If I had to capture Péter Dobai and the character of his art in a photograph, I would choose one from his secondary grammar school years. The photo, taken during a time trial competition at Eötvös Secondary Grammar School, shows Péter Dobai on the far left, wearing a white singlet that recalls the bodybuilder hero of the Archaikus torzó (Archaic Torso), looking more like a weightlifter. A few seconds later, Dobai crosses the finish line as the winner. Dobai is almost a photograph within a photograph: he seems cut from another race or a different picture. This sense of individuality, inaccessibility, participation in various ‘sports’, and the desire to complete a challenge also define his artistic attitude. In the middle and at the far right of the photograph, the other competitors, in terms of position, body type, and running suit style, are closer together, while their expressions tell different stories: one is smiling, running effortlessly, while the other appears resigned and slowing down. Meanwhile, the young artist is visibly exerting extraordinary strength as he approaches the finish line, as if it were a matter of life and death – something like Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with elephants. This attitude and this conduct also define the heroic figures in Dobai’s art. His characters, such as Kristóf Kelemen and Alfred Redl, heroically embrace the impossible and the hopeless. Péter Dobai’s expression in the photograph reveals his ability to empathise – thanks to his strong imagination and exceptional talent for creating and preserving images, his characters can feel at home even in alien historical and geographical contexts.
“To exist with the same force at every point!” – wrote Dobai in 1971 in his autobiographical essay, and with this sentence, his artistic position in the 1970s is defined, a time when he attracted attention with his genre and media shifts (e.g., poetry, linguistics, prose, film) and the declaration that one’s behavior itself could function as an artwork. He envisioned this as a continuous and directed sequence of manifestations, embedding his poetic theory in attention-grabbing, provocative statements (e.g. “to dance around the craters of manifestation every day, which a person consciously or spontaneously creates around themselves”). His workshop confession titled Nyelv, kép, megnyilvánulás (Language, Image, Manifestation), written in connection with Archaic Torso, is one of the defining writings of his early creative period. For Dobai, the ‘shift’ into universal cinematic language represented a ‘jump’ into action, and like his role model Pasolini, he examined the language he used and realised that he could not express himself through ‘pre-packaged phrases’. Péter Dobai moved from poetic language to epic language, and from there to universal film language. His early works show a strong unity of language and themes. Following his writer’s program, the protagonists of his short stories, set in the present of the 1970s, seek to assert themselves against the lives they lead, and it is inevitable that they pay for this with their lives. The stories are framed by fatal violence and brutal and aggressive outcomes. The author replaces the depicted life-lies with the nostalgia of his characters, turning towards the past in his historical novels to find an example for ‘action’. His oeuvre, from the mid- to late-1970s, gradually organised itself around memory. Péter Dobai developed a consistent (working) style, reacted with bold courage to the critiques of official literary criticism, fought for the revelation of the tabooed history typical of the Kádár era, and at the same time, was always characterized by duality: he tried to win over the hearts of readers and friends with gentleness and a unique loyalty, while attempting to conquer the intellectuals with anger. In his later poetry collections, he built a self-regulated (archaic) world. Dobai’s approach to time is unique; his newer poems are likewise distinctive – often with archaic sentence structures that exude a Secessionist atmosphere. However, as he made the problem of aging and the passing of time his primary subject in the last twenty years (e.g. in a 1999 interview, he stated: “For me, the only failure is my approaching old age, and the only pride I have is my youth”), and abandoned his previous intention to ‘bombard reality with his passion’, he gradually faded from the critical spotlight.
Péter Dobai’s life work can be divided into three creative periods. The first can be placed between 1968/1969 and 1978/1979. The author’s literary and film debut also dates back to 1968/1969; however, interestingly, he did not join the ‘literary new wave’ but rather connected with the 1969 generation of the Balázs Béla Studio, and his career initially ran in parallel with contemporary film history. His first creative period coincides almost entirely with the Hungarian film history of the 1970s (1969/1970–1978/1979), and the second period covers Hungarian cinema of the 1980s (1978/1979–1989/1990). The beginning of Dobai’s second creative phase, the turning point between the 1970s and 1980s, can also be compared to Hungarian and European film processes: by the late 1970s in Hungary, alongside the documentary and avant-garde efforts, a new academicism arose, aiming to reinstate the traditional narrative style.
1968/1969–1978/1979
The first wave of new avant-garde (the turning point between the 1960s and 1970s) had a significant influence on the author’s art, but the second wave, which gained strength in the late 1970s, passed Dobai by. Of the two trends emerging at the time, the new academicism and the new sensitivity, Dobai aligned not with the progressive tendencies uniting the neo-avant-garde and underground, especially in the Balázs Béla Studio, but rather with the classical style of new academicism, which followed the model of the New Hollywood turnaround. István Szabó’s trilogy made in the 1980s (Mephisto, 1981; Redl ezredes [Colonel Redl], 1984; Hanussen, 1988) represents an important pillar of the European art film tradition rediscovering epic storytelling, and also the peak of the Hungarian film’s new conservative wave; all three films were nominated for an Oscar, and Mephisto won the award in 1982. With Mephisto, not only did the director experience a significant stylistic shift in his career, but Dobai also underwent a change, as Szabó, the earlier auteur filmmaker and author, shifted from an experimental position to a new academicism that addressed a broader audience. This stylistic shift is evident in the writer’s works from the 1980s, particularly in his major novels (Vadon [Wilderness], 1982; A birodalom ezredese [Colonel of the Empire], 1985).
Political borders often represent a change for artists and their work. Péter Dobai’s experimental period ended around 1973–1975 with the consolidation of conservative political forces and the onset of cultural repression, when the government dismantled the first wave of the new avant-garde. This marked the closure of a chapter within Dobai’s first creative period. The years 1973 and 1975 frame Dobai’s last ‘Balázs Béla’ film, Együtthatók (Coefficients), which can be considered the closing piece of the avant-garde period. Between 1973 and 1975, the author spent a year and a half on a Cuban scholarship; according to his recollections, he edited the film in 1973 and began his scholarship in Cuba the next day. During his absence, some of the film’s reels, which were still unfinished, likely disappeared from the film studio’s Pasarét department due to political reasons. However, according to Artpool’s records, the remaining sections of the film were shown on 29 April 1975. Dobai’s last work at the Balázs Béla Studio was a generational film in which the author immortalised his avant-garde artist friends (Miklós Erdély, Gyula Pauer, Péter Halász, and Tibor Hajas). Of the two-hour, six-part planned film, 39 minutes remained, featuring a recording made at Péter Halász’s home theatre and a few minutes from 1 May 1972. Péter Dobai’s Anyám (My Mother, 1975), a documentary-style feature film, marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Together with Ferenc Grunwalsky, Dobai used archived photos and film footage in a feature-like manner; this technique was applied by the Balázs Béla Studio’s 1969 generation. Compared to his earlier works, it marked a change for Dobai as he showcased the connection between history and the individual through the story of his mother. Csontmolnárok (Bone Mills, 1974), like Agitátorok (The Agitators, 1969), did not feature a protagonist who called for emotional identification, while Kilovaglás egy őszi erődből (Riding Out of an Autumn Fortress, 1973) – a ‘cult book of a generation’ – can be associated with the spirit of 1968, like The Agitators and Büntetőexpedíció (Punitive Expedition, 1970), and serves as a kind of manifesto. From the 1975 novel Tartozó élet (A Life Owed), the author began to emphasise the personal aspect of history, featuring prominent protagonists, a goal similar to that of István Szabó (with Mephisto, Colonel Redl, Hanussen).
The film The Agitators is an important work in the development of the author’s artistic career. Dezső Magyar brought a new, political modernist poetics to Hungarian cinema, and Dobai applied this in writing Bone Mills. The manifesto titled Szociológiai filmcsoportot! (Sociological Film Group!) published in the summer of 1969, written by Dobai as well, can be linked to his work Dokumentumok alapkőbe és komputerbe (Documents into Foundation Stone and Computer, 1970), which documents Dobai’s writerly program and the era’s objectivist-collectivist art. The book Riding Out of an Autumn Fortress is a collection from the author’s early period, during which he consciously distanced himself from conventional aesthetic forms and drew attention with his individual lexical constructions. His early works show a strong thematic and linguistic unity. Riding Out of an Autumn Fortress is permeated by the spirit of The Agitators and Punitive Expedition from 1968, and in line with Dobai’s early short stories and the film Archaic Torso (1971), it demonstrates the development of ‘self-consciousness and behaviour’. During the making of Archaic Torso, Dobai confronted the failure of individually organising behaviour, but he later considered rebellion to be a ‘higher version of behaviour’, as he discussed in his thesis Imperatívusz és illúzió. Kölcsönhatás Albert Camus művészete és filozófiája között (Imperative and Illusion. The Interaction Between Albert Camus’ Art and Philosophy, 1970) about Camus’ works and characters.
In Bone Mills, Péter Dobai paints a portrait of nineteenth-century revolutionary intellectuals. The events of the 1848–1849 revolution are pieced together from the conversations of exiles after the defeat and from fragments of memory. The steps required for the success of the revolution not only characterise the historical situation of the time but also the revolutions of later eras. When Bone Mills was published, the criticism welcomed it, among other reasons, because it provided new perspectives on the connections between historical themes and modern Hungarian novels. It “applied exemplary compression, economy in composition,” and, in line with the subtitle (A 20th-Century Hungarian Novel), the author developed an authentic, archaized novel language. Similar to Bone Mills, in Wilderness (1982) and Colonel of the Empire (1985), Dobai mixes documentation with fiction, deliberately complementing contemporary documents with his imagination (a technique also used in A Life Owed). With these novels, he returns to the traditional, representation-centred epic novel type. By reading György Szomjas’ Rosszemberek (Bad People) (1979) film’s literary screenplay (Se szó, se törvény [Neither Word nor Law]) (1981), one can see the method, as well as the unique talent and ability upon which Dobai relies in creating authentic novel spaces and language based on contemporary documents (in the first half of the book, the documents from the period between 11 May 1864, and 13 April 1865, about bandit history collected by György Szomjas are featured), as well as letters, notes, and testimonies.
Since the 1970s, Péter Dobai has mentioned in almost every interview that, as a university student, he frequently attended János Zsilka’s general linguistics seminars. The linguistic games characteristic of the author’s early writings may have been inspired by Zsilka’s linguistic studies, but only a few of Dobai’s works related to film language were published (A képi és fogalmi jelentések összefüggései [The Interrelation of Visual and Conceptual Meanings], 1972; Kép és szó [Image and Word], 1973; Nyelv és film, a filmi formálás és a nyelvi rendszer összefüggései [Language and Film, The Connection Between Cinematic Shaping and the Language System], 1973). Between 1971 and 1972, the author participated in an interdisciplinary series of lectures and debates that preceded the launch of the Filmnyelvi sorozat (Film Language Series) with László Beke, Gábor Bódy, Miklós Erdély, Özséb Horányi, János Kelemen, András Szekfü, and János Zsilka. He also contributed two screenplays to the collection titled Film Language Series (1973) – Egy arc módosulásai (Changes of a Face) and Régi magyar képtár (Old Hungarian Art Gallery) – but did not make any films within the series.
In Cuba, Péter Dobai distanced himself from the ideal of community: he severed his ties with the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) and his work increasingly focused on the individual, thinking in terms of (self-)portraits and developing his own mythology. During his time on the scholarship, he wrote 1964 and Sziget (Island), a diary-novel published in one volume in 1977, as well as Changes of a Face (1976). 1964 and Changes of a Face both tell the story of the same girl, Dobai’s first love. After 1975, the author’s relationship with the Balázs Béla Studio loosened, and his work shifted to the MAFILM studios, where his filmmaking activities aligned more with the ‘mainstream’. In 1979, he joined Zoltán Huszárik’s film Csontváry (1980) and also collaborated on Gábor Bódy’s Psyché (1980). Péter Dobai confirmed in a 1979 interview that, at the beginning of his career, he was most drawn to film and that he learned a lot from cinematic form, particularly attracted to the ‘structural clarity’ of the dramaturgical ‘concept’. His 1978 short story collection Sakktábla, két figurával (Chessboard, with Two Figures) contains pieces that are film stories, carefully constructed in terms of dramaturgy, just like a screenplay. In this sense, Dobai took the professional path of a screenwriter, though his second short story collection lacks pieces as memorable as Imago and Alapműveletek (Basic Operations) from Játék a szobákkal (Playing with Rooms, 1976). In Péter Dobai’s early works, he primarily seeks to grasp the world conceptually, and his creations are connected not only by radical thinking but also by the quest for inner freedom. In Playing with Rooms, alongside more developed prose (e.g. Imago), film stories (e.g. Régi magyar mesterségek [Old Hungarian Trades], Hétfők és konyhák [Mondays and Kitchens]) and diary-like meditations (e.g., Basic Operations, Szövetek [Fabrics]) alternate.
1979–1989
Péter Dobai’s second creative period spans from 1979 to 1989. The first phase of his artistic career was characterised by genre diversity, but in the 1980s, screenwriting became his dominant activity. Péter Dobai’s screenplays can be divided into two main groups based on their themes. One group consists of historical-themed screenplays (Agitators [the screenplay was written by Gábor Bódy, but Dobai rewrote his role, which is why the film is included among the author’s screenplays], 1969; Punitive Expedition, 1970; Old Hungarian Art Gallery, 1971; My Mother, 1975; Radetzky-induló [Radetzky’s March], 1976; Bad People, 1978; Mephisto, 1980; Colonel Redl, 1983; Hanussen, 1984; Budavár visszavívása [The Recapture of Buda], 1686, 1986; Károly és Zita [Károly and Zita], 1993; Guantanamera, 1995; A felderítő [The Scout], 1996; Bone Mills, 2000), and the other group consists of artistic biographies (Csontváry, 1979; Eszmélet [Conciousness – a series about Attila József’s life and works], 1987; Rembrandt van Rijn, 1993; A fürdőorvos [The Bath Doctor – about the life of Géza Csáth], 1996; Magyar kereszt [Hungarian Cross], 1999; Amrita Sher-Gil, 2001). For Péter Dobai, historical films brought the greatest recognition as a screenwriter – according to the author, his best screenplay was the one he wrote for Károly Makk’s Radetzky’s March –, and the most significant novels are also rooted in historical themes. Dobai’s first screenplay, written for Filmgyár (Film Factory), was also historical. Félix Máriássy planned a film about the Anders’ Army, which focused on the Polish refugees who arrived in Hungary, but due to the Soviet Union’s negative role (the invasion of Poland), György Aczél did not allow it. The literary screenplay of A Life Owed (The Scout) extends beyond the novel’s timeline, exploring Hungary’s history and Kristóf Kelemen’s life in the mid-1950s. In the screenplay, Kelemen survives the Nazi takeover but becomes a victim of communism, drawing a parallel between the two totalitarian regimes, while also using historical material from his earlier novels and screenplays. Péter Dobai’s artistic portraits were made in less successful films or not made at all (e.g., Rembrandt, Amrita Sher-Gil), and only in one of his novels, Lendkerék (Flywheel), which is about the fictional sculptor hero Gyula Zsujti, does the artist’s fate come into focus. The interest of the script for Ferenc András’ Hungarian Cross (1999) lies in the fact that Dobai weaves his own life story into the screenplay.
The historical films and major novels of Péter Dobai strengthened each other at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. The shift of Hungarian cinema towards an academic style may be the reason why, in contrast to the harsh criticism from literary critics, filmmakers not only recognised the author’s screenplays but also his major novels. Hungarian cinema, aiming to satisfy a wider audience, often drew on Dobai’s novels, which are rich in historical settings, adventurous storylines, and well-defined moral dilemmas and internal conflicts involving heroes. Ferenc András made the film Wilderness (1988), and it was also planned to adapt Bone Mills and A Life Owed (The Scout) for the screen. During the 1980s, Péter Dobai’s prose was closely connected to his film work, with Bad People being seen as a preparatory study for Wilderness. He wrote Colonel of the Empire in 1985 because he felt that the film based on Colonel Redl’s screenplay had a problematic approach. Unlike István Szabó’s film, Dobai’s novel does not focus solely on Colonel Redl but also on the dissolution of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. In other words, Redl’s thoughts and actions are not presented solely from his own perspective but are placed within the broader historical and ideological context: Dobai’s work is primarily about the Empire with which the colonel identified. The novellas published in the 1980s, such as Lavina (Avalanche, 1980), Háromszögtan (Trigonometry, 1983), Ív (Arc, 1988), and Lendkerék (Flywheel, 1989), were originally written as screenplays, but as no films were made from them, the author transformed them into prose. The contemporary criticism of Dobai’s major novels also reflects a paradigm shift within literary criticism. Critics who represent the more traditional, realistic novel ideal praise the author’s more conventional narrative style, while critics who think within the framework of poststructuralism lament the lack of self-reflection regarding the challenges of narration. The 1980s brought the dominance of postmodern prose poetics in Hungarian literature, and since Dobai’s major novels did not fit into this new trend, the author fell out of the literary canon of the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s, after a seven-year hiatus, Dobai released a new poetry collection, Az Éden vermei (The Wells of Eden, 1985). He closed the decade with the collection A válogatott versek (Selected Poems, 1989), which comprises selections from his earlier poetry collections.
The period after the regime change marked a new era for Péter Dobai, not only thematically but also in terms of the form of his art, as it narrowed his artistic focus and the scope of his movement across different artistic fields. Over the last twenty-five years, he has primarily worked on processing his memories, especially in poetry. In 1989, Dobai seemed to begin organising his works, and from then on, a detailed bibliography of his novels, screenplays, and directorial work appeared at the end of his books. The 1994 publication Vitorlák emléke (The Memory of Sails, 1979–1993) set the tone for Péter Dobai’s new creative period, and the author established the position of the rememberer, from which he has not moved since. It is clear that the need for synthesis was born in him. From 2000 onwards, Péter Dobai has published several collected volumes, including Párbaj, tükörben (Duel in the Mirror, 2000), which contains his collected short stories, and Angyali agresszió. Írások Pier Paolo Pasoliniről és a filmről (Angelic Aggression. Writings on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Film, 2002), which includes his essays on Pasolini, studies on film language, and other writings related to cinema and Rome. The 2010 volume Latin lélegzet (Latin Breath) is also a thematic collection, where Dobai organises his poems related to Italy, and in the 2011 volume Emlék az ember (Man is a Memory), the poems are grouped around memories. In Belvedere (2014), he draws on material from his previous poetry collections.
1990–
In Péter Dobai’s third creative period, he consciously reflects on his first artistic phase. In a 2000 interview-style documentary by Ferenc Grunwalsky, the director compares the author’s earlier and 1990s poetry, noting that the same themes, myths, and thoughts (such as love, the sea, farewell, and remembrance) appear in poems written 15 years earlier. In the film, Dobai also acknowledges that he is a monothematic writer. In Önmúltszázad (Past Century of the Self, 1997) and „Barth hadapród, becsületszavamra, visszatér a nyár!” (“Barth cadet, on my word of honour, summer will return!”, 2005), he refers to his poems in Riding Out of an Autumn Fortress (1973), but it can also be said about his newer works that “what is new in them is what is old in them...” or “what I began, only these can be about”. From the collection Hanyatt (Laying back, 1978), existence in Dobai’s poetry acquires new meaning when a memory comes to mind, and he sees memory as a foundation for construction: “I live my future with the life of my memories, / I am this construction, made of years and dreams, taking shape twice.” In Laying back, the room is a symbolic place, a repository for layered memories and impressions. The typical posture of the lyrical hero is lying on his back, and the main means of recalling the past are photographs and paintings. Dobai primarily seeks form for his thoughts and memories, which point towards staticness and thematic one-sidedness. However, for the author, this calm state is only apparent, as new and new leaps of energy characterise him. Péter Dobai knows that the only effective recollection is one that is also a re-experiencing and a re-creation: in order to authentically represent the poetry of non-being, the absence, he developed the lyrical present, in which past, present, and future merge. In the process of organising memory images, the author concludes that the past is more intense and substantial than the present, and that his poetry is driven by a passion for recreation. Because of the need for preservation, repetition and recurring image-thoughts are frequent within the collections, as well as the invocation, reworking, and supplementation of past experiences and old poems, which, due to changed life circumstances, are placed in a new context – this gives the elegiac recollection a distinctly novel quality.
Péter Dobai’s poetry today is still highly charged and impassioned, and the intellectual energy of his emotional expression has not dulled; in fact, it might even be stronger. The same thematic elements (e.g. the lyrical hero’s nostalgic longing, non-belonging, the passion of love, the weight of history) and stylistic techniques (e.g. militaristic expressions, objectified imagery) continue to characterise his poetry. The author’s approach to constructing poetry has not changed: he begins with a precise, factual title, a clear indication of the occasion, and carefully chosen mottos, from which the first image unfolds, such as first bringing a building to life in its physical form, then placing it in a historical context, and finally reflecting on its impact. In his newer collections, he calls the environment (e.g., a sculpture, a painting) that inspires him to write an ‘inspirational force field’. A significant change in his poetry is the direct use of mannered (sometimes bordering on kitsch) metaphors and the development and application of somewhat archaic language, which intensifies the sense of rapture (e.g. “viruló kamaszkisasszony” [”blooming young lady”], “ó, ti vivátos kezdetek!” [”Oh, you jubilant beginnings!”]). Dobai’s poetry has always been marked by the accumulation of details, with loose, scattered, often endlessly sprawling streams of words. While in his early poems, he used expressive images, in his third creative phase, he applies the style of impressionist prose and pointillist construction. Péter Dobai’s early epics, in a sense, anticipate the shift towards prose. The author’s epic work, differing from the loquacious, anecdotal storytelling tradition of Hungarian prose, began in the spirit of minimal art, thus connecting to a literary trend championed by writers like Miklós Mészöly and Géza Ottlik. By the time this trend gained strength, however, Dobai had embarked on the path of classicism, choosing a new academicism aimed at reclaiming traditional narrative forms. In the collection Versek egy elnémult klavírra (Poems for a silent piano, 2002), however, he adopts the popular postmodern technique of pastiche, imitating the late rococo and early biedermeier styles of Judit Dukai Takách (1795–1836). However, the author does not follow Sándor Weöres’ intentions, nor is it a matter of identity play stemming from the lyrical subject’s uncertainty about the voice delivering the text. Instead, it’s about the existential experience of the lyrical self through experiencing the other. The author’s craftsmanship, therefore, draws on various sources even within a single creative period, and this may offer an explanation for his position outside the canon. Dobai does not fit into the dominant postmodern canon of the 1980s, as his prose is not sufficiently postmodern. By 2000, a reassessment of neo-avant-garde trends had begun, but Dobai’s oeuvre cannot be called avant-garde either; compared with classical modernism, his art is too iconoclastic.
Past Century of the Self (1997) features one of the characteristic (prose-)poems in its introduction (Decembervers, A. D. [December Poem, A. D.], 1995), where Péter Dobai presents himself as a solitary marcher: “Felvonulok! Egyedül. Nem kell tömeg.” “Nem kell – tüntetésem végén – ingyen virsli, sör, sósperec. / Elvégre senkit és semmit nem képviselek” (“I march! Alone. No need for a crowd.” “No need – at the end of my demonstration – for free sausages, beer, salty pretzels. / After all, I represent no one and nothing.”) Yet, through the listing of the events of twentieth-century Hungarian history and the lines “Hát vonulj csak, bár az igazi zarándok nem / te vagy, hanem a gyárakból elbocsátott / munkások, a proletárok, ők járják helyetted a Kálváriát!” (“Go ahead, march, though the true pilgrim is not / you, but the workers dismissed from the factories, / the proletarians, they walk the Calvary for you!”) the author’s solidarity is evident, and through the poem, we can grasp the duality that runs through Dobai’s entire oeuvre: the often criticized ‘extreme individualism’ – prone to turn its back on the world and build from imagination – and the commitment to public, communal life, which is described through the desire to make history and – referring back to the Sociological Film Group! manifesto – reality visible.
Péter Dobai is the author of one of the most revised poetic works, with several pieces originally published in Első ének (First Song, 1968) appearing again in a new form in the A magunk kenyerén (Living off our own bread, 1971) anthology. His 2014 book, Belvedere, attests to fresh creative energy, and the (new) epic cycles (poems related to the author’s mother, grandfather, such as Emlék az internátusból [Memory from the Boarding School], 1950 – hat esztendősen mély magamtalanság [In 1950 – Six Years Old, Deep Disorientation], Idők vesznek el a vesztett térben A. S. N. 1914 [Times Are Lost in the Lost Space A. S. N. 1914]) suggest that the long-planned autobiographical novel may be underway, thus both the poet’s work and his prose may become complete.
[2015]