The oeuvre of Gyula Duba – an extraordinarily prolific author not only in (Czecho)Slovakian but also in universal contemporary Hungarian literature, with more than forty volumes to his name – is of a contradictory nature. On the one hand, it can be outlined quite clearly, primarily on the basis of his genre choices and shifts, which also express his artistic ambitions. On the other hand, when we consider his autobiographical narrative attitudes and epic procedures, it is so unified that the majority of his numerous stories and novels belong together almost inseparably, as though they were transformations of one another.
The writer is not adventurous in terms of literary modes: he left both drama and lyric poetry untouched. In contrast, he experimented with almost every variety of epic prose – most frequently with fiction, yet he often made use of the expressive possibilities of discursive prose as well. He began his career – rather late, at the age of twenty-six – by publishing humorous pieces in literary journals. At first the humoresque was his defining genre, and according to contemporary criticism it was the branch of humour that avoided – as it had to avoid, given the era’s “expectations” – political positioning and criticism of social or power structures. One of his first admirers, Lajos Turczel, noted in the afterword to Baj van a humorral (lit: There Is a Problem with Humour, 1967) that the distinctive feature of his conception and depiction of the comic lay in the Aristotelian principle that the essence of comic effect is the absence of pain. The literary historian observed that this is why the classic form of humour – the type József Eötvös characterised with the formula “smiling through tears” – does not occur, nor the relentless satire of Saltykov–Shchedrin, which seeks to provoke in the reader an indignation that grows into a hatred of social evils. Perhaps because the reception was at once limited and reserved, the author himself seemed to take his humorous writings somewhat lightly: after a time he himself spoke of the humoresque as a “shallow genre,” while allowing his pieces to wander for long years in weekly and daily newspapers. According to his monographer, Zoltán Szeberényi, this is one of the most successful – if not the most successful – areas of Gyula Duba’s literary work, especially considering his “more original” parodies. László Koncsol, a deep connoisseur of the oeuvre, considers the parodist’s career separately divisible: at first the intention to caricature dominated, creating a unique form of condemnatory literary criticism, while gradually he came to treat parody as a kind of intellectual game, a writerly trial of strength. The monographer regards the early period as the more demanding: because widely known works were lacking in Czechoslovak–Hungarian literature, the travesties and caricatures had to be humorous in themselves. Throughout, they fulfilled the role of critique – for literary parody has rightly been called a form of representational criticism – whether it ironises the text or the style, or the author’s hidden or, conversely, very prominent personal traits.
Whether the target is a poet or a prose writer, the parodist’s brilliant command of versification makes one almost expect the “latent poet” to burst forth. And when he caricatures narrative works, he reveals “a deep affection for the raw material.” Altogether, it expresses a respect for their entire literature. He demonstrates this convincingly by continually expanding the circle of those caricatured in the successive, differently titled editions of Káderezés a (zseb) Parnasszuson (lit: Vetting on the (Pocket) Parnassus). After presenting his own generation, he also portrays those who followed them. “Between ‘the foundation-builders’, ‘the eight’, ‘the one-eyed’, ‘the approachers’, and ‘the iródiások’, ‘lone runners’ wedged themselves in. Schematism, new realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism all found voice and form in their works, and thus found a place in my distorted mirror,” he writes by way of characterisation and summary, considering his collection of parodies a kind of “humorous literary history,” which for him is “a heart-warming memory” and “perhaps a lesson for others as well.”
Although the portraits and subchapters of this peculiar literary history were written and expanded continuously throughout his career, their number has naturally decreased over time due to the nature of the topic. The same is true of the humoresques, though for different reasons. The main reason was most likely the unexpectedly positive reception of the first collection of short stories, Csillagtalan égen struccmadár (lit: Ostrich in a Starless Sky, 1963). In his summarising study, László Koncsol was bold enough to declare that with this book the author “secured one of the leading positions in our prose literature”; and according to Lajos Turczel, he had reached genuine modernity, particularly in terms of structural design. Discussing this same book in another analysis, Koncsol titled his essay A kétlelkű emberek írója (The Writer of Double-Souled People), and from then on this remark – applicable alike to character behaviour, social traumas, narrative psychology, and shifting points of view – became one of the most frequently used turns of phrase in the secondary literature. It encompasses the modern solutions of the young prose writer: the reversal of events, the freer “handling” of place and time, the role of foreshadowings and visions, and the rhetorical device of repetition. Above all, it contains what from that point on became the defining, characteristic feature of Gyula Duba’s fiction – from the most ambitious story in Ostrich in a Starless Sky, Az idegen szem (lit: The Foreign Eye), all the way to his most recent novel, Szégyen (lit: Shame, 2010) – both in structural composition and narrative method. He builds an epic work on the dialogue of outer and inner voices and tones, presenting and contrasting different perspectives. This procedure is based on the most frequently cited world-literary model in his oeuvre: alongside the essays and confessions, the novel written in Petersburg by Dostoevsky, The Double, which he often evokes in his novels. What Mikhail Bakhtin says of the Russian classic also applies to Duba’s early short story just as much as to his late novel: the book’s pages are teeming with the protagonist’s dialogues with himself, and the inward-turned, silently speaking figure (or narrator) has a consciousness split into three voices. Although this polyphony becomes dominant only in the later phase of his career, it is worthwhile to take into account the early attempts at its realisation. According to Bakhtin – and following him – the first voice is “the self appearing to itself”, which cannot exist without the other. The second is “the self appearing to the other”, a fictional voice, the self reflected in the other. Finally, the third is “the voice of the alien who does not acknowledge the self”, which, however, is not represented by an actual character outside the hero, since the narrative does not present co-equal protagonists. The first voice, its discourse and canon, will eventually form the basis of the entire work. For the moment, however, at the beginning of the short-story writer’s career, despite the praise of modern solutions – and later too, frequently and with reason – objections and criticisms also arose: for example, that the writer’s, that is, the narrator’s formal reflections, meditations and explanations might harm structural coherence and disturb artistic unity. These were, here and there, accurate observations even regarding stories written three years later: however, after Delfinek (lit: Dolphins, 1966), perhaps encouraged by the reception or driven by the inner compulsion of early stock-taking, his first novel was born. Szabadesés (lit: Free Fall, 1969) was again followed by warm praise, among them one review that called it the pinnacle of his creative activity up to that point.
The novel’s raw life material and the confessional quality of its narrative mode were mentioned as two characteristics that would, with good reason, return in connection with later works of the oeuvre. The reality references – in terms of so-called referentiality, the opposition between the world of the village and that of the city – signify not only the clash of two mentalities and worldviews, but also those family conflicts and personal antagonisms that alienate Morvai, the first-generation intellectual, a peasant boy who exchanged his profession as a mechanical engineer for that of a journalist, even from his own parents in the most literal sense. Moreover, this distancing seems to be mutual, as the title of a short story written around the same time also signals: Elmegy a fiatalúr (lit: The Young Master Leaves). The intimacy, trust, and harmony that once sent the adolescent child on his way have disappeared or are at least in the process of vanishing within the family. Their opposition is essentially political-ideological in origin: the son’s ideas are incompatible with those of his parents regarding his own future, and especially the future of his model-farmer father. According to his system of values – and in this respect nearly all of the author’s later prose heroes with similar motivations, including Nagybene and Gál, the two boys of the trilogies, share his stance – the village is inherently a terrain of backwardness. The fall of the peasant way of life is inevitable, and the socialist reorganisation of agriculture, that is, the introduction of collective farming, is not only necessary but, despite all the abuses of power, also beneficial: the foremost proof and guarantee of progress. Morvai, returning home in Free Fall, perceives that it is “as if from deep within the Middle Ages, from the darkness of catacombs they were looking up at him”: the people at home are “raven-like creatures, dark, black”, and what is more, “they resemble my father”, hard-headed, obstinate, and he cannot understand “why they cannot see that progress is unstoppable”.
At the beginning of Duba’s second trilogy, he chooses as his protagonist the young Gál, who, in Aszály (lit: With Drought, 1989), recounts the process and coercive mechanisms of “re-Slovakization”, and in Álmodtak tengert 1–2. (lit: They Dreamed a Sea, 1993, 1994) sketches the career of a publicist who fails even to grasp “the merciless brutality and arbitrariness of the age’s truths”. In matters of dogma, he is true spiritual kin of Morvai. The first trilogy (Ívnak a csukák (lit: The Pikes Are Spawning, 1977); Örvénylő idő (lit: Time in Whirlpool, 1982); Halódó parasztvilág (lit: A Dying Peasant World, 2001)), although differing little from the later works regarding how the village life-world is judged by its characters, nevertheless diverges in that, instead of tracing a career narrative, it models a family saga and a Bildungsroman. Consistent with this, the fate of the Nagybene family becomes – as suggested by the title of the final volume – a tale of decline. This shift in perspective is justified by the time of the works’ composition and even by the historical frame filled by their plot. In Duba’s earlier trilogy, the story of the Slovak-Hungarian village renamed Füzesnyék (corresponding to Hontfüzesgyarmat [Hontianska Vrbica]) spans more than half a century: from the end of the Second World War to the present, the final part even moving beyond the triumph of the Velvet Revolution and into the early phase of the regime change. This makes it understandable that the Nagybene son, after half a century, demands back his parents’ land confiscated during the era of deportations and resettlements (recalling for the reader a painful episode known from Vajúdó parasztvilág (lit: A Labouring Peasant World)), as though he were revoking the hope and belief in progress that once animated figures who shared Morvai’s worldview.
According to the author’s own testimony, the later trilogy was intended to be the story of the Hungarian intelligentsia in Slovakia, centred on Gál, who leaves his village – here called Atagyarmata – in order to become, in the capital, the organiser of national-minority culture and the spokesperson of his community. Knowing this intention, the conclusion (Téli áradás (lit: Winter Flood, 2002)) can no longer truly be regarded as a continuation, since it omits the previous main character, and its carved-out slice of time extends only from the autumn of 1989 to the summer of the following year, from the revolutionary demonstrations to the first free elections. The essential difference – the one that characterises the entire epic shaping – appears in the narrator’s voice and conception of time. It is ironically witty: on the one hand in the casting of its characters and in the depiction of its situations, flashing the hues of the comic; on the other hand in its imperative admonition that “we must perceive the world in its simultaneity!”, because history, through its irrationalities, repeats itself. The parallel placement of time layers presupposes continuity; therefore the narrative interweaves into the threads of the Velvet struggles, at times the era of Sigismund of Luxembourg, Roman Emperor and King of Hungary (from the vantage point, for example, of the economical running of a brothel), and at times the 17th century, with a cursed Hussite pastor, Nicolaus Drabicius, at its centre, who naturally – and here the Dostoevsky inspiration returns – has his double living in the present. Taken together, the Velvet Revolution of Téli áradás (Winter Flood) could almost find its earlier conceptual counterpart in the quarrels of János Arany’s A nagyidai cigányok (The Gypsies of Nagyida). Duba voices his disappointment in bitter laughter – creating, in conception and execution, perhaps the most unified piece of his entire oeuvre. Sólyomvadászat (lit: Falcon Hunt, 1993), the story of an informer’s unmasking, exhibits similar virtues.
From the perspective of epic elements and procedures, the path from Free Fall to Winter Flood or Shame does not appear straightforward – and the first major detour was perhaps A macska fél az üvegtől (The Cat Is Afraid of the Glass, 1985). And not only because the author placed the setting entirely in the city, but also because – as Árpád Tőzsér analysed in detail – instead of making the longitudinal sweep of the era’s historically lived time the structuring element of the plot, he made it the outer and inner, psychological events of two or three days in the characters’ lives: a cross-section of time. Consequently, the sociological principle cannot operate; instead of the individual’s social environment, it is as if his biological–psychological character were the determining factor. For this reason, Tőzsér speaks outright of “epoch-making” significance. In Slovak-Hungarian literature – he writes – this is the first time that the nationality person’s anxious struggle with language appears with epic credibility and psychological depth, recognising and making the reader recognise that – to quote the novel – “within the system of the foreign language he cannot remain himself”, the foreign language “alienates him from his truth”. Yet for all this – and this is what would make this otherwise faintly received novel “epoch-making” – he himself is primarily responsible: the fault lies in his scepticism, fatalism, and indifference; he himself is the obstacle to his own self-realisation. This differs not only from the conceptions of contemporary authors’ protagonists but also considering the fact – as one or two earlier critics noted, for example regarding Free Fall – that nationality problems, the continuing difficulties of the Hungarian minority even after the years of disenfranchisement, tend to appear only in the background of the plots.
Thus, his novel The Cat Is Afraid of the Glass counts as a departure from the aforementioned path even in terms of its relation to reality; however, from the perspective of narrative mode and story formation, what is more essential is what is more closely connected to the cross-sectional conception of time and the intention of abandoning the sociological principle: namely, the renunciation of the dream of creating the Czechoslovak-Hungarian “great novel” – a dream cherished intensely in The Pikes Are Spawning and Whirling Time and not yet abandoned even after Drought. These were the desires and plans first formulated – almost as requirements, as commands – by Zoltán Fábry, who had long appeared to him as a “spiritual lighthouse”. Gyula Duba considered the chances and possibilities of realising this in several essays. Some of these were included in his first essay collection with the telling title Valóság és életérzés (lit: Reality and Life-Feeling, 1972), which reliably attests that from the beginning he was a committed adherent of “literature of reality”. It was for this reason, based on the early phase of his career, that András Görömbei, the author of the monograph A csehszlovákiai magyar irodalom 1945–1980 (Czechoslovak-Hungarian Literature 1945–1980), found him suitable for the task, offering encouragement: “the Hungarians in Slovakia – bearers of the great problems of the age – are waiting for their epic writer”. And thus he should be – and indeed became – the one.
Although he abandons the maximalist ambition of the realist great novel and its direct relationship to reality, he nevertheless preserves the most evident possibility for bearing witness to the life of a minority community living under specific circumstances: the forms of autobiographical narration. Only rarely – perhaps only in Labouring Peasant World – does this mode of speech appear directly in the first person; the identity of narrator and author enhances the credibility and force of the depictions of both village life and family history. In a similar manner to Gyula Illyés’s autobiographical documentary novel People of the Puszta, or, more recently, to those sociographies written probably in the wake of the unprecedented success of the diary entries of András Sütő (Anyám könnyű álmot ígér [Mother Promises a Light Dream]), as well as to the peasant-historical reckonings that trace the development of the individual alongside that of the community and within the community (Gyula Szabó: Gólya szállt a csűrre [lit: A Stork Landed on the Barn]; Ferenc Fehér: Hazavezérlő csillagok [lit: Stars That Guide Us Home]; Sándor Gál: Mesét mondok, valóságot [lit: I Tell a Tale, I Tell the Truth]).
Direct speech was almost a concomitant of the so-called “simulative mode of representation” – to use technical terminology –, whose aesthetic horizon does not extend beyond the folk-ethnographic world of the given region. Indirect speech, however – see the later novels (Az élet lehajló ága [lit: The Drooping Branch of Life], Valami elmúlt [lit: Something Has Passed], Szégyen [lit: Shame]) – could even become polyphonic, turning into the dialogue of the speaking “I” or of the characters. Meanwhile, the chosen locations and settings remained – to use Lejeune’s term – parts of an “autobiographical space,” just as in the earlier works. By comparing recurring themes, ideas, and motifs, the boundaries of this space can be drawn with considerable accuracy. This remains true whether the traits of the narrator’s career are almost identical with those of the author – only the names differ, as in Free Fall – and also when most fictional characters can be identified with the writer’s contemporaries and colleagues, as Zoltán Szeberényi did in the case of They Dreamed of the Sea 1. For this reason, reviews repeatedly note – the author himself points out their one-sidedness – that Gyula Duba essentially writes only about himself, about what has happened to him. One reader finds “autobiographical elements at every turn,” another claims (speaking of Morvai’s story) that “it is no longer even a novel, so much has every event and detail happened – and happened how many times! – that it becomes a genuine document, a protocol.” A third, his monographer, emphasises what? That it remains entirely valid to say “a writer’s work is in some way always a self-portrait.” A fourth rewrites Babits: “I am the only hero of my stories.” What else could the author do but admit that indeed “I always talk about my own things.” In his most recent volume, Ulysses Ontario tartományban (lit: Ulysses in the Province of Ontario) (2009), containing his confessions, essays, and notes, encouraged by the example of Negyven év (lit: Forty Years) by László Németh, he discusses the history of his oeuvre, the circumstances in which his works were created, and their intended meaning or “message”. In one of the essays that may also be regarded as a workshop diary or reckoning, beyond the intent to guide the reader, he also provides himself with an opportunity for “deeper self-knowledge.”
Self-analysis is also a form of self-strengthening. This was all the more necessary, as increasingly mixed, even distorted voices began to appear in the assessment of his oeuvre. In 2008, when the seven-member board of the Association of Hungarian Writers in Slovakia considered him worthy of the Talamon Alfonz-díj (Alfonz Talamon Prize), one of his younger colleagues protested in an open letter, characterising his work thus: “Though we cannot regard him as a benchmark, as a talented, industrious minor master he has undoubtedly inscribed himself into literary history.” He responded neither to this nor to earlier disparagements. He did not defend himself, but he did not attack either. His reckoning is neither impassioned nor coldly detached. He does not expose his wounds or grievances. His tone is different from that of László Németh. His calmness, his striving for factuality and objectivity, precludes the confrontation of opposing opinions. For example, from the reception history of the first trilogy. On the one hand, there was László Tóth, who interviewed Duba under the title „…az írót mindig a közösség emeli a világ elé" (Lit: ...the writer is always elevated before the world by the community.) At first he merely asked whether the “traditional grand realist epic” was not an anachronism; later he declared outright that The Pike Are Spawning in some way also indicates the failure of the traditional grand realist epic attempted in it. On the other hand, there was something he could have opposed to this view – and what he indeed acknowledges in his essay Vallomás a regényről (lit: Confession on the Novel): Árpád Tőzsér’s poetic letter, written on the occasion of Whirling Time, containing these appreciative lines: “in your book you created for us that medium / in which we may still meet: the myth. / You led us back into that Edenic age / when our experiences still had a common object: / nature, and within it our shared labour. […] / Our language was not the language of pondering but of action, / and we met not in words but in the movements of things.” On the same novel, Gáspár Gróh did not consider the ambition of a “monumental work” either laughable or dismissible, saying that “a national (or minority) community could build on it just as the Greeks of the ancient world built on the Homeric epics that summed up the Trojan cycle” – adding that this work was expected “from László Dobos and/or Gyula Duba.” A few years passed – enough time for the so-called paradigm shift – and at the turning point of 1989, Lajos Grendel, speaking not as a literary historian but as an “active writer,” concluded his lecture Hagyomány és korszerűség a csehszlovákiai magyar prózában (Tradition and Modernity in Hungarian Prose of Czechoslovakia) by stating that “the prose model marked by the names of László Dobos, Gyula Duba and others will not, and cannot, become the canon of our prose.” Plain speaking. Yet with a detour, pointing to the title: “Only a tradition. A compass that future generations of writers may take up whenever they feel that, on the uncharted road they have embarked upon, they have lost their way.” That is, the compass is a warning device, indicating the direction one should not take. This counsel is preceded by the admission – or rather the recognition – that the most significant prose works of their literature nevertheless originate from them. Two years later, in his Rosszkedvem naplója (lit: Diary of My Low Spirits), he became even more conciliatory at the beginning of the year: “the programmatic nature of Hungarian literature in Slovakia,” he wrote, “had a certain legitimacy, for by raising questions of destiny it strengthened the minority’s sense of identity – and it would be foolish to deny how necessary this was.” With the political transition, however, the situation changed – for “it is not the task of literature to raise these questions, but that of public writing and the social sciences.” By mid-year he was more pessimistic: leafing through the books and publications of the Iródia generation, he declared with conviction: “we shall be forced to draw a very thick line between them and the literary ideal to which Fábry, then László Dobos and Gyula Duba’s generation committed themselves.” Soon enough a young line-drawer appeared: István Dusza – incidentally from the same alumni in Košice – who, on the writer’s sixtieth birthday, spoke of An Author’s Fallibility (this was the title of his greeting), summing up his toast thus: “For me, Gyula Duba has always embodied the industrious figure of the ‘novelist’.”
The value perspective and literary conception of Hungarian critical summaries and overviews have also changed. In his 1982 period-monograph, András Görömbei regarded the work of the forty-five-year-old, eleven-volume author as one of the richest and most valuable chapters of Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia. In the same year, the volume A magyar irodalom története 1945–1975 IV. [lit: History of Hungarian Literature 1945–1975 IV.], edited by Miklós Béládi, arrived at a similar assessment: it calls Duba one of the past half-century’s most distinctive and most talented writers, and it considers his selection Angyal vagy madárijesztő? [lit: Angel or Scarecrow?] to be “probably the best collection of short stories published by a Hungarian writer in Slovakia to date”. Not even ten years later, Tibor Elek wrote with a certain regret and surprise: “The dominant direction of Hungarian prose in Czechoslovakia is still marked by the names of László Dobos, Gyula Duba, and Olivér Rácz.” Another ten years on, the author of the study A regionalitás és a posztmodern kánon a XX. századi magyar irodalomban [lit: Regionalism and the Postmodern Canon in Twentieth-Century Hungarian Literature], Péter Szirák, likewise did not write in a laudatory tone when asking whether the identity-forming strategies of the Hungarian elite in Slovakia were still shaped by the socio-cultural context of the same region-encompassing, that is, “globalising” “folk discourse” as before. If so, then their prose must recognise that the communicative capacities of inherited forms – late-romantic representative confessionalism, homogeneous speech situations, and “schematic construction” – have very real limits. He would seem to hold this view also of Duba’s then-unfinished trilogies, without mentioning their titles. What he does name, in another context, is Labouring Peasant World. At least he mentions the author and one of his books. The author pair Tibor Gintli and Gábor Schein, in Az irodalom rövid története [lit: A Short History of Literature] (2007), does not follow his example. Nor does A magyar irodalom történetei [lit: Histories of Hungarian Literature] (2007), edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veres. The name Gyula Duba is not written at all, let alone any analysis of his works.
A year or two later, however, the tide seemed to turn slightly: in the Magyar irodalom [Hungarian Literature] volume of the Academic Handbooks series (2010) – editor-in-chief Tibor Gintli – the chapter on the 1970s and 1980s, dealing with the renewal of the realist prose tradition, mentions Labouring Peasant World. True, only in passing, while discussing Zsolt Csalog’s Parasztregény [Peasant Novel]. What is unexpected and surprising is that literary historian Lajos Grendel re-evaluates the active writer, and in his monograph A modern magyar irodalom története [lit: The History of Modern Hungarian Literature] (2010), praises Labouring Peasant World as well as the two realist novels The Pike Are Spawning and Whirling Time. He values the sociography for continuing the best traditions of the genre, but also as a work whose true “hero” is “time, which moves the facts”, the relentless transformer of the traditional peasant community. What he writes of the two novels amounts to admitting them into the canon: according to the monograph, they can be read as sociography dissolved into fiction, as minority history, but also as “genuine novels”, thanks to their finely individualised protagonists. Nor does he cite as a fault that their plots progress slowly and their drama is restrained, for he regards their author’s greatest literary virtue to lie in the descriptive passages.
For now, this is where the history of reception stands in defining Gyula Duba’s supposed “canonical significance”. And the author himself stands at the point of gathering “into some kind of unity” what he has written, and what he continues to write ceaselessly and fruitfully, with the safety and serene composure of “the identity of the writing desk”.
[2012]