Györgyi Pécsi: Writer Nándor Gion
“Nándor Gion, born in 1941 in Srbobran [Szenttamás], Bačka, Vojvodina, moved to Budapest in 1993 and died in a hospital in Szeged in 2002, is one of the most important prose writers of the final decades of twentieth‑century Hungarian literature,” literary historian Tibor Elek concludes in his monograph on the many‑times‑awarded author, recipient of the Híd Literary Prize [award associated with the Vojvodinian Hungarian journal Híd], the Déry Tibor Prize, the József Attila Prize, the Márai Sándor Prize and the Babérkoszorú Prize [lit. Laurel Prize, a state literary honour in Hungary]. For us, this oeuvre is of particular importance because the most complete literary account of what happened to the Hungarians of the Southland [South Slavic regions formerly within the Kingdom of Hungary] in the dreadful twentieth century – and how it was lived through psychologically – is to be found in Gion’s novels and short stories.
Beginnings
Across communist Central Europe, the harsh dictatorship of the 1950s was followed by a freer decade. The 1960s became a period of energetic literary debuts and florescence in the Hungarian literatures beyond Hungary’s borders. It was then that poets and writers of world‑literary stature either began or came into their own in the surrounding countries: in Czechoslovakia, László Dobos, Gyula Duba and Árpád Tőzsér; in Romania, András Sütő, Sándor Kányádi, Domokos Szilágyi, István Szilágyi and Tibor Bálint; and in Yugoslavia, around the later‑legendary journal Symposion [avant‑garde Hungarian‑language literary journal published in Novi Sad], the so‑called ‘Symposion generation’ emerged – with Ottó Tolnai, István Domonkos, László Végel, István Brasnyó and Nándor Gion. Modernity, a fertile openness to the world and a sensitivity to the avant‑garde characterised minority Hungarian writers of the decade in general; and the symposionists, in particular, were also marked by neo‑avant‑garde commitment and – in contrast to their counterparts in Transylvania and Upper Hungary – a radical anti‑provincialism as well. They rebelled against ‘couleur locale’, against minority self‑definition, and against a conventional realism: they wanted to be cosmopolitans.
At the beginning of his career, Nándor Gion also joined this circle, drawn above all by its modernism and intellectual spaciousness. Although from 1969 he was a member of the editorial staff of Új Symposion, he soon drifted away from the journal, and later described his affiliation with the group as a mistake. “When I wrote my first volume, my first novel, I still tried to be a bit tricksy – but with little success” (Erdélyi–Nobel). His early successes nevertheless came in this milieu: two of his novels won first prize in the novel competition of the Novi Sad Forum Kiadó – Kétéltűek a barlangban (lit. Amphibians in the Cave, 1968) and Testvérem, Joáb (lit. My Brother, Joab, 1969). The former, drawing in part on the author’s own biography, depicts the somewhat over‑told, grotesque and absurd‑leaning rebellion of industrial apprentices. Testvérem, Joáb, by contrast, despite also winning the Forum prize, provoked a lively critical response even before it appeared in book form. Political and ideological readings objected that, by leaning too close to everyday life, it offered an unduly critical portrayal of contemporary Yugoslav society (corruption, moral decay, the moral distortions of the 1960s), and that it took an ‘incorrect’ stance on sensitive foreign‑policy issues (the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia). The reception registered the novel’s searching quality by aligning it as readily with Zsigmond Móricz’s realism as with Faulkner and Hemingway.
Gion, however, recognising his own writerly development, prepared increasingly consciously to write the reality of the place – the moral and ethnic tensions of the present, and the silenced and concealed past.
After the First World War, the multi‑ethnic South Slavic state that came into being did not dissolve ethnic tensions – on the contrary, they periodically radicalised and escalated. The country remained awash with weapons and suppressed passions even after the Second World War; and Marshal Tito, the former partisan leader, built a distinctive ‘third way’ state. To neutralise the nationalism that was latently and continually present – a neuralgic point of the country – he devised the idea of a ‘Yugoslav nation’ and imposed it upon everyday life; alongside a foreign‑policy non‑alignment, he introduced a form of welfare socialism. A perfect schizophrenia: relative prosperity, relative freedom, palpable anxiety; the writer may write about anything, except real tragedies and real tensions – even though Gion’s birthplace, Srbobran [Szenttamás], and its surroundings (Čurug [Csurog], Žabalj [Zsablya], the Šajkaška region [Sajkásvidék]) were among the principal sufferers of the 1944 Serbian reprisals [targeting local Hungarians].
But Gion found the crack through which he could transpose ‘couleur locale’ into something modern and of world‑literary validity, and could tell compelling stories in such a way as to persuade even the uninformed reader that what happens to Hungarians living as a minority hemmed in by the Balkans in the twentieth century matters.
Ezen az oldalon (lit. On This Side or lit. On This Page) (1971)
Published in 1971, the prose volume Ezen az oldalon is already the work of a mature, fully formed writer. Its genre remains disputed in the reception to this day: a novel, a cycle of short stories, a novelistic cycle, a ‘short‑story‑cycle novel’, a ‘legend‑cycle novel’? The six longer pieces, each with its own title, can be read as complete and autonomous stories in themselves, even though characters recur and the setting remains constant. The author himself preferred to call them short stories; indeed, in 1988 he included the pieces from the 1971 volume in full among his selected stories, Jéghegyen, szalmakalapban (lit. On an Iceberg, in a Straw Hat). Yet the individual texts, forming a loose network and entering into a hidden dialogue with one another, acquire an additional meaning, characteristic to novels. “The story itself is embedded in a frame … Even more important than the frame as a cohesive structural element, however, is the narrative procedure whereby situations depicted in one chapter are illuminated by a later one, and a character’s hinted‑at fate is told in an episode found in another chapter, often by way of the ‘old touching story’. Moving backwards in the time of the novel, and forwards in the time of reading, the picture clarifies and the depicted world becomes ever more layered. In this way the structure sustains tension throughout, and can be likened to the representational technique of crime fiction” (Éva Toldi). The book’s single location is the strangely atmospheric Keglovics Street, where odd, eccentric people – fallen out of time – vegetate near cemeteries, living lives that are half‑marvellous and half‑pitiful. There is Romoda, the carpenter, who causes the death of his fragile wife by moving her into the still‑damp house he built with devoted labour; Szent János [lit. Saint John], who fails to notice that his beautiful daughter becomes a prostitute before his very eyes; Sebestyén, intellectually disabled yet capable of tears; and Madzsgáj, a former partisan who once had better days but has been reduced to poverty. They are ordinary people who seem hardly able to distinguish between desires, dreams and realities. They long for old, fine stories, and are certain only that, according to their desires and ideals, they must leave – yet, according to reality, there is nowhere to go. Gion portrayed his birthplace, the multi‑ethnic Srbobran, as a futureless, dead‑end life: – which is not only the setting of this volume, but, going forward, the setting of almost all his writing.
Latroknak is játszott (lit. Playing for Rogues Too) (1973–2002)
The writer’s true breakthrough came with the publication of Virágos katona (lit. The Soldier with the Flower, 1973), followed in 1980 by Rózsaméz (lit. Rose Honey). The two closely linked novels trace the life of Srbobran from the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War, up to the entry of the Hungarian army. Gion’s intention was to write the Bačka existence of the previous century woven around his grandfather’s life; yet for political and psychological reasons the tetralogy took an exceptionally long time to complete, stretching across almost three decades. The third part, Ez a nap a miénk (lit. This Day Is Ours), was published in 1997, and Aranyat talált (lit. Found Gold) in 2002. The first two novels were written in Yugoslavia; the writing and publication of the latter two became possible only after the author was forced to move to Hungary.
The plot of Gion’s novel sequence begins in 1898 and ends in the 1950s. It is a family novel, a village novel, a minority novel, an (anti‑)hero novel. Its setting is Srbobran, a real village in the multi‑ethnic Bačka region – the author’s birthplace – inhabited by Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, Jews and Roma people. At the outset of the tetralogy the area has belonged to historical Hungary for ‘a thousand years’; at that time it forms part of the Austro‑Hungarian Monarchy. Yet with the Treaty of Trianon after World War I, the region is annexed to the Yugoslav kingdom. During the Second World War, in 1941, the Hungarian army enters – in the language of the time, ‘the Southland returns’ – and at the end of the war Serbian partisans occupy the area, with the village becoming part of socialist‑communist Yugoslavia. (The novel does not go on to depict the civil wars of the 1990s that followed the re‑emergence of suppressed national tensions.) A region that had been more or less undisturbed for a millennium undergoes five changes of sovereignty in a single century – four of which appears in the novel sequence – while the residents of Srbobran scarcely leave their village. In the southern territories the Holocaust annihilates the Jewish population; expulsions eliminate the Lutheran German community; and the acts of intimidation known as the ‘Cold Days’ decimate the Hungarians. Together, the four novels – culminating with Aranyat talált – present fifty years in which the Hungarians of the Southland find their fate ‘reversed’ again and again: sovereignties roar overhead, and with each change something is leached out, some element of the centuries‑old multicultural soil dies away.
In his tetralogy, Nándor Gion recounts – through creating exceptionally memorable figures of twentieth-century Hungarian literature – the incomparable life he saw and lived in his birthplace. Srbobran is populated by characters previously unknown in Hungarian prose, above all the eccentric, oddball protagonists of the novels: István Rojtos Gallai, a dreamy man with the soul of a poet; Ádám Török, a noble–peasant–outlaw–bandit; Gilike, a simple‑minded swineherd boy who takes centre stage only in the first novel; and Rézi, a born matriarch. Like the four elements of creation, the four of them embody a strange wholeness of the world in Virágos katona (lit. The Soldier with the Flower). The tetralogy’s twin protagonists – in a sense, each other’s negatives – Rojtos Gallai and Ádám Török, are true outsiders. They find everyday life intolerable; neither wishes to blend into village society; neither enjoys work; and neither is entirely ‘pure’. In adolescence the signs of banditry already appear in Ádám Török, while Rojtos Gallai’s drifting, dreamy disposition draws him into minor petty schemes, and he repeatedly strikes compromises of his own, ‘playing for rogues too’, and so on. And yet, despite their ethically questionable behaviour, they retain our sympathy. Rojtos Gallai not only conjures festivity into a sullen world with his zither‑playing and his tales; when need arises, he also stands his ground with genuine humanity. Ádám Török is, of course, a hardened robber, highwayman and killer – but at certain moments in life he is guided by a kind of ancient, visceral ethic (he hides the Jewish boy Lusztig), and at the instant of his death he is, for a brief moment, genuinely transfigured.
In the world created by the novels, the Christian ethical and metaphysical legacy seems almost indifferent, even as the author pointedly gestures towards some kind of Christological legibility. He titled his trilogy Latroknak is játszott (lit. Playing for Rogues Too), and named the first book of the sequence after the Roman soldier who smiles as he scourges Christ. By the values of two thousand years, truth always finds its own cross‑bearer, and the one who takes on sacrifice receives grace. Gion, however, says in Virágos katona that “one must leave the place where ugly things happen”. Those who live in peace and in the majority find this life‑truth – suspiciously close to accommodation – difficult to understand. “The young zither‑player … survived the First World War, survived the minority years between the two world wars, survived the Second World War … the post‑war anti‑Hungarian atrocities … because he played for rogues too, and remained alive, and saved other lives as well. Still others, who could not do this, died – often a dreadful death … in the best case they became destitute wanderers. They too must be written about – perhaps above all – yet the protagonist is the one who stayed alive … and died a natural death,” the author said in a late interview. In the world of the novel, only a truncated heritage, mere rubble of the Christian European value‑system lives on: in place of the idea of redemption (the fullness of life), the survival imperative of a fallible person, often forced into roguery.
Considering postmodern experiences about novels, this tetralogy can be regarded as a rather traditional novel sequence. What makes Gion’s novels compelling is not a complex conception of time, intricate construction or a refined play with narrator positions, but the author’s immense delight in storytelling, his unparalleled gift for creating characters, and his utterly distinctive language and style.
Critics, with some reservations, have compared Gion’s novel‑poetics to García Márquez-style magical realism, his genial anecdotalism to that of novelist Kálmán Mikszáth, and the atmosphere and melancholy of his novels to Chekhov’s. They emphasise that the created world of his fiction is built upon reality, yet rises above it; indeed, the harsher the world, the more it rises above it – while never severing itself from realism and lifelikeness. The writer himself called his method ‘enriched realism’; in the closing volume Rojtos Gallai sums it up like this: “From me you will always hear reality … You know, Hungarian folk songs sometimes contain exaggerations, but even those grew out of reality.” In his novels the author reasserts the right to tell stories – and, specifically, the right to a mode of storytelling that recalls spoken narration. Even in his longer descriptive passages, Gion clings to a clear, easily intelligible, followable diction close to living speech; his style is by no means simple, it merely seems simple – as with true storytellers. His prose gains extraordinary power from its special, world‑creating style: in Gion’s novels people speak as if it were perpetually Sunday – lifelike, yet ceremonial. Even the chillingly tragic moments of Ez a nap a miénk (lit. This Day Is Ours), which evokes the ‘Cold Days’ of the Southland, are characterised by this elevation and ritual quality – the reader has reason to suspect ‘exaggeration’, sensing that Rojtos Gallai, and even Ádám Török, could hardly have spoken that way then and there. In connection with the novel, literary critic Mátyás Domokos speaks of ‘bloody realism’, while literary historian Béla Márkus reproaches the story for beautifying events, as if Gion cared more for his own style than for historical exactitude. Indeed, if we look at the raw reality‑depiction of the novels, we find it mercilessly cruel, unrelenting and bitterly hopeless. The tetralogy begins with Stefan Krebs witnessing a brutal tavern brawl; then he witnesses several more, and gradually grows accustomed to the fact that in Srbobran quarrelsome men can leap at one another to the death at any moment, that knives are easily drawn, and that even in peacetime people are beaten to death in no time at all. Systematic brutality on the one hand – and, on the other, a strange indifference: the village treats everyday violence as a natural, inherited right. We sense that the consuming fire of Greek tragedy could flare up at any moment: that powder‑keg, even when still, determines the sense of fate. The people of Srbobran are unhappy and ill‑humoured, Rojtos Gallai says on numerous occasions, still in peacetime; they are unkempt, dirty and foul‑mouthed – and from his historical experience he knows that “all sorts of things happen to careless, dirtied people”. In this ill‑humoured, unhappy corner of the world, Rojtos Gallai – and, of course, the author, Nándor Gion – follows the soldier with the flower: with dreaming, with beautiful speech, with intoxicating tales, with zither‑playing. Gion’s distinctive profane‑sacral, liturgical and finely ironic – even self‑ironic – style, marked by ceremoniousness and an intricate use of symbols, becomes valid in every situation and governs the novel‑world.
Short Stories from Novi Sad and Budapest
The stories written in Yugoslavia – those of the 1971 volume Ezen az oldalon (lit. On This Side or lit. On This Page), the 1974 Olyan, mintha nyár volna (lit. As If It Were Summer), and the 1985 Angyali vigasság (lit. Angelic Revelry) – together with the pieces from the book Mint a felszabadítók (lit. Like the Liberators) (1996), composed already in Hungary, and the later stories on Yugoslav/Vojvodinian themes, merge almost imperceptibly in the selected collection Jéghegyen, szalmakalapban (lit. On an Iceberg, in a Straw Hat). It is as if, with sociographic fidelity yet a kind of fairy‑tale realism, Gion were writing a single great epic story about the same half‑dreamlike, hopeless, absently dreaming and ever more menacingly endangered world.
Gion writes cycles – or cycle‑like texts: segments that can be read and interpreted separately or together. His short stories and framed narratives are, rather, text‑variations: repeated retellings of the great tale, the single story – the story of disintegration, and the pain of disintegration. His protagonists are often daft eccentrics, solitary oddballs, or else perfectly ordinary little people; they typically live in a doubled world, at once in dreams and stories and in reality. The boundary between the two is loose and easily traversed. Yet it is traversable only towards dreams and stories, because this ‘Yugo’ Hungarian fate has no perspective, no future – only a life that closes in upon itself. Suppressed tragedies, fears, real anxieties, hopelessness and dead‑end life: they yearn for metaphysical wholeness, yet reach only the point of folly. The stories spread out across time – and time does not move forward, from past to future, but, in a Borgesian manner, circles. Only here, circular time is not a game but a sombre fate: time turns in on itself, and the possibility of the future is sealed off. Has time come unstuck? More precisely: time is stopped, precisely by the act of speaking – and this speaking forms a glass bell‑jar against raw reality.
In Gion’s short stories, scarcely anything happens other than the telling of old, fine, interesting stories. That is true both of the gently ironic protagonists and of the slightly unreal, fiction‑writer figure shaped with a lyricism tending towards the grotesque. The Gion stories do not confess and ‘speak out’ with painful sincerity (although they always hint at heavy pains and tragedies); rather, they bring bad and good onto a shared emotional denominator. Tragedy becomes less tragic, pain’s edge is blunted, and happiness acquires a slight ironic shade; the great emotional swings are calmed.
That the author wishes not merely to make his writing readable – although his evident aim is to offer literature that is more readable, more consumable, rather than esoteric – suggests that the ceaseless narration has a purpose. Storytelling covers and conceals something the characters themselves do not wish to know, or do not wish to know as their life: they want it more beautiful, far more beautiful – as Romodán says outright: “Nothing was the way they tell it. It was different. It was more beautiful than the way they tell it.” For beautiful speech is, at the same time, silence – about heavy tragedies. This covering and concealing is already present in the early stories set in the world of the ‘Yugo’ myth, only more covertly. We learn only in passing why old Madzsgáj hates dogs so much – Madzsgáj, who, after the war, threw the partisans out. There is no explicit pointer that B., the expelled partisan, is identical with Berger who, much later, and for an altogether different reason – an absurd idea, the wonder‑machine’s failure – might perhaps have had to be hanged; yet because things and persons are too interlinked, the reader suspects: what kinds of subconscious planes, suppressed historical, social and psychological dramas are converging here? By what system of signs are hatred, revenge, forgiveness and atonement to be read? Because of his wandering daughter, in grief Szent János [lit. Saint John] hangs a stray cat – in place of his daughter, or does he hang his daughter in the image of a cat? In Mint a felszabadítók (lit. Like the Liberators), the smashing of the most beautifully made furniture is a revenge familiar from terrible experience: after the war, partisans destroyed everything with a deliberate, obstinate vengeance. “I have accepted that in the Balkans revenge is a normal and natural act, and so I still do not forgive my enemies and those who wish me ill,” Gion wrote in his Curriculum vitae – with an ironical double meaning.
Beautiful speech, the fine story, is a sacred act: it lifts one out of the everyday and makes one believe that this fallible, mortal Bačka man is the residue of a better, more beautiful age, cast into the present. For on the one hand the narrators yearn for an epic world, and on the other they live a provincial, insular, horizonless fate – and nothing is more absent from this neatly rounded world than mighty heroes fighting heroically for mighty ends. It is as if, after a collapsed epic‑mythic world, in a Beckettian space, Chekhov’s characters were wandering across pre‑warmed and cooled‑down battlefields. Only memory and beautiful speech connect them to that world‑time which is now irreversibly past – and which they can increasingly remember only in fragments.
Srbobran was Nándor Gion’s point of origin; after his resettlement he remained – in the terms of his memory – a man of Srbobran. He watched those at home, and from here too he watched those at home: however much he had ‘come home’, Budapest, Hungary, still meant a change of country. Yet the late Budapest stories show that, here too, in Kőbánya, he found the characters and stories through which he could articulate, in valid narratives, the fundamental questions of our time. Pitifully déclassé former ’56ers [participants or sympathisers in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution], prostitutes, smugglers, opportunists, fortune‑hunters, perpetual suckers, and former Yugoslav wanderers are the protagonists of the volume Mit jelent a tök alsó (lit. What Does the Pumpkin Under‑Knave Mean? [tök alsó: a playing‑card rank in the traditional Hungarian deck]) (2004). They are people who have fled, drifted, scattered – the dispossessed who want only to live, to survive, somehow, anyhow, but to persist. And to see that mass migration and mass déclasséisation are not merely a Vojvodinian, and not only a global, but also a Hungarian phenomenon: for that, Nándor Gion had a particular sensitivity.
Novels for Young Readers
The most important publisher of Vojvodinian Hungarian literature, the Novi Sad Forum, announced a novel competition in 1969 to enrich literature for young people. The first prize was won by Nándor Gion’s Engem nem úgy hívnak (lit. That’s Not What They Call Me). Alongside his sombre, weighty ‘adult’ writing, the author devoted several books specifically to younger readers: in addition to this prize‑winning work, Postarablók (lit. Post Office Robbers) (1972), A kárókatonák még nem jöttek vissza (lit. The Cormorants Have Not Yet Returned) (1977) and Sortűz egy fekete bivalyért (lit. Gun Salute for a Black Buffalo) (1982). Reception sometimes also groups the story collection Az angyali vigasság (lit. Angelic Revelry) (1985) among them, although Gion included several of its pieces in the selected volume Jéghegyen, szalmakalapban (lit. On an Iceberg, in a Straw Hat). The author himself also intended Zongora a fehér kastélyból (lit. Piano from the White Castle) (1996) as a youth novel – though it can be called or recommended as such only with some reservations. That the youth works form an integral part of his oeuvre is signalled not only by the classification dilemmas, but also by the fact that, even while observing the classic rules of youth fiction, Gion could not – and would not – renounce telling the truth of real life; as a result, the tone of these twist‑filled, adventurous stories is also noticeably darker.
Engem nem úgy hívnak (lit. That’s Not What They Call Me) tells the story of adolescent love and of becoming an adult. Three apprentice car mechanics try to find their place in the adults’ world of toil. For one of them, unexpectedly, an opportunity arises for the adventurous escape he has long fantasised about – yet the girl is dragged back into raw reality by her tyrannical father. Postarablók (lit. Post Office Robbers) can most readily be read as a classic children’s crime story: one night two cocky boys attempt to rob the post office, but professional criminals are also preparing to do the same; in the end, after much excitement and adventure (telephone tapping, arson, toppling a bear‑statue), the boys become the saviours of the town and the post office.
His finest – and by now classic – youth novel is A kárókatonák még nem jöttek vissza (lit. The Cormorants Have Not Yet Returned). Two childhood friends, as adults, look back on their former experiences. A group of boys meets regularly outside the village at the disused slaughterhouse; they gang about carefree, scribble on walls, chase horses, and from time to time visit Gergián, the gamekeeper. But a new companion, J. Burai, disrupts their carefree attitudes, turns their attention towards beauty, and they help Gergián build a lookout tower so that he can protect the cormorants – and so that they themselves may come closer to the sky. The story, however, ends tragically: as he tries to rescue the cormorants, Gergián is shot by an enemy. The novel is far more than an adventurous children’s tale: densely interwoven with layered symbols, it proclaims the moving vulnerability – and moral victory – of humane conduct, human dignity and beauty. Even darker, more tragic is the ending of Sortűz egy fekete bivalyért (lit. Gun Salute for a Black Buffalo), which reads almost as a continuation of A kárókatonák…. The same characters continue their carefree life as schoolchildren under the leadership of J. Burai. We meet the village’s novel‑worthy array of the downtrodden: the melancholy teacher Fodó; the soured spinster teacher Novák; a fisherman hunting muskrats; Bandi Rozmaring, a brandy‑distiller; the jovial parish priest; and above all the buffalo‑keeper who has lost his little daughters – whom they ‘treat’ with the brandy of a count stripped of everything. They hold a great celebration for the buffalo‑keeper, already close to madness in his pain; but here too the celebration, and the carefree life of childhood, is halted by a violent death, and they can do nothing but – having done the work of mourning – fire a gun salute for the buffalo and for the innocent Lajos Ács.
His last novella intended for young readers, Zongora a fehér kastélyból (lit. Piano from the White Castle), was published only in the collected edition. The novel processes extremely grave historical events with such pitiless bitterness that, although children are again the protagonists, the author could not shape it into an adventurous ‘youth’ book. Burai J. and Szivel Sanyi, now adults and already known from the previous novels, come to believe – while looking at wartime photographs – that they recognise the Torontál sisters, once aristocratic young women with whom they had been in love. The sisters move to the village at the end of the Second World War; yet the defenceless women are raped and forced into prostitution by Serbian partisans, then subjected to the same by soldiers of the ‘liberating’ Soviet army, and after the war by police officers who, promoted from partisans, have become leather‑coat interior‑ministry men [a stereotyped figure of communist‑era state security]. The sisters’ story ends in complete consolationlessness: they flee on; the adventurous, love‑struck boys are powerless; but the law of life is strong as well – the boys forget the sisters and return to village sweethearts more suited to them.
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Nándor Gion’s collected works were published between 2007 and 2010 in five volumes by the Budapest Noran Kiadó. His oeuvre has been studied in literary‑historical monographs by László Gerold (Gion Nándor, Kalligram, 2009) and by Tibor Elek (Gion Nándor írói világa – The Writerly World of Nándor Gion, Noran, 2009). Study volumes with monographic ambition include Hargita Horváth Futó’s Lokális kontextus, elbeszélői szerepkörök és a szövegek átjárhatósága Gion Nándor opusában (lit. Local Context, Narrative Roles and the Permeability of Texts in Nándor Gion’s Oeuvre; Faculty of Humanities, Novi Sad, 2012); Károly Árpás’s Az építő–teremtő ember (lit. The Builder–Creator, Bába Kiadó, Szeged, 2008); and Ádám Kurcz’s, Gion Nándor műhelyei és műhelytitkai (lit. Nándor Gion’s Workshops and Workshop Secrets, Napkút Kiadó, 2017.
In 2010 his homeland inaugurated the Gion Nándor Memorial House in the writer’s birthplace, Srbobran (Szenttamás) (today Serbia). The building that houses the institution is the Gion family home: number 30 on what is now Popovača venac Street, which at the time of the writer’s birth was called Sutjeska Street.
[2017]