality: some come sharply into focus, while others fade into obscurity. Bogdán describes them as “a tangled stack of undeveloped negatives,” composed of images that have already been developed somewhere, by someone, but remain “unknown to you.”
Péter Egyed [2] calls the book the first major Hungarian novel of the “jeans generation,” dealing with the problems that shape the identity of a particular “social age group.” For them, the work may have “particular subjective value”: they can also read it “as a document of their confrontation with the problems of life and with themselves.” According to Egyed, the protagonist is a human being reduced to his physical and ethical essence, and the fragments of the story actually depict his “formation” – or rather, its end result. Opposed to this reduced personality stands the ideal human being, the fully realised individual, yet the two cannot identify with each other. Possible ways of life confront one another, settings from which a choice might be made, but the protagonist feels no compulsion to choose: “a strange disposition, an attribute of his character,” which the critic interprets as one of the work’s – and its author’s – moral and psychological shortcomings. The external composition – the dreams, tales and half-dreams emerging from smoke rings, cracks in the wall and moments of intoxication, or, as the author puts it, “image fragments, image crumbs, image splinters” – forms part of the novel’s visual, montage-based technique, while also embodying fragmented existence, disintegration and the instability of the self.
The novel’s “overall meaning,” Péter Egyed writes, is that however much the protagonist may wish to escape this “way of life,” he cannot: his fate is to remain a “Balkan mouse caught in a trap.” There is no true organising principle, only “events with an organising principle”; the author himself essentially says the same.
From the second half of the 1970s, artists with a new voice – primarily poets – began to emerge, differing fundamentally from their predecessors, especially the poets and writers of the second Forrás generation, in their understanding of the artist’s role. In numerous studies, Zoltán Bertha and András Görömbei argue that a striking feature of the second Forrás generation at its outset was its “firm commitment to communal concerns and communal existence, the poet’s responsibility towards society, a kind of empirical view of life, and the elevation of direct social experience into poetry.” By contrast, many of the younger writers who followed believed that the “mission-driven discourse of communal representation” had become anachronistic. Particularly in poetry, this discourse had been closely linked to “the stability and unity of the poetic self.” Now, however, they argued, “the once unified, absolute lyrical subject has disintegrated, and the community behind it has disappeared. Mission and representation have become meaningless because they have no content.” This conception leads directly to an overemphasis on the individual and their complete freedom. Instead of the forces of history, society and systems of values, the individual’s momentary state of mind and philosophy of existence – one might say, their way of life – become the subject of poetry and, more generally, of art. The philosophical basis of this new outlook is an “inherent constant of uncertainty and suspension”: the continuous merging of different “objects, times and states of existence and the shimmering alternation and indistinguishability of reality and fiction”. In both its external, technical and poetic features and its internal, philosophical outlook, László Bogdán’s early poetry and prose are a distinctive expression of this new “way of life” – of the worldview and artistic self-positioning of the “jeans generation” as a social age group.
Throughout his subsequent poetry collections and prose works, Bogdán retained these fundamental external and internal features of his poetic method, artistic character and psychological disposition. One technique became increasingly prominent, gaining strength almost from volume to volume as an appropriate form of self-expression: the creation of alter egos. According to Tibor Elek [3], although “even in the 1970s and 1980s Bogdán was occasionally drawn to the poetic possibilities of evoking literary predecessors – both classical and contemporary – and their texts, and thus to intertextuality,” it was from the mid-1990s that “allusion, rewriting, variation, literary echoes and role-playing, entering into and assuming different creative identities, and exploiting the interaction between the resulting texts became characteristic of his mode of (self-)expression.”
The Space and Time of the Small Town
“I never wanted to write an autobiographical novel, and by now I probably never will,” the author admits in an interview published in Székelyföld , though somewhat misleadingly. “That is why my first novel, Location Scouting for a Film Shoot (1978), the novella Amabilis confusio, Címeremben két hattyú (Two Swans in My Coat of Arms, 1980), or the three intertwined, crazy stories in Hol vagytok, ti régi játszótársak? (Where Are You, My Old Playmates?, 2003) can all be regarded as romans à clef […]. But let me be more specific, since the charge of writing romans à clef has been made more than once. Take, for example, my novel Two Swans in My Coat of Arms. Many clearly regarded it as a roman à clef, and not without reason, since the setting is topographically authentic: the characters really do wander the streets of Szentgyörgy, sometimes leaning against the walls of recognisable houses, smoking and flicking their ash onto the ground, sitting down in a café, or spending time at Sugás shopping mall. Many figures from the local lore of Sepsiszentgyörgy also appear in this picaresque novel, some already dead, others still alive when the book appeared in 1980. I deliberately left certain names unchanged. To mention only those who had died: Robi the Gypsy, the town’s popular bandleader; Jámbor, the half-witted ragpicker; old Elekes, the bookseller and secret poet (I still own his booklet of poems entitled Szibériai homokszemcsék zenéje (The Music of Siberian Grains of Sand)); not to mention the author of A szívek harca (The Battle of Hearts), a pulp novel that was enormously successful in its day, Feri, Sepsiszentgyörgy’s much-loved local eccentric; and the old park keeper, also known to many. And the list is far from complete. There is also the courtyard, with its human menagerie from the courtyard of my childhood. […] Nevertheless, the roman-à-clef aspect is ultimately a kind of trick, since the story is entirely fictional and most of the main characters are invented. I was trying to use one of the oldest devices for arousing curiosity, and since everyone looked for themselves in the book, it was not unsuccessful. Looking back thirty years later, it sold an astonishing number of copies – people still read books back then…”
All this is also true of three works subtitled a jobb kézre húzott kesztyűk városa (The City of Gloves Worn on the Right Hand): alongside the aforementioned volumes of 1978, 1980 and 2003, Promenade, or The City of Gloves Worn on the Right Hand (1989), A késdobáló, avagy a jobb kézre húzott kesztyűk városa (The Knife Thrower, or The City of Gloves Worn on the Right Hand, 1991), and Eltűnés, avagy a jobb kézre húzott kesztyűk városa (Disappearance, or The City of Gloves Worn on the Right Hand, 1994). These are romans à clef, though not autobiographical novels, and they contain a fragmented image, a “triptych” (István Szőcs), of the small town in which the illusion of “authentic existence” can still be sensed.
In the blurb to Promenád (Promenade), László Bogdán writes: “The East European family novel, shattered into splinters, stories, details and fragments, seeks to answer whether, in the more than seven hundred years of the City’s history, the people living in and around it ever had, or could ever have had, the opportunity to live according to their own laws; or whether authentic existence in this part of the world has always remained merely a vain, self-deceiving, self-destructive, self-consuming dream – and whether this is also why so many left the City, setting out like prodigals in the hope of a better life, guided by the equally self-flattering and self-deluding belief that ‘things must surely be better elsewhere’?”
Writing about Promenade, István Szőcs [4] says that, in terms of its actual content, the book is “essentially a historical-sociological essay cast in the form of a novel”; it is also a treatise, a study in art history, but at the same time a real East European small town – the writer’s “hated and beloved hometown.” As Bogdán himself puts it: “Ultimately, the possibility that someone might recognise themselves in the novel’s characters has some significance (if any?) only in this town, within an inherently small and excessively self-absorbed and self-preoccupied circle – for Two Swans in My Coat of Arms is admittedly set in Sepsiszentgyörgy. Elsewhere, in Temesvár or Máramarossziget, none of this is of any interest. After all, every small Transylvanian town had its legendary ‘madmen’ and ‘violin virtuosos’; trees beneath which Francis II Rákóczi had once stood, or rooms where Mór Jókai had slept while passing through. And for long decades they waited for Petőfi to return from Siberia, unable to believe that he was dead…”
The image of his beloved grandmother also appears in the Promenade novel cycle, but, the writer stresses, “I cannot emphasise enough that although she really was in my mind when I created the heroine, everything subsequently changed, became transformed, almost enchanted. And naturally I also made use of many novelistic elements of her biography, sometimes stylising and altering them beyond recognition, at other times remaining faithful to reality…”
Two Swans in My Coat of Arms revolves characteristically around childhood but already introduces almost all the figures who would later become important in Bogdán’s work, including Béla Hutera and his companions. In the courtyard depicted in the novel, “countless shipwrecked survivors of the 1950s, along with infantile and bizarre figures, had been thrown together, from displaced aristocrats to former underground communists.” At the end of Two Swans in My Coat of Arms, the author sums it up as follows: “We want one thing: for the past finally to fall into place within us as well; for those who have long lain buried in cemeteries to die within us too. We would like the mirror of the concept finally to be filled with the concept itself.”
In the case of László Bogdán, a chronological account of his career hardly provides any truly meaningful order; if we attempt to survey his oeuvre, we must look instead for thematic points of reference. Ingaévek (Pendulum Years, 1984), his second volume of poetry, often places childhood, the City and his companions within an epic framework, while the young poet – naturally – elevates into poetry the adventures of a personality “reliving himself and his roles again and again”.
Azok a szentgyörgyi őszök (Those Autumns in Szentgyörgy), says the title of one poem, and from the past emerges a “golden Kaiser pear” suspended between heaven and earth, the “filtered light” of November, “that garden, yes, that garden too”, “children with sky-blue eyes”, a fragment of melody: “what kind of bird” – in other words, the whole of those “unrepresentable / unrecallable indescribable autumns in Szentgyörgy”. Félúton (Halfway) bears the subtitle állóképek a gyerekkorból (Still Images from Childhood), and contains the river that has “irretrievably” disappeared, “marshland days, sinking years”, as “the sky recedes then comes dazzlingly close”. The poem itself is a process of remembering, a lyrical autobiography told in melancholy, broken, tearful half-sentences, because “riding out of childhood” also means “going halfway, chasing yourself and fleeing from yourself”. The poet hangs between heaven and earth, as groundless as that “proudly golden Kaiser pear”.
A film runs through this volume too: “starts all over everything starts again” (a tudat happeningje [The Happening of Consciousness]); “there is no past. there is no present.”; the poet is “the film’s only character. and its viewer too”. The poem is merely mood, a web of emotions, the fear that “the film may break again at any moment”; in a csend (Silence), too, “everything is unreal”, the former courtyard of a former childhood, as if the poet were standing “before the white screen of memory”. In félúton (Halfway), the past grows more beautiful to the person looking back, and although “you run ever faster / back inward into yourself”, the poet knows: “there is no return you have known that for a long time”. Yet the memories – “what you saw, those you spoke to / those you were with, the things you observed / you carry with you now forever / from here to there forever halfway”. The poem recalling the death of his grandmother, az utolsón túli éjszaka (The Night Beyond the Last), is profoundly beautiful, while equally compelling are the Art Nouveau fantasies concealed within scenes of the City’s possible former life – whether it ever existed or not – with the poet imagining himself as a character within them. Yet taken as a whole, the volume is not primarily about incorporating personal time, personal history, family and past moments of life into poetry.
Rather, it portrays a personality existing nowhere, wandering near the shores of nothingness and driven by the raging winds of “imagination”: an uncontrollable, directionless vision of being, existence and an in-between state, surging now backwards, now forwards, with time and space devoid of order or system. There is a “private mythology”; “there is no time”, only “enlargement. freeze-frame”, only an inventory, a sequence and enumeration of perceptions without elaboration, and constant self-observation. The title poem, ingaévek (Pendulum Years), merges present, past and future without beginning or end, and within it, in szövegkönyv (Script), the poet floats in cosmic nothingness – the self alongside another self observing it from outside: “am I one with myself? or am I not?” he asks. Yet among these unanswerable philosophical questions of existence are several starkly lucid, self-explanatory statements: “I imagine myself in situations”, and “again and again I live through / my own self in these situations.”
In his confessions, László Bogdán also speaks about the tragic course his life took.
He recounts an incident from 1974 which, as he puts it, “decisively shaped my fate,” and which, though never explicitly named as a tragedy, can be sensed behind the feelings of a personality struggling against nothingness. “Like most of my friends, I did not leave the country for good. Viola, the great love of my life at the time, swam across the Danube in 1974, made her way clandestinely through Yugoslavia, passed through a tunnel into Austria, and from there slipped into Italy, since she was half-Italian. We planned to marry and for her to get me out as well, when the terrible news came: she had been killed in a motorcycle accident. And so I stayed at home. For a long time I could not come to terms with her death. It was only in 2003 and 2004, in my volume of poetry The Demon Takes Female Form, that I began to write about it, twenty-eight years after she died. Until then – and ever since – she had haunted me only in my dreams, and sometimes while I was awake… And that is how it will remain. To me, she is alive and present in my life, like my heteronyms.”
Just as Viola, the vanished beloved, would later appear in that late volume of poetry, other people who had disappeared forever also appear in The Transylvanian Picture Garden (1995): townspeople and former regulars at Sugás, the town’s well-known restaurant and pub: “the ghost ship sets sail sets sail upon the Transylvanian sea / between intersecting Bermuda triangles / how many have vanished here without a trace my God.” In The Demon Takes Female Form, meanwhile, the poet in a sense “scatters” them throughout the volume: “And then, one after another, there appear my friends who have since departed – borrowing Borges’s beautiful phrase – for the garden of forking paths. In The Demon…, I scatter all this among the Viola poems, the love poems subtitled Encounters, the poems evoking the town’s past, and those reviving the fate of Ovid. But they are all there; they appear. Zsiga and Ferkó, for example – Dr Zsigmond Darkó and Dr Ferenc Simó. Let us begin with them. They founded the regulars’ table in the late 1950s, when they were assigned here as punishment: a promising surgeon and a neurologist, sent from the university to this remote outpost of the autonomous region, far into the provinces (see the poem The Exiles). They founded it and regularly spent a few hours here both at noon and in the evening, perhaps to keep themselves from going mad. Later, visual artists and actors began coming here – the poems feature the two legendary actors Árpád Visky and Árpád Zsoldos, as well as the no less brilliant graphic artist Imre Baász – and, of course, journalists and poets. In droves. Belonging to the regulars’ table conferred a certain status, even if no one said so aloud. And it was also a refuge. I learned an unspeakable, indescribable amount here. As my friend and Rosicrucian brother Attila Vári observed, people did not merely drink at this table; they also talked, and one could hear about everything, because the people who came here were well-informed, cultivated and widely read. In the land of boredom that was Ceaușescu’s Romania, that in itself was like winning the jackpot.”
Over the years, however, the relationship between the Town and its native son changed fundamentally, as László Bogdán now also admits. “It is as though I did not even live in this town. I feel that the draught did not sweep me out of the town; instead, I fled from it for good into my library, and now I live among my beloved books, just as I always wanted. I could now write about it, about ‘my town,’ with genuine impartiality, but it no longer interests me. Yet whenever I go away for an extended period – as happened quite often for a while – I am always homesick. ‘My whole life is one long homesickness,’ Mahler, the great composer, once said. And I do not long for Romania, Transylvania or Háromszék, but specifically for the hometown I love and hate. Who can understand that?”
The last time he evoked it, he says, was in The Demon Takes Female Form. Alongside the Viola poems about his dead beloved, he portrayed Szentgyörgy “in two confessional poems disguised as adaptations of Miłosz, because I wanted to understand my ambivalent feelings” (The Regulars’ Table and Town, Never Have I from You).
Transcriptions, Heteronyms
According to Gergely Angyalossy [5], it is no accident that László Bogdán mentions the relevant entry in the Explanatory Dictionary, since the cited part of its definition “provides a satisfactory explanation of his own procedure or strategy”: a transcription is “the recording of sound or text in a different system of writing.” Angyalossy is discussing the 1998 book átiratok múzeuma (The Museum of Transcriptions), but we may regard as generally valid and characteristic the way in which the author “appropriates the style, manner, diction, or perhaps quite simply a single line or merely the name of other poets – in order to incorporate these elements into an entirely different system of textual organisation.”
Rewriting, however, “always involves technique and even mechanics,” the critic argues, since “the finished text always presents itself to the rewriter as a structure, as something constructed; for only a text conceived as a structure can be extended or rebuilt. This is one of the points of reference by which we can distinguish plagiarism from rewriting. The plagiarist wants to appropriate someone else’s work in its entirety; his efforts are therefore directed not towards understanding the work as a construction, but towards altering it here and there – that is, towards ‘covering his tracks’ – and this is precisely why he is exposed.” Yet “there always remains an element of imposture” in the activity of rewriting, although this becomes part of the genre’s fundamental mechanism of effect.
In the Székelyföld interview already quoted several times – and to be quoted extensively again – László Lázár Lővétei introduces this poetic characteristic in the form of a question: “Why do you flee so headlong behind the protective ramparts of literature – or, indeed, of culture in general?” His question concerns not the technical aspects of rewriting but its inner, creative-psychological motivations. László Bogdán replies: “Am I fleeing? Well, I don’t know… Perhaps because I cannot, and perhaps do not even want to, refrain from playing upon other texts; for me, literature is also an accumulation of texts. Moreover, when I was young, I quoted a confession by Henry de Montherlant as the epigraph to my short novel Amabilis confusio: ‘There is something in reality so much more powerful than anything one can imagine that I could not refrain from referring to it and evoking it.’ And after a while, I no longer even wanted to.”
The age of “transcriptions” began in Bogdán’s career in 1997, when he recast Ginsberg’s Howl in terms of his own fate, and “they have continued ever since,” he says. Meanwhile, Csáth Géza hajnalai (The Dawns of Géza Csáth) inaugurated a series of persona poems. This was followed by P. a ketrecben (P. in the Cage), evoking the fate of Ezra Pound, and Az erdélyi Madonna (The Transylvanian Madonna), which transformed an old woman’s life into verse (“a novel in sonnets”).
Writing about the latter volume, Tibor Elek [6] observes that, through the subtitle of this volume of twenty-four sonnets – Chapters from a Novel – which evokes the twentieth-century fate of a Transylvanian woman who endured both communal tragedies (wars and dictatorships) and private ones (the loss of three husbands), “the author himself indicates that on this occasion he consciously embraces the ambivalences arising from the tension between content and form.”
However, “only the first and last pieces of the cycle function as genuine poems, as sonnets. In these, the summing-up of a life, compressed with dramatic intensity, is authenticated by the woman’s own voice and transformed into deeply affecting lyric poetry (‘I remember the autumn forest / and the horses at the forest’s edge, / heads raised high as their hooves beat the ground. / They might have fallen onto snow, / but there was no snow: they fell on leaves, / neighing, unburied corpses. / I watched them and saw myself / singing amid falling snow.’ etc.).”
In the intervening texts, by contrast, “the more detached epic perspective and poetic voice (‘Her wedding was in fourteen. / Her young husband wore a borrowed dinner jacket. / Before she could grow accustomed to him, / he had to leave for the front.’ etc.) tend rather to work against lyricism.”
Then came, he lists, the author's other strange paraphrases, The Demon... Ovid's poems... then the heteronyms "first the apocryphal poems of a Chinese poet translated by Faludy, Li Ho (see in Felröppenő flamingó (the Flying Flamingo, 2009), then Ricardo Reis, then Vasily Bogdanov. Why this happened, I don't know, but from the beginning I felt I was being played with by someone."
According to László Bogdán, the poetic shift – the abandonment of stories from his personal past – can be traced to a psychological situation in which he no longer found anything interesting in his own biography. He had put the past behind him, with its settings, characters and stories, and therefore had to seek other literary terrain. “After writing the novellas of Where Are You, My Old Playmates? (2003) – A vadász (The Hunter), A rendező (The Director), A diszkoszvető (The Discus Thrower), and the unpublished A katona és a démon (The Soldier and the Demon) – which can also be regarded as an appendix to my Promenade series of novels written in the 1990s, I felt it was time to begin something different. […]” Yet as early as Az ördög Háromszéken (The Devil in Háromszék, 1996), he had begun writing “fictional novels” about the 1950s, “which in Romania began with nationalisation in the summer of 1948 and lasted until the execution of the Ceauşescus.” This was followed by Drakula megjelenik (Dracula Appears, 2002), Bűbájosok (Enchanters, 2005), and Hutera Béla utolsó utazása (Béla Hutera’s Last Journey, 2007). “Then, in my trilogy A kintrekedtek (Those Left Outside) – Tatjána (Tatiana), A vörös körben (In the Red Circle), Két boldog fénygombolyag (Two Happy Balls of Light), 2008, 2010, 2011 – I also moved beyond the Transylvanian setting. […] The writing of this trilogy coincided with that of Ricardo Reis Tahitin (Ricardo Reis in Tahiti, 2009), a book containing both poetry and a novel […], which I don’t think was accidental. Both are picaresque disaster novels – if such a thing exists, and it does! Motifs from the Reis volume flow into Those Left Outside, so the two are connected in some way…”
When examining Bogdán’s oeuvre, the word “recent” must, for several reasons, be understood as covering a very broad “time span,” Tibor Elek writes. The poems in Átiratok múzeuma (Museum of Transcriptions, 1998), Argentin szárnyasok (Argentine Winged Creatures, 2001), Az erdélyi madonna (The Transylvanian Madonna, 2004), P. a ketrecben (P. in the Cage, 2004), and A démon női alakot ölt (The Demon Takes Female Form, 2006) are often no more recent than material in earlier volumes. The 1998 Átiratok múzeuma (Museum of Transcriptions), for example, includes poems dating from the 1970s and 1980s, while the 2007 Szinbád a taligán (Sindbad on the Handcart) contains roughly a decade’s work. Thus, Elek writes, when discussing any “latest” volume, the critic can only work backwards to unravel and present the poems’ “inner content.” It is therefore clear that there is still no meaningful chronological system underlying the new and more recent poems and works: writings produced at roughly the same time are selected by the author for volumes published at different dates, while in his workshop “poetic material and cycles later organised into separate volumes were being written in parallel – not to mention the simultaneous production of short stories, novels, reviews and a mass of newspaper articles in various genres.”
According to Elek, Argentine Winged Creatures sends the “Self” masquerading through a labyrinth of “the most diverse textual worlds, other existences and his own ‘years used up’,” clearly revealing how language and text become both refuge and prison for him (“Has this language become your refuge, your prison?” – Időszámításunk előtt (Before Our Era)); “You imprison yourself in languages, / yet feel at home upon the grave of Babel” – Joyce a tengerparton (Joyce on the Seashore). Among the literary predecessors evoked, it is above all the worlds – and certain texts – of Borges, Pessoa and Kafka that the poems bring into play. The 29-poem cycle P. in the Cage appears an even more successful and accomplished lyrical composition not only because of “its greater formal diversity, but because Bogdán is able to portray from within the vulnerability and loneliness of Ezra Pound, imprisoned by the Americans in a ‘steel cage’ in the prison yard at Pisa at the end of the Second World War, and the tragedy of the poet’s fate, by entering his consciousness and memories and experiencing his visceral pain.”
Like the 2001 volume Argentin szárnyasok (Argentine Winged Creatures), Szinbád a taligán (Sindbad on the Handcart) represents “the thematic and formal richness of Bogdán’s poetry, the diversity of his form-creating techniques and the polyphony of his wide-ranging textual world,” while also being a product of both the recognition of selflessness and the simultaneous desire to bear witness to the self. In search of lost time, it articulates almost simultaneously the feeling that “EVERYTHING REMAINS” (Fogolyvadászat [Partridge Hunt]) and that “Nothing remains” (A tér [Space]), although overall it seems rather to intensify the experience of irretrievable loss and passing.
Bogdán’s persistent attraction to persona poems, doubles, alter egos, heteronyms – to roles in general – and his compulsive urge, as he himself acknowledges, that “I cannot stop myself from making references and evoking others,” may offer an extraordinary experience to a “quotation hunter.” Yet the fact remains that a reader who approaches these works without such scholarly intentions, without delving into philological depths, may easily lose the thread. And without the writer’s assistance, there is no guarantee of finding the way back to the main track. “I turned to persona poems and heteronyms primarily because I realised that the imaginary biographical poetry I had sought to create, following the example of American poets, throughout my entire botched life could not be made from the toy blocks of my own squandered life, its bleak or sometimes dazzling settings, its major and minor characters, and so on. Then came the labyrinth of the self, the roles… Already in the Reis poems, I was fascinated by biographical correspondence, by the possibility of deriving the poems from Ricardo Reis’s biography, from the hard facts of his life. This is also why I broke away from the Ricardo Reis created by Pessoa, who wrote nothing like these poems. I wanted to create a unity between biography and poetry, inevitably given a pale-purple, melancholy, parodic, even sarcastic quality of suspension by the inescapable fact that, ultimately, this was the life of an imaginary person – and one whom I had not even invented in the first place.” (There is, however, an alter ego whom he did invent, although the name itself was given to him: Vasily Bogdanov, alias László Bogdán.)
Elsewhere, László Bogdán discusses biographical poetry at greater length, arguing that there is no genuine example of it in Hungarian poetry; whenever such attempts have been made, he believes, they have all ended in failure. But his thoughts returned to the Beat poets of his early career, to the example of Beat poetry and to his enduring sympathy for the poets of Howl and their poetic model of life. “In connection with biographical poetry, I was thinking primarily of the American Beat poets. In their case, poetry and life continually merge into one. They recognise no taboos; they speak openly about things that are not normally discussed, particularly in times of state-imposed prudery, and all this is combined with fierce criticism of the system. Think of Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti or Kerouac, who attempted the same thing in the novel, as did William S. Burroughs, or the poet and prose writer Charles Bukowski. The setting is a global empire, America, whose overlapping crises, folding over one another like the panels of a leporello, are also addressed by perhaps the greatest practitioner of biographical poetry, Robert Lowell. Incidentally, he is one of the discoverers of my imaginary poet Vasily Bogdanov; the other is Miłosz. Both figure prominently in the poems of his old age.” [7]
László Bogdán’s aforementioned volume of alter-ego writing, his biographical poetry, Ricardo Reis Tahitin (Ricardo Reis in Tahiti), concerns the increasingly mysterious life of Ricardo Reis, the ship’s doctor invented by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), while the author places the fictional climax of the story on the picturesque island of Gauguin’s Tahiti. “Although the novel is set in 1936, in the ‘era preparing the way for the Second World War,’ its protagonist, Ricardo Reis, outliving his creator, withdraws among archaic peoples to discover his now autonomous self. Pessoa, who wrote under nearly eighty-six pseudonyms and in as many styles, sought to expand the boundaries of his subjectivity through the invented biographies and identities of his alter egos. The independent lives of his heteronyms were intended above all to legitimise his own existence, allowing him to recognise his true self through his creations” [8]: just as the poet László Bogdán might recognise himself through his own alter egos.
Bogdán sums up this literary path and intention as follows: “The adventure began when I was fifty, in the autumn of 1998, with my cycle of poems Csáth Géza hajnalai (The Dawns of Géza Csáth), and has continued ever since. Persona poetry, at least as I conceive it, requires continuous work, like a novel. Perhaps because my persona poems also contain plenty of epic elements; indeed, the two cycles of poems in Ricardo Reis Tahitin (Ricardo Reis in Tahiti) frame a novel which itself contains enough poetry to fill a volume. Writing these works required not so much a state of grace – which cannot be induced even by autosuggestion; sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not – as concentrated attention and discipline, complete identification with the role. At times this also entails hallucinatory dangers. When I was writing my novel Dracula Appears in January 2000, about a schizophrenic Securitate officer who imagines himself to be Dracula, after a while I began dreaming about the Prince of Darkness. He came alive. I was well on my way to that proverbial white room. Fortunately, I had never intended the work to be a full-length novel, and a few months after I finished it, Dracula disappeared from my dreams as well. He no longer haunted me. I also dreamed about Ezra Pound while writing my poetry collection P. a ketrecben (P. in the Cage). I dreamed about Ricardo Reis and Bogdanov too, but those were reassuring dreams. For me, they had already come alive; somewhere, in another time, space or dimension, they really do exist. Incidentally, I regularly dream about the characters in my novels as well. Tatjána (Tatiana), the first book of Those Left Outside, also grew out of a dream. I was on a ship, which became one of the principal settings of the novel cycle, where the buxom, full-figured Mrs Laura punishes her ‘lover,’ Vittorio, by ordering him under her skirts. The bizarre scene duly appears in one episode of the novel.”[9]
This compulsion to adopt roles may not be unrelated, Tibor Elek writes, to “postmodern literary and poetic fashions – or even to the inspirational influence of a younger Transylvanian fellow poet such as András Ferenc Kovács, even more versatile and virtuosic in his Protean transformations – according to which, in contrast to the privileged status traditionally accorded to lyrical personality and personal expression, contemporary and authentic poetic utterance favours the linguistic pre-existence and dissemination of the lyrical self, the fragmentation and fictionalisation of the subject; yet it may equally be rooted in a sincere, inner desire to search for the self.”
What applies to Bogdán’s poetry applies equally to his prose: themes, characters, settings, major motifs, sentences and protagonists return from decades earlier to “haunt” his work; the author moves them from one genre to another, while he himself frequently moves into the bodies and minds of others and draws the words of other writers into his own texts, the fragmented subject assuming different roles and genres. “I do not mean by this,” writes perhaps Bogdán’s most authoritative critic, Tibor Elek [10], “that Bogdán is one of those writers who repeat themselves, or who spend their entire lives writing the same thing, because he has repeatedly demonstrated his ability, in the course of continuous creation, to renew himself, to change and to expand his literary world; yet he seems to do so in a kind of circular fashion, building on his own earlier textual worlds as well. There is continuity both in his literary toolkit and methods of textual organisation and in his themes, and he readily picks up and develops threads that he had previously dropped.” Enchanters (2005) and Béla Hutera’s Last Journey (2007) “offer striking examples of all this.” This is partly because Bogdán likes to construct cycles not only from his poems but also from his shorter and longer prose works, even his novels. He himself has spoken of this, stating that his more recent novels were intended to “form part of an interconnected cycle.” This includes A szoros délben (The Strait at Noon, 2002) and Dracula Appears (2002), but also applies to the cycle of interconnected stories Where Are You, My Old Playmates? (2003).
According to the writer’s own account, “my novels are about personal autonomy; about the possibilities of creating or living as an autonomous individual in an era when the system favoured dictatorial practices. An era which, although it proclaimed a happy future and promised opportunities for individual prosperity even in the distant years ahead, in reality obstructed everything.” The writer asks: “Was an autonomous life, lived according to one’s own principles, possible in Transylvania over the past decades?” The answer is no. And the novels, Tibor Elek explains, are precisely about “what remained for people deprived of the possibility of living according to their own principles in this world – not only in Transylvania, but throughout the Carpathian Basin and the wider region of East-Central Europe. Bogdán’s novels do not examine the minority condition as such, but the human fate of those who suffered through the upheavals of twentieth-century history, here, in this particular region, where alongside dictatorial regimes, coexistence between majority and minority, with all its tensions, was another factor shaping human existence. Yet this question concerns Bogdán not only in these novels; the theme is also present in most of his earlier prose, albeit less prominently, and in fact runs throughout his entire oeuvre. One of its central threads is formed by the stories surrounding Béla Hutera: a barber who experienced the Second World War on the Eastern Front, American captivity in Western Europe, the collectivisation and lawlessness of the 1950s, and later Romania’s ‘Golden Age’, all in the imaginary Transylvanian village of Felsőtábor, which also appears in numerous other works by Bogdán. This character (‘this once cheerful provincial rogue who had seen better days, a light hidden under a bushel, a botched Transylvanian Figaro, a godforsaken innovator of women’s hairstyles,’ as the new novel repeatedly describes him) has been returning to Bogdán’s prose since the late 1970s, continually acquiring new traits.”
János, the surgeon in Enchanters, likewise lives through the Second World War and is then sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war. He returns home in 1948, but after 1956, as a result of false and unfounded accusations made by a former classmate who has become chief prosecutor, he finds himself first in Romanian prisons and then in the Danube Delta. In Tibor Elek’s interpretation, “Bogdán has long been experimenting with an individual renewal and modernisation of the traditional omniscient narrative stance and mode of narration, largely abandoned by (post)modern prose, but perhaps nowhere more successfully than in this work. The impersonal narrative voice, which relates what his characters (and not only the two mentioned above) say, think, feel and imagine, virtually disappears, dissolving into their consciousness, minds, bodies and very entrails. Yet it is not only the viewpoints and sentences of narrator and characters that slide into one another – not least through the frequent use of free indirect discourse – but at times those of János and Irén as well; strangely, they even sometimes tell each other things they had previously heard from the other. Moreover, they frequently repeat what they have heard from others, effectively quoting them or passing the opportunity to speak on to them, so that within their own texts, narrated by the narrator, ever new voices emerge. When shifting between voices, the author generally dispenses with any linguistic markers signalling the change; and if we add that shifts in voice and viewpoint are frequently accompanied by shifts or overlaps in spatial and temporal planes, it is hardly surprising that readers may sometimes be unsure who is speaking at a given moment, when and where (and whether what appears to be a minor illogicality, inconsistency or linguistic imprecision actually is one).”
According to the critic, “individual elements of all those authorial intentions and aspirations, techniques and solutions whose felicitously interwoven combination – despite everything I find problematic about it – made Enchanters Bogdán’s best novel to date were already present in his earlier works, and some of them live on in Béla Hutera’s Last Journey as well.” These include, for example, portraying history from the perspective of ordinary people and exploring the possibilities of creating happiness; blending reality with the worlds of memory and imagination; unexpected shifts of viewpoint, voice and narrative plane; and unreal or miraculous elements. Likewise, “in this novel too, ‘images rush unstoppably into one another, the past rises again,’ while time alternately comes to a halt and expands beyond measure.” At one point, the protagonist of this novel also feels that he has “lost his way in his life for good” and “staggers through his own story as helplessly as through the sinking years.”
Elek also comments on the intertextual nature of Bogdán’s prose, noting how distinctively, alongside his own texts, he exploits the possibilities of referring to and establishing connections with the works of other authors – fellow Transylvanian writers and major figures of Hungarian and world literature alike: “on the one hand, in what has by now almost become his customary manner, he unobtrusively incorporates their sentences into his own text; on the other, he generally quotes poems with explicit attribution and footnotes.”
We have already noted several times that chronological accounting plays no significant role in László Bogdán’s oeuvre, and if we single out one of his short-story collections, such as the 2001 Öt korsó sör a Golgotában (Five Mugs of Beer at Golgotha), we encounter the same time that alternately comes to a halt and expands, the same overlapping of images and fragmentation of the whole that we have discussed in connection with the novel above, as well as much earlier poems and prose works: Bogdán constructs from fragments and never seeks to build them into a coherent whole. According to Júlia Vallasek [11], “what we read are existential situations assembled from fragments of stories; the characters’ memories and reflections on particular events are more important than the events themselves.” Vallasek regards these writings as companion pieces to Museum of Transcriptions: in these short pieces of prose, László Bogdán “holds up a mirror to his favourite authors, in which the two texts are superimposed, so that we simultaneously read Márquez, Cortázar, Hajnóczy, Kosztolányi, Fellini and László Bogdán.” But the author adopts not only the “distinctive style” of individual writers, artists or film directors, but also typical characters (Kornél Esti, clowns, sailors), situations and recurring themes. These are homage pieces: the author dons another writer’s clothes without conspicuously disguising himself, expressing his own thoughts in another’s voice and thereby half risking relinquishing them. It is at the point where expression and relinquishment meet that stylistic parody diverges from homage – parody always implies an ironic reading, whereas homage is “humble reading” and, not least, a willingness to take risks, because the boundary between adopting another’s style and identifying with them is fluid. As we may recall from Bogdán’s own account, “I could not stop myself from making references and evoking others.” The critic concludes: “László Bogdán’s writings are, almost without exception, structured according to the logic of memory or dreams. Within stories that are complete in themselves, fragments of memory and dream images overlap, and probing the hairline fractures threatens to bring the entire structure crashing down. Bogdán’s writings inhabit a suspended world”: just as almost all of Bogdán’s protagonists move through a suspended world, as does Bogdán himself, in the peculiar space-time of a double consciousness in which inner and outer vision, irrespective of distinctions between literary forms and genres, are capable both of subjective, personal expression and of detached self-analysis.
The aforementioned Vasily Bogdanov stories occupy a special place in the oeuvre in this respect as well: Vaszilij Bogdanov: A végzet kirakós játékai (Vasily Bogdanov: The Jigsaw Puzzles of Fate, 2013), Vaszilij Bogdanov: Arcok a forradalmi menetoszlopból (Vasily Bogdanov: Faces from the Revolutionary Column, 2014), Vaszilij Bogdanov: Az illuzionista és a szörnyeteg (Vasily Bogdanov: The Illusionist and the Monster, 2015), and Vaszilij Bogdanov: Ricardo Reis Szibériában (Vasily Bogdanov: Ricardo Reis in Siberia, 2015). “Bogdanov is a biographical poet; the facts of his life seep into his poems, against the backdrop first of Paris during and after the First World War, and then of a nightmare come to life: the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev! An idea striving for world domination at any cost, and an empire of madness,” Bogdán says. He also describes the similarities between his two alter egos: “What Reis and Bogdanov have in common is their longing for freedom. Their attempts to experience and fulfil this desire are thwarted sometimes by a totalitarian nightmare, sometimes by a hallucinatory one. (Bogdanov is haunted by the sinister shadow of KGB officers, Reis by that of the Immeasurable Ancients.) Reis establishes a commune of poets in Tahiti, where they try to defend themselves through poetry against the Immeasurable Ancients, who seek to influence them telepathically. Bogdanov writes poems about his continual ordeals because he believes that by doing so he can master them, just as prehistoric man once mastered the wild animals he drew. He is an eternal survivor and witness.”[12]
Stories and episodes from a life, then, because what we are actually dealing with is a novel in verse – or rather, a lyrical novel sequence with an epic background – with a precisely traceable “origin story,” at least as far as the author is concerned: András Ferenc Kovács dedicated one of his poems to László Bogdán and wrote his name in Russian. This gave him the idea for the volume – or rather, for the name and the fictional author. The fiction continues, as the “translator,” László Bogdán, writes in the Preface to the first volume: “A substantial part of the oeuvre of Vasily Bogdanov (1895–1982), an unjustly forgotten Russian poet, remained hidden until quite recently, but then the poet’s notebooks came to light, and his granddaughter, Tatiana Bogdanova, professor of Slavic studies at Harvard University, began publishing the material from the St Petersburg, Siberian and American notebooks, naturally accompanied by explanatory notes, which reveal a great deal about the period and changing conceptions of literature, but above all about how little we understand Stalinism, let alone its literature and the constraints imposed upon it.”
And as the poet László Bogdán says of his poetic alter ego, his favourite heteronym, who exists for him as a living personality in full physical form: “Bogdanov is a blond man of medium height and well-proportioned build, with regular features and crystalline blue eyes. I often picture him while translating his poems, and I often dream about him too – more often, in any case, than I should. It is the same as with Ricardo Reis: for me, they are alive. They are living people. While I was writing Ricardo Reis’s poems and novel, Pessoa also appeared frequently, whispering encouragingly: ‘many people live in my soul.’” The first volume is the first volume of the “critical edition edited by Tatiana Bogdanova,” containing the youthful poems of the beloved heteronym’s Parisian exile in four sections: Üvegvilág (Glass World, 1914–1917), Árnyak délutánja (Afternoon of Shadows, 1917–1919), A fúriák (The Furies, 1920–1921), Orosz ábrándok (Russian Reveries, 1922–1924). “and behind me remained the towers of Paris” – with this final line of the final poem, the poet closes both the book and the story, while the second Vasily Bogdanov volume continues with sketches by the “voluntary exile” from the period 1939–82, following an account of an extraordinarily dense and remarkably lifelike fictional biography: the Siberian journey of the literary translator, which is in fact exile, rendered through a markedly “biographical mode of poetic composition,” the attacks against him and his being driven to the “margins of literature.” Arcok… (Faces…) offers a kind of “sample,” a fragmentary sketch of this life. László Bogdán depicts the “Stalinist and post-Stalinist” Soviet Union of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the “pariah existence” imposed upon his protagonist, his “ostracism” and “complete exclusion.” He then writes of the years in St Petersburg after his return and the renewed publication of his poems during the “Khrushchev Thaw,” while the third book constructs its quasi-reality from the period 1923–39 – that is, the “first St Petersburg notebooks” – followed by the “Siberian notebooks” (1939–1940), the second “Siberian notebooks” (1941–43), the third (1943–45), the “later St Petersburg notebooks” (1946–49), their 1950–56 section, and finally the material of the St Petersburg notebooks from 1957–68. “I came to know you. I searched for you. / memories, dreams are merely tricks / of our imagination; the other self appears”: László Bogdán had this passage printed on the cover of the fourth Bogdanov book, and A másik én (The Other Self) also became the title of a cycle within the volume. These are elegiac fourteen-line confessional poems, from individual lines of which an encoded self-portrait might be assembled: “No one loves another, only the one / Who carries something of himself”; “Searching for my swirling, wandering self […] again I do not know where or who I am. / my alien self revives within me”; “My self abandons me. I do not know who I am […] Do I still exist, a botched copy”; “Where could I have come from? I cannot know […] Dream and reality are already merging”; “I sit on my heels, surrounded by my selves. / The sun rages. I do not know where I am”; “I – I am myself. But nothing binds me here, / only our life. Far away, tangled shadows. […] The whole is a deceptive dream, a fleeting illusion”; “doubt spins me around myself. / The void grows ever larger in my heart, / drawing my broken-copy existence into itself.”
These fourteen-line poetic forms also appear elsewhere in the volume, including the section A hasonmás (The Double): “the sonnet creaks like a shattered cage,” as the poet puts it, once again evoking the illusion of a “twin existence,” an existence as a double, the haunting other and the confused “shared dreams”: “Everyone exists as a single copy. / Everything else is exaggeration, a fragment of a dream.” Nor is the sense of cage-like existence new to the poet: the “hot concrete floor” of P. in the Cage, the state of having been “locked in a cage,” the “shadow of the cage bars” falling across the face, the “ringing” bars and the images of confinement in the irregular sonnets are all born of the same “blinding visions.”
Even in this vast, four-volume body of alter-ego poetry, amid a profusion of references, stories, facts, explanations, emotional and intellectual labyrinths, and thousands of masked situations, László Bogdán speaks of nothing other than what he expresses, for example, in his poem Én (I), printed on the cover of The Demon Takes Female Form:
They lost me. Found me. Toyed with me.
The infinity within me blazed and shone.
Alone I wandered at a vanishing village edge,
and while I searched for myself, across the dark, barren land
they spun me, rolled me like a coloured glass marble.
What had never been came back to life. Our mirror, the river,
was blown into flood. An evil, heavenly goblin,
whose form is now no more. At night, he is the moon.
Was I, or was I not? Forgotten, I kept spinning,
ragged Paprika Jancsi, my selves all around me.
The world’s labyrinth opened. Back and forth I went and came.
And while I collapsed unconscious on my bed, I climbed, kept climbing
a pillar, a pear tree, a tower, a barren hill.
A vision carried me away. It closed around me forever.
And of what he says in his Ars poetica: “In my poems and stories, ever new rooms of the museum of transcriptions open up, and my alter egos wander around me there. We are together in the draughty space between texts.” And elsewhere: “When I was writing, I felt free. Can a person be free? Though this too, like everything in the world, may ultimately be nothing more than a dazzling illusion, and have nothing to do with ‘a passion for literature’.”
[2016]
[1] László Lövétei Lázár’s interview by correspondence with László Bogdán, Székelyföld, 2011/9.
[2] Péter Egyed: Az életformák kritikája (The Critique of Forms of Life), Igaz Szó, 1979/8.
[3] Tibor Elek: „szövegek közötti térben” Bogdán László újabb verseiről („in the Space Between Texts”. On László Bogdán’s Recent Poems), Forrás, 2008/3.
[4] István Szőcs: Hármaskép – lórúgásszerűen értelmezve (Triptych – Interpreted Like a Horse Kick), Utunk, 15 September 1989.
[5] Gergely Angyalossy: Egy különös múzeum (A Curious Museum). László Bogdán: Átiratok múzeuma (Museum of Transcriptions), Kortárs, 2000/4.
[6] ] Tibor Elek: „szövegek közötti térben” Bogdán László újabb verseiről („in the Space Between Texts”. On László Bogdán’s Recent Poems), Forrás, 2008/3.-
[7] Melinda Varga’s interview.
[8] Judit-Eszter Szabó: A kék háromszögek mítosza. Bogdán László: Richardo Reis Tahitin című könyvéről (The Myth of the Blue Triangles. On László Bogdán’s Ricardo Reis in Tahiti). Új-Forrás, 2011/3.
[9] See footnote 7.
[10] Tibor Elek: Végeérhetetlen történetek Bogdán László: Bűbájosok; Hutera Béla utolsó utazása (Never-Ending Stories. László Bogdán: Enchanters; Béla Hutera’s Last Journey), Kortárs, 2008/3.
[11] Júlia Vallasek: Bogdán László: Öt korsó sör a Golgotában – eltűnések, áttűnések (László Bogdán: Five Mugs of Beer at Golgotha – Disappearances, Dissolves), Jelenkor, 2001/9.
[12] See: Melinda Varga’s interview.