His first writings, according to the cover of the 2005 edition of Évgyűrűk hatalma I–II. (The Power of Growth Rings I–II.), which contains essays, articles and interviews, “remain memorable to this day”. If his two early-career volumes, the various editions (1955 and 1959) of Irodalomelmélet (Literary Theory), are also to be counted among them, then what makes them memorable in the eyes of the recommender is – presumably – that their fundamental category, socialist realism, once used as the standard for all aesthetic–poetic evaluation, was considered “gluposzty”, that is, stupidity or foolishness, by László Dobos, who taught literary theory at the academy – as preserved in the recollection of his student, Árpád Tőzsér. It is almost certain, however, that the chapters of the textbook were written in a different spirit. What kind of spirit, that can again only be guessed – namely from the fact that he never presented to the public again the very first pieces of his early career, the evidence of his work as a journalist and the attempts of his early creative prose. They may well be memorable, yet when compiling his selected volumes, he forgot about them.
His works of various genres that preceded the launch of Irodalmi Szemle (Literary Review) in 1958 – his articles, feuilletons, essays, reviews of theatre performances and books – are preserved in the pages of the daily and weekly papers of the time, as are his short stories. As a kind of “prelude” to his debut as a novelist, scholarly literature identifies several of his literary reportages (Komáromi pillanatfelvétel [Snapshot of Komárno], 1956; Bort, búzát, békességet! Bodrogközi krónika [Wine, Wheat, Peace! A Chronicle from Bodrogköz], 1957), as well as a few of his short stories, among them those published after the journal’s launch (Én, Fekete János [I, János Fekete], 1958; Valakihez tartozni kell [We Must Belong to Someone]; Áldozat [Sacrifice], 1961). It is not known whether Zoltán Fábry was also referring to the reportage-like short stories or the short-story-like reportages when, in greeting Messze voltak a csillagok (The Stars Were Far Away, 1963), he gave voice to his “multiple” surprise. He marvelled that the author, known as a literary historian and aesthetician, showed no sign of the “uncertainty of a beginner” in his literary debut.
An unprovable certainty: the development of László Dobos’s creative career was fundamentally influenced and shaped by the fact that it was essentially Zoltán Fábry – at that time the unchallengeable intellectual authority of Czechoslovak Hungarian public life and literature – who inaugurated him as a writer. His multi-part study Új szlovákiai magyar regények (New Slovakian Hungarian Novels) in the 1964 volume of Irodalmi Szemle (Literary Review) celebrated the birth of the Hungarian minority novel, highlighting Dobos’s work alongside two others (Bálint Petrőci: Határváros [Border Town]; Olivér Rácz: Megtudtam, hogy élsz [I Found Out You Are Alive]). His concluding words were echoed by many even much later: “Dobos’s novel is a warning, a visible stand: an audible, crying, desperate shout. A monodrama: a sentinel at his post!” Admittedly, the eulogist allowed himself nearly comical exaggerations with this description. For the novel’s main figure, Ács, sums up the extract of his fate in quite a different way: “An injustice, a terrible injustice befell me: the Horthy people drafted me, I marched on foot through half of Russia. I escaped home from beneath the Carpathians, hid myself. I waited for the front to pass over, I thought that would end the war for me. It did not happen […] Some ill-wisher informed on me, smeared me. They branded me a political enemy. With such a terrible seal they handed me over to the Soviet command. […] I ran around seeking justice, but by the time they heard me, the train was rattling with me under Smolensk.” It is obvious that the critic, in his enthusiasm, selected a hiding deserter for the role of sentinel, of overseer. A man who, upon arriving in the internment camp, volunteers for the Czechoslovak army. “If necessary, we will fight” – naturally even against the Hungarians. At this point he seems not to follow his father’s advice: “Do not strive to be in the front row… stay further back […] protect yourself along with the others, think of yourself.” In his behaviour it is peasant caution that operates as the living force, and not his Hungarian identity. He regrets too – referring to the period after the First Vienna Award, to the reattachment of the Upper Highlands – what “a price” he paid for the fact that “everything was Hungarian: God, freedom, justice”. Later he also speaks of “confusion”, and on the matter of national belonging and self-identity he says this: “The changes followed one another like avalanches: first swear loyalty to Beneš, then be a good Hungarian patriot… Slowly we no longer even knew what nationality we actually were.”
For all these reasons László Koncsol could venture – in stark contrast to Fábry – to elaborate that Messze voltak a csillagok (The Stars Were Far Away) was born “in the spirit of political perception”, meaning that “it does not view politics from the perspective of life, but rather, conversely, judges life according to the logic of political perception”. He regrets that among the writers fighting for their own identity and for the fundamental issues of minority existence – including, of course, the revocation of the charge of collective guilt and the elimination of the disenfranchisement of Hungarians beginning in 1945 – Dobos too failed to rise “above the spirit of the age”.
In analysing the later novel Földönfutók (Wanderers, 1967), he almost literally repeats this, though applying it only to the plot lines connected to Hungary: according to Koncsol – who himself was a “wanderer” and a student in Sárospatak during the years of statelessness – the way the narrator depicts the former circumstances is “a tribute to the spirit of the age”, “tendentious and tactical”. That anyone, in the dormitory or elsewhere, made him feel he was living on sufferance, or that anyone – least of all a priest – told him to his face that “he has neither homeland nor God”. Even so, he does not argue with those critics whose opinions converge in claiming that the “collective drama” of the Czechoslovak Hungarian community is revealed through the meeting of the two protagonists, the Slovak pilot and the Hungarian “writer-like figure”, a meeting that prompts them to recall their shared past. There is no debate between them; they barely speak to each other: only the pilot’s voice “sounds”, the narrator remains “silent”. That is, each reckons inwardly with the past in an internal monologue. The writer-like figure recalls the persecution of his village people and family, the deportation, the population exchange, then the forced adventures of his youth, the dangers of escaping across the state border. Even twenty years later he cannot forget how “the new rulers of power delivered judgement”, and how “they separated people according to their language”: “whoever speaks in his mother tongue is guilty, to be beaten and hated”.
The new rulers – whether the victorious democrats or the communists staging the dress rehearsal of their takeover in November 1947 – appear like members of some masquerading troupe. The pilot recalls later times. For him, the 1950s are the years of wandering: he is forced to leave the seminary because he does not display sufficient enthusiasm for the “revolutionary ideas”. His doubts that “the working class performs miracles” only grow when he returns home, for the agitators forced the peasants into the kolkhoz through cruelty and intimidation. After the unrest of home comes true homelessness: the police try to hire him as an informant, and afterwards – invoking his conscience and the needs of society – they assign him to Jáchymov, the uranium mine of the “city of the dead”.
The pilot and the writer-like figure both experience a sense of homelessness. Although their worker- and peasant-rooted calvary is shared, they look back on it differently. Their perspectives differ individually as well, and the writer-like figure’s viewpoint differs even within itself. His narrating “I” is in constant debate with the narrated self, and especially with the latter’s environment – and this, not only in Wanderers but in all of Dobos’s other novels except A kis viking (The Little Viking), is an essential perceptual and structural feature. His remarks about his own actions, or more precisely his inaction, continually end up at the intention of rebellion. “I would rebel, but I feel I should have done so earlier” – he begins to excuse himself and search for scapegoats. He would call his father to account for allowing him to be taken to the front; his grandfather, for bringing up Galicia. This shifting of responsibility is clearly not done in order to shape a sense of communal or national identity, but rather in the course of searching for followable behavioural patterns and acceptable norms of conduct. Thus the narrating hero arrives at the same point reached by the author’s other novelistic figures: the criticism of humility as a behaviour in which the individual’s awareness of dependence and even insignificance is expressed. “Three generations passed before me, and not one of my forefathers rebelled” – he condemns the group to which he belongs: the peasantry. The image formed of them – “They obeyed, always obeyed. Their fate is similar, the same. They were humiliated to the ground a thousand times, but they did not rebel” – hides the image that could be formed of his own self, the self that is likewise cowardly when it comes to rebellion. But it also hides the nature and the responsibility of power. This projection leads him to present obedience, servile submission, the renunciation of human dignity, or – in the often-used harsh expression – the acceptance of “worm-life” as if it were a characteristic trait of peasant society.
His third novel, the concluding part of the irregular trilogy, Egy szál ingben (In Nothing But a Shirt, 1976), was conceived in a similar spirit. It was likely encouraged also by the almost heightened anticipation that Zoltán Fábry had once stirred up regarding the Czechoslovak Hungarian “great novel” intended to strengthen minority self-knowledge and self-awareness – a novel whose realization readers expected primarily from László Dobos or Gyula Duba, according to several contemporary critics. The author did not disappoint this expectation: the reception almost unanimously declared the work to be of outstanding significance. In matters of national self-examination, it was likened to works of East-Central European literature such as Tibor Cseres’s Hideg napok (Cold Days), Serbian writer Danilo Kiš’s Hourglass, the short stories and memoirs of Romanian writer Titus Popovici or Slovak author Andrej Plávka, and not least András Sütő’s diary notes, Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (Mother Promises a Light Dream). Some praised its complex structure, its film-like montage technique that creates the possibility of totality. Others highlighted, as part of its associative narrative technique, the way it transforms into epic components those forms in which the collective national fate has been expressed almost instinctively for centuries: the ballad, the hymn and the psalm. To these could be added the documents: in the flood scenes that frame the novel, the waves first wash up letters sent from distant America, the land of emigrants’ hopes; then others arriving from the Russian front; and finally some from the Czech lands, with Beneš’s portrait on the stamp, from the period of the deportations. Addressee and sender alike are unknown. Not so the field postcards and letters the narrator finds at home. They were written by his father: “Kolozsvár has returned, Marosvásárhely, Csíkszereda, Kézdivásárhely have returned!” proclaim the first ones. Then come those dated in Subotica and Zombor, and after them those sent from Ukraine – the documents of “soldiers’ history”. Based on these, it would seem self-evident that the clerk-like narrator would judge the narrative time and its events – the years between the reannexation of Upper Hungary and the end of the war – from the perspective of the soldiers, those dragged into battle, and in doing so weigh the differences between the “Hungarian” and the “Czech” world.
The critic who had earlier reproached the work for paying tribute to the spirit of the age also sees it this way, praising that the path taken from the “half-formed consciousness” of Kálmán Ács in Messze voltak a csillagok (The Stars Were Far Away) to the “biblical-mythical reworking of peasant portraits” in the flood chapter of Egy szál ingben (In Nothing But a Shirt) “at the same time maps out the path taken by our prose – and of course primarily by our minority consciousness – toward accepting unblemished identity”. In the case of the flood portraits, this unblemished quality may indeed be true. But in the case of the soldier-father, hardly. Fewer human values are attached to him; instead, it is Mihály Leczo, the tailor – mentioned by name both in the first novel and in the confessions to the homeland – who rises to the status of hero. He is also evoked by the title: in “nothing but a shirt”, refers to the communist who accepts death, and who, incidentally, is executed before he can realize his plans – to strike the front from behind, to gather weapons and to make contact with the Soviet troops. He, the revolutionary who does not quite reach the point of action but is resolute in intention, stands at the centre. Not the father, who embodies the suffering common man and who – like the other figures of soldiers’ history – cannot rise to the height of mythic heroes. For the narrator has inherited from him, from them, the habit of looking “from below upward”, the “distorted human posture”. The harsh judgement familiar from elsewhere is repeated: “they drew helpless circles around their worm-like fate”, and “as often as I made the journey from below upward, the fate of my ancestors shuddered within me. Their worm-life and worm-desires fired my nerves to be something other than they were”.
The next novel, Hólepedő (Snow Cover, 1979), is, according to the author himself, a “branching-off” in his oeuvre. The previous volumes were “historically and socially centred”, whereas this one is “moral and psychological in nature”. And evidently not because it tells the fate of a severely injured young teacher, suspending the autobiographical character of the last two parts of the “trilogy”, but because it examines where a person may find the strength to fight their own struggle between life and death.
The struggle, of course, gives grounds for analogy: the author remembered the 1970s – when he was expelled from the party and banned from publishing – as a time when he “was kept on the register of dead souls”. According to one of the novel’s admirers, Erzsébet, a young teacher’s story, is not unique: it depicts “a great social trauma, a shock that gained frightening power over people’s souls, and that certain (intellectual) strata bore with difficulty and – not to say – were struck by tragically”. Considering whether the girl is tormented by a historical–social or an individual trauma, the latter seems more likely. Her psychological wounds also appear to be of this nature: she seeks the possibilities of her independence and autonomy in opposing her parents. She considers her grandmother bigoted, her mother insensitive, and her father almost entirely foreign to her because of his “concealed life”, and even – again the harshness of judgement – “the fear of worm-life”. From her rejection of her father’s behaviour would follow the aim, the plan: “A separate life, a different life…” for herself. At this point the teacher’s story certainly diverges from being read in parallel with the author’s own; however, a comparison with the short story based on the same basic situation, Egyedül (Alone), is nonetheless suggested.
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If Snow Cover is a branching on the career path, then Sodrásban (In the Drift, 1984) is a return to the world saturated with autobiographical elements found in Wanderers and In Nothing But a Shirt. Distinctively to that period of life and that social era – the 1950s – without whose events the arc of the career, the process by which the smuggler-student becomes a kind of writer, would break off. The story of teacher Jeromos Tiba is about fulfilling a role: as the son of peasants conquering the city, becoming an intellectual, and meanwhile not only proclaiming that “a new god is born, a new religion”, that of communism, but fighting through fire and water for the realisation of the idea. For its “implementation in practice” – to use the so-called “Comintern” expression that permeates the linguistic world of the novel. The turns of Orwellian “newspeak” – “to exert influence”, “the international situation is escalating”, “to openly discuss the problems”, and similar phrases – dominate here as well, entirely without ironic overtones. In recounting the actions of the “hero”, the narrator does not judge from an outsider’s perspective; there is no distance between him and the teacher who becomes intoxicated by the power he wields and worships Stalin. This identification may even be regarded as a virtue of the novel, an aesthetic value: the false consciousness and blind faith of the era are revealed directly.
Considering its year of publication (1991), A kis viking (The Little Viking) may have been written in the fervour of the regime change; perhaps the most personal of László Dobos’s novels, yet one that avoids political-ideological domains entirely. It was inspired by his grandson, born in Norway. Lars, in the literal sense, tells the story himself – weaving a dozen Norwegian fairy tales into it – recounting his socialisation and upbringing, which took place almost exclusively within a family (and not state institutional) framework. The arc of his path is this: the boy who initially desires only tales and storytelling reaches the point where he begins to take an interest in his ancestors. Abroad he is captivated by the Vikings and the Kon-Tiki, while at his grandmother’s home on the Danube it is the Turks who hold his imagination, and he practises bravery in fighting against them. The entire work proclaims the essential unity of language and the human being, reminiscent in its outlook of András Sütő’s essay-novel Engedjétek hozzám jönni a szavakat (Let the Words Come to Me). The Little Viking may not have been created with the same artistic ambition and intensity as some of the other novels, yet in terms of the aesthetic quality of its unified transformation it still stands out among them. Nor do we find in it the “much ballast” that, according to one critic, weighed down some of the others: the “burden of functionless words”, the pathos, the “ornamentation”, the overly drawn-out reflections.
The pathetic tone and elevated style are in any case regarded as one of the characteristic features of his prose. Together with the second – autobiographical inspiration – and the third, which points to a fundamental contradiction in his oeuvre. Namely, that the narrators and many of the characters judge the reality-material, the so-called represented objectivities of rural-peasant and national–ethnic character, from an outsider’s perspective, and often speak in the tone of criticism rather than empathy. So much so that his friend and colleague Árpád Tőzsér rightly speaks of a puzzle: why is Dobos considered a népi író (‘rural writer’) in Hungary, when in his works the village as a theme is heavily stylised and, when present, becomes a symbolic setting of backwardness and bigotrry.
What makes him a ‘rural writer’? His latest volumes, the collections of essays and interviews Teremtő küzdelem (Creative Struggle) and Évgyűrűk hatalma (The Power of Growth Rings), answer this indirectly or directly. In self-criticism he writes that it was an “unbelievable condition” to fall into the “swamp” of the personality cult. A programme: “to cast off Trianon and the sediment of this century’s anti-Hungarian acts of vengeance, to win back our plundered history… To fight for our morally and politically rightful self-determination, so that we may decide our own fate. To transcend the outdated ideology of the still nationalist nation-states. And to build tirelessly the institutional system of Hungarian–Hungarian integration, of a unified nation.” As the title of one of his interviews states: Már nincs hova hátrálni (There Is Nowhere Left to Retreat).
What is his significance within the canon? András Görömbei’s epoch-making monograph on Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia (1982) praised him as an outstanding, prominent author. Distinguished literary historians expected from him (and from Gyula Duba) the “epic” of the minority community, the great realist novel. The period of silence imposed on him only increased readers’ and critics’ interest. Then, on the eve of the political transition, his “active” colleague Lajos Grendel – writing about the relationship between tradition and modernity – declared almost as a verdict that the prose model associated with his name (and Gyula Duba’s) “will not, and cannot, become the canon of our prose writing.” Perhaps for this reason Ernő Kulcsár Szabó does not devote a single line to him in A magyar irodalomtörténet 1945–1991 (A History of Hungarian Literature 1945–1991, 1993), though he would fit within the chapters on confessional writing, realism, and regionalism. Tibor Elek may also be puzzled: the dominant trend of prose “even today” abroad may still be represented by Dobos, Olivér Rácz and Gyula Duba. Then come the syntheses: Tibor Gintli – Gábor Schein: Az irodalom rövid története (A Short History of Literature, 2007); A magyar irodalom történetei (The Histories of Hungarian Literature, 2007), edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veress; and, under the editorship of Tibor Gintli, Magyar irodalom (Hungarian Literature, 2010) – all of which canonise without Dobos. Then Lajos Grendel’s volume A modern magyar irodalom története (The History of Modern Hungarian Literature, 2010) appears, containing a small portrait of Dobos, mentioning Földönfutók (Wanderers) and Egy szál ingben (In a Single Shirt) as two outstanding novels, praising the fact that he “makes much bolder use of the techniques of modern prose – shifting time frames, associative structures, multiple plot-lines – than Duba.” Later, when drawing the portrait of Tibor Bálint, he returns to Dobos, saying that in the Slovakian and Romanian branches of Hungarian literature in the 1960s and 1970s there arose a demand for “summing, great novels” at the very time when in Hungary the renewal of epic form was on the agenda. “From this perspective, the successful novels of Duba, Dobos, Sütő and Bálint represented the models of Hungarian realist epic that Hungarian literature sought to surpass and overwrite – more its past than its present,” he adds. Giving the impression that some twenty years earlier it was dictated to him from Budapest who and what could enter the external canon.
Have those times passed, or will the seemingly completed oeuvre of László Dobos once again be subjected to new ideologies?
[2012]