Tibor Gyurkovics saw his first poem appear in print in 1957, while the final quatrain he wrote bears the date 29 June 2008. Between these two moments unfolded the multifaceted and richly coloured oeuvre of one of the most distinctive – and at the same time most solitary – creators of Hungarian literature.
“Gyurkovics is undoubtedly one of the rare ‘pentathletes’ of contemporary Hungarian letters (he cultivates at least five genres at a European standard!), and the elements of these genres mutually reinforce one another in close unity. The poet, novelist, short-story writer and author of children’s tales live and create at arm’s length from the dramatist – and this is to say nothing of that exceptionally witty and perceptive publicist whose voice, in today’s intellectually fractious and disjointed world, speaks with uncommon validity to Hungarian readers about the past, about homeland, about culture and about universal humaneness,” writes Elemér Szeghalmi in his study, summing up this wide-ranging, varied career [1].
Imre D. Nagy, a distinguished interpreter of the oeuvre, characterises Tibor Gyurkovics thus: “Whether he practises the writing of novels, creates ever more delightful tales for children, or sees one successful play after another staged – in short, whatever he does, he cannot deny the lyrical blood in his veins [2].”
As for the sources of his solitude, these lie not only in the singularity of his personality – he was, in his ‘civilian’ occupation, a trained psychologist – but also in the peculiar divisions of Hungarian social and cultural life. Gyurkovics reflected on this when he remarked: “I was persecuted for having been a Piarist pupil, for being my father’s son, for being a Catholic, for being a psychologist, and on top of that I was branded an existentialist. Deep in my soul, I am an anarchist and an anti-bourgeois. I dislike the bourgeoisie just as I dislike priests. For the populist (népies) writers, I was not ‘populist’ enough; for the cosmopolitan (urbánus) writers, I was not sufficiently good a bourgeois. I am a solitary rebel. I cannot be categorised, for I belong nowhere. At the outset, I was excluded in every possible way.”
Although he enjoyed considerable popularity among readers, his official reception was, for a long time, characterised by silence, owing to his worldview. To the question “Who is Jesus to me?”, posed by the journal Vigilia [Catholic intellectual periodical], he replied:
“The very essence of Christianity is its personal character. Christianity is not a worldview, not a high school of thought, nor a decipherable philosophical system or moral code. Oh no. Jesus. The relationship. The companion. // The division within humanity is the heaviest burden. The mingled stain of our fall and our rising. The mixture of our wickedness and purity. Like some bad liqueur. Jesus chooses us – out of ourselves. He is only purity, only elevation – what a one-sidedness, what a lack! Into this lack we may cling… The relationship with Christ Jesus is a lover’s relationship. It is no accident that He is called ‘heavenly bridegroom’, ‘divine fiancé’, ‘my beloved Jesus’. It is not a friendly, companionable relationship – it is one of self-surrender. More-than-human love [3].”
Before 1990, the official ideology found such views unacceptable; afterwards, although external political conditions had changed, the prevailing intellectual climate remained resistant to a Christian outlook. Summarising his artistic vision with comprehensive force, Gyurkovics formulated it in philosophical terms in his poem Örök (lit. Eternal): “A semmi is lehet minden, / a minden is lehet semmi, / ahogy az első percben, / csak úgy szabad szeretni.” (lit. “Nothingness may be everything, / everything may be nothing, / as in the very first moment – / only thus is it permitted to love.”)
He sought to grasp the fullness of existence and to cast it into artistic form. With the three words of the poem – nothing, everything, and love – he delineated the space of the human (or, rather, the human–divine triangle) within which he could conceive of existence with all its pain, beauty, and the noble human endeavour – commensurate with the magnitude of the stakes – to ‘resolve’ it through imaginative participation.
“I became a poet and a writer because I proved inadequate as a human being [4].”
This aphorism – a bon mot worthy of Gyurkovics himself – with its characteristic self-ironic inflexion, signals the poet’s Sisyphean effort to express experience, indeed, to express totality. He consistently believed that life in its flesh-and-blood reality and the act of creation together give rise to the work of art. In a conversation with György Szemadám [5], referring to the poetic technique of Gyula Illyés, he put it thus: “I believe in something different. Namely, that pressures arise, internal – almost incomprehensible – tensions within the creator, which are conveyed by the German word that has since been refuted: it calls the poem Dichtung, because dichten means ‘to condense’, so that that state akin to an atomic explosion may come about.” As he writes in his poem Látnok (lit. The Seer): “Így élek tíz-húsz éve már / hogy látom, amit nem lehetne / darabosan szemembe áll / a dolgok fényes, égi rendje, / mint fekete s arany tövis, / mely a csontok közé fúródott, / benyomva tarkómig, tövig / szememben állnak a dolgok.” (lit. “For ten or twenty years I have lived thus: / I see what should not be seen; / splintered, the bright celestial order of things / drives itself into my eyes, / like a black and golden thorn / piercing the bone, / pushed in to the nape, to the root – / the things of the world stand lodged in my eyes.”)
Gyurkovics’s art is often placed in parallel with that of Dezső Kosztolányi, Gyula Krúdy, and others; yet it is the confession of Mihály Babits that seems called for here: “I inscribed the hymn of ‘never-being-satisfied’ on the first page of my first book.” Gyurkovics, too, was driven by the compulsive urge of this never-being-satisfied, propelling him through a metaphysically expanding triangular space of being, taking upon himself – though never imitating – the lyric traditions of François Villon, Attila József, Endre Ady, and István Sinka. “I have learnt the most from them [6].”
Poetry
Gyurkovics’s earliest poems appeared in daily and weekly newspapers – for instance, in Élet és Irodalom [Life and Literature, launched in 1957]. They drew immediate attention through their novel tone and unusual vocabulary. Not by chance, Gyurkovics turned to Sándor Weöres with his early writings – with good reason, for the rhythm, melody, and playfulness of his poems, as well as their fundamental mode of seeing, show clear affinities with Weöres’s work, and the latter encouraged the young poet. This was all the more significant because, in the years following 1956, any deviation in thought or artistic expression was swiftly ‘brought to heel’ by the authorities. So much so that Gyurkovics’s splendid, uninhibited love poem (Feleségemnek [lit. To My Wife] was mocked by Ludas Matyi, a satirical weekly. As Imre D. Nagy remarks: “More than a few critics misunderstood Gyurkovics’s poetry at the outset. The voice he introduced with Grafit (lit. Graphite) and later with Kenyértörés (lit. Split) was not the customary one. The intellectual orientation he represented could not be fitted into any one pigeonhole [7].”
There were, however, more perceptive critics. Writing in Vigilia, György Rónay observed of the first volume, published in 1961: “One can hardly expect fully mature poetry from a first book, and Grafit [lit. Graphite], Tibor Gyurkovics’s debut collection, is indeed a first book. Yet it is no everyday occurrence for a first volume to possess so distinctly its own colour and tone. Gyurkovics knows how – and dares – to see with his own eyes, in a peculiar, slightly oblique refraction, with a tiny grotesque distortion in which the playful exaggeration often masks nothing more than a ‘small mathematical’ sadness (Táj, nővel [lit. Landscape with a Woman]). This distortion is unintentional, and for that very reason feels authentic [8].”
Of Landscape with a Woman, the poet himself writes: “The essence of love is that through it, in it, with it, I learn something I could not otherwise know. The world cannot be known; it cannot be understood. Two things may replace, or compensate for, this: love and art [9].” Here, he touches upon a central idea that spans the entire oeuvre: faced with a world that cannot be known or understood, the viable attitude and source of life are art and love. Love, in his conception, means far more than the mutual attraction or physical relationship between a man and a woman; it manifests the expanded, indeed totalised notion of love, the most active of all human actions and dispositions. It requires the full commitment of the personality – the mobilisation of the human being in all cognitive, emotional and volitional dimensions. From woman – from love – Gyurkovics hopes for redemption: a gesture which he knows to be impossible, and yet… For no human can redeem another in the Christological sense to which Gyurkovics is deeply attached. Consequently, his lovers – and he himself – eventually collapse, emptied, only to reach again for a new hope of love-redemption. Something similar he expects from art: through art, the human being becomes a co-creator standing beside the divine.
According to Elemér Szeghalmi, love for the poet is a dual experience: “a primal element and a natural catastrophe, an indispensable inner value and a force pulling one downward at the same time – but in every case the supreme instrument of defence against human loneliness [10].” In this, he identifies the continual interplay of good and evil, sin and atonement in Gyurkovics’s art. It is not accidental that commentators often speak of his ‘Dostoevskian’ temperament when discussing his novels.
After Graphite and Split (1963), the volume Emberfia (1966) (lit. Son of Man) – the biblical resonance is difficult to miss in the last two of them – already conveys, in a more focused tone and with a touch of the prophetic, what Imre D. Nagy describes as Gyurkovics’s increasingly expansive worldview and growing depth. Even the previously dismissive critics now had to acknowledge his exceptional talent: “Tibor Gyurkovics’s lyrical disposition and the experiential world deriving from his profession provide him with a fine opportunity to occupy a unique place within contemporary Hungarian poetry. Yet is the faint pastel-toned family lyricism, the causeless or only very abstractly motivated self-torment we see in this volume sufficient? And finally, is the formal preparation and poetic discipline, which render this rather anaemic poetic world, sufficient? We cannot imagine genuine progress under the aegis of the view the poet himself expresses thus: ‘…it is impossible to understand the world; one can only feel it.’ [11]”
György Rónay, recognising the significance of the volume, offered the following appraisal: “Tibor Gyurkovics’s third book, I believe, will surprise those familiar with the first two. It is as though only now had he arrived at himself, by posing the question: how is it possible to live at all? This, in essence, is what the collection addresses. What the final three stanzas of the poem Péntek (lit. Friday) express so compellingly: that one cannot live without love; that love is sacrifice; but that it is not only necessary to love, one must also endure being loved; that a person clings to himself, to his limits, and yet ‘love has no limit’ – this is, roughly, its theme. The introductory Ajánlás (lit. Dedication) to the cycle Gyógyulóban (lit. In Recovery) states: ‘only another person can heal us. One cannot live alone… Alas, literature, printer’s ink, sheaves of paper, pencils. There are only human relationships. Beneath the letters are human faces we once loved so dearly. Poems are the rubble of love.’ … He who accepts such a fate (as in the poem Sors – Fate) ultimately finds the meaning of his destiny, both poetic and human. He also finds that voice which, beyond ‘literature’, becomes ‘poetic’ in a deeper, truer stratum of humanity, with the authenticity of an experience wrestled with personally; the voice that ‘will spring forth simply’, for ‘love – having no rule, but like the rose – opens at last…’ And then the artistic cultivation, increasingly assured and refined in Tibor Gyurkovics’s new volume, gains its true meaning and validity [12].”
Gyurkovics first placed prose passages – prose poems – before individual poems in the volume Emberfia (lir. Son of Man); later, he retained this method of enriching emotional and intellectual resonance throughout his career.
His consecutively appearing poetry books – Vaskakas (1970) (lit. Iron Rooster), Szeretlek, akárki vagy (1975) (lit. I Love You, Whoever You Are), Leveleskönyv (1978) (lit. Book of Letters), Boszorkányok pedig vannak (1983) (lit. But Witches Do Exist) – “steadily continue to build the walls of this clearly contoured poetic world; the swirling, colourful clouds of emotion become just as integral as the philosophical reflection that probes the fundamental questions of existence – as do those utterances which at times appear blasphemous, alongside the spiritual nourishment whose fabric is unmistakably Christian [13].” Based on the 1978 selection Istenigazából (lit. In God’s Truth), published by Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, Zsolt Kőháti comments on nearly two decades of poetic development: “Quite early, he sensed those forms and contents which now designate his place in the upper regions of the middle field (to use a generational classification). He fought his way forward in solitude, and suddenly he found that fashions were affirming him; his essentially tradition-preserving disposition, his modest – and only in certain moments genuinely novel, yet proportionally highly felicitous – innovations have matured into the work of a good (contemporary) poet [14].”
In Gyurkovics’s case, it seems that formal elements are often decisive: rhyme, rhythm, song-likeness, and a particular image summon the thought. Critics took note of the fact that “the concept of God and the legendary stock of religious terminology are constantly present, working within the formation of the poem” (Zsolt Kőháti).
Balázs Lengyel aptly remarked that Gyurkovics is a “landed proprietor of desire”. Like an ever-active volcano, he pours forth new and deeper layers of himself. Imre D. Nagy extends Lengyel’s thought: this proprietorship of desire increasingly becomes the expression of a myth of suffering. This remains true even though, in later volumes, the thematic range widens to include partly historical material and partly recollections reaching back into childhood.
“Poems are the debris of love”, says Gyurkovics – pointing to the ‘non-totality’ of earthly love, to the lack for whose resolution he hopes in every relationship. Perhaps he does so also in the hope of obtaining redemption from death. The idea of death appears already in his earliest poems and returns continually, in increasingly vivid tones: at times the poet fears it, at other times awaits it; sometimes he approaches it as a secret enchanter, then again flings himself towards it with coquettish bravado. A general feature of Gyurkovics’s lyricism is that, when one expects an image or scene to unfold according to our socialised panels and cultural conventions, he abruptly tightens – or throws open – the curtain with an unexpected epithet, simile, or metaphor, granting the entire poem a new, striking, and thought-provoking refraction.
On the formal and technical aspects of his poetry, Zsolt Kőháti – referring to the previously mentioned poetic forerunners whom Gyurkovics himself acknowledged – writes that their influence is detectable “not in the spirit of imitation, dependency or mimicry, but rather in a striving towards a complete linguistic–stylistic ideal. This is a more agitated, looser poetry than what the norms operative in most of the poets mentioned before would imply, yet formally it is far more disciplined than the average lyricism of the newer generations [15].”
He employs both free verse and more tightly structured rhymed forms; the song-like quality of his work results in pronounced musicality, further enriched by the colour sensitivity of a creator attuned to the visual arts. From the outset, he frequently wrote poems inspired by paintings. Several volumes consist exclusively of such works: Fény-képek (lit. Light-Pictures), Túlvilági extázis (lit. Otherworldly Ecstasy), and Landscape with a Woman).
The collected poems published under the title Halló, Krisztus (lit. Hello, Christ) by Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó in 1991 offered an occasion for a fresh summation in the altered political and social circumstances. Yet, as emerges from the critique by Lajos Mohai V., despite many sound observations, the worldview that fundamentally shapes Gyurkovics’s poetry – together with his poetic mode, oscillating between inner spiritual self-examination and moral exactitude, between embrace and rejection, love and hatred – still did not fit into the spirit of the age, even the supposedly transformed one: “I recall Balázs Lengyel’s remark that Gyurkovics has ‘one piece of good fortune, namely that he is tenaciously, obstinately talented, and time, the great gold-washer, will in due course sift out the noble metal from his poetic oeuvre as well’… Tibor Gyurkovics’s poetry impresses above all through the unbleached immediacy of experiential lyricism; it breaks upon the reader almost unhindered. This poetry draws on the longest-standing traditions of Hungarian verse, and its reader may likewise rely on them. Song-likeness characterises it, as do solutions such as the closed stanzaic or imagistic structure, which suggest finality. […] The relationship between poet and world is defined by mystery, and poetry is the means of unravelling this mystery, Gyurkovics’s entire oeuvre suggests, as though from within the estate of mystery itself. Herein, I sense the explanation for his poetry-rich career. And here, too, I sense the trap: that the poet inevitably succumbs to the seduction of the poem. A single image or original epithet no longer weighs in the balance, but rather a multitude of recurring images and epithets.” The critic also addresses the ‘God-poems’: “Let me speak of a single thematic group more concretely, more closely – seemingly by way of digression, although I might say that I perceive it as central, given the density of its loosening and binding threads, its spiritual legitimacy. I mean the Christ-poems. I sense in Gyurkovics’s world a kind of fanaticism toward the ever-present Christ; it gives rise to an elevated tonal colouring, though not serene devotion, but rather a lifelike conciliatoriness. Then suddenly a defiant tone bursts from Gyurkovics – a defiance which, to be sure, is ultimately impossible resistance, yet even in its fluctuation between strength and weakness, it works like a magic blow. His weakening says – or makes me read – this: however, I, the poet, may seek to appropriate my creator, I myself can only be his creature, and thus my existence, my fate, lie in his hands… As elsewhere, Gyurkovics derives duality here too from the doubleness of word and wordlessness: he chooses the many words. Yet in content and gesture, this is a form of collision; he speaks out boldly to Christ, though what he thereby creates is not so much drama as an arena – an electrical shock, a jolt. […] Nonetheless, I suspect there may be other modes of interpretation, reception, indeed acceptance of Gyurkovics’s ‘God-poems’, which clearly refute what I have just said above. One thing appears certain – and Gyurkovics possesses ample poetic force to sustain it: this is an inner matter, one that occupies an especially privileged place on the palette of his poetry; it does not merely permeate or frame his oeuvre but constitutes something akin to its very foundation [16].”
Stage Works
The volume A test balladája (lit. The Ballad of the Body, 1992), written after the poet had suffered a heart attack, deserves special mention. Even earlier, one could observe how Gyurkovics’s lyricism deepened: the emphasis increasingly fell on revealing what is at stake in existence itself, while he continued to preserve the enriching possibilities of irony, the grotesque and all manner of grimace. Imre D. Nagy summarises this with precision: “What do these poems confess? Illness, convalescence, love, grand life-philosophies, small hopes, longings, life’s great grimaces? None of these singly. In reality, all of them, together. Facts and possibilities sublimated into one. They speak of a highly sensitive world in which the momentary flashes of the mortal human being’s earthly and heavenly desires ripen explosively [17].”
After 1990, when it once again became possible to think in terms of homeland, nation, and history, the thematic scope of his poetry broadened. Yet even here Gyurkovics sees, in the community he embraces and can be embraced by, a community from which he hopes for redemption. “It is difficult to write a poem about the nation; in this respect, Endre Ady has always been my model: to speak of the country without pathos or chauvinistic ‘Hungarianness’, and yet with an anti-Habsburg insurgent (kuruc) vehemence, as the subtitle also indicates,” he confessed to Erzsébet Ézsiás regarding the circumstances in which Ebek harmincadja (Kuruc dal) [lit. Going to the Dogs (A Kuruc Song)] was written. Reflecting on his 1963 poem A másik (lit. The Other), he returns to his fundamental ‘triangle’ of thought: “There are those who find it easier to come to terms with death, but that is the other human type; I am the type who bears that burden throughout his life. These are my great closing rings: God, love and death – death above all [18].”
Novels and Short Stories
As a novelist, Tibor Gyurkovics first came forward in 1970 with Ne szeress, ne szeress (lit. Do Not Love, Do Not Love). The title is characteristically ‘Gyurkovicsian’: the negation only intensifies the ravenous desire – love, love! In prose as well, Gyurkovics retains a lyrical disposition. The duality that appears in his poems regarding love – at once life-giving and burdensome – re-emerges here and dominates the narrative. It is for this reason that Elemér Szeghalmi observes: “It seems likely that the writer’s (and his characters’) Sisyphean struggle with emotions, with the opposite sex and, through all this, with existence itself, will always remain primary in intensity and significance, both in his current and in his future works [19].”
In his subsequent prose works – Mindennapi szerelmünket add meg nekünk ma (1974) (lit. Give Us This Day Our Daily Love) and Pótmajom (1980) (lit. Surrogate Ape) – the protagonists, in the blaze of passion, attraction and repulsion, probe and grope for the possibilities of the human being in the other – and in themselves.
Special mention must be made of the novels Isten nem szerencsejátékos (lit. God Is No Gambler) and Szolgálat (lit. The Service). The observation made by his poet friend Dénes Kiss [20] – “In the poet Gyurkovics a Dostoevskian soul is at work, only it manifests itself in Hungarian landscape and Hungarian time – and in Central Europe – in the second half of the twentieth century” – is at least as applicable to the novelist. Accident or crime? In God Is No Gambler, the dialogue between the examining magistrate and the accused monk–teacher evokes inevitable associations with Crime and Punishment, while, in parallel, through cinematic cutting, the reader follows the formation of a personality seeking its own path and ultimately finding it in the priesthood. The morality of the soul and external law: under which should one remain, and how far should one obey either?
Critics received the work with unambiguous recognition (it also gave rise to a successful stage adaptation); its subject matter doubtless contributed to this success, since the monk–teacher is ultimately convicted. “Gyurkovics’s most important novel, Isten nem szerencsejátékos, may be counted among the distinguished achievements of Hungarian prose… With this lyrical language, capable as well of psychological and philosophical analysis, he illuminates a personality closed towards human community yet open towards God’s fictive world alone, moving with intuitive sensitivity among the wills and subconscious currents of human existence, on the transcendent waves of the sense of infinity and death [21].” Writing of the dramatic version, Béla Czére formulates a judgement equally valid for the novel: “Two kinds of morality collide in the dramatic adaptation of the novel God Is No Gambler. Father Simon, the monk–teacher who, in his terrible exertions of God-seeking, continually challenges fate and does not think or act in earthly categories of measure and ethics, is judged by the play’s examining magistrate not solely according to the law; he also seeks to understand this conduct and to awaken doubt within him [22].”
The heart-rending novel of moral dilemma, A szolgálat (lit. The Service), later reappears on stage under the title Boldogháza (lit. Happychester). The compulsion of reality and moral responsibility – profound compassion for the ordinary man who, in his modest contentment, is suddenly struck down by a soulless external reality just when he has secretly revived the memory of a youthful love: a mistaken decision involving a new railway switch that causes an accident. Setting the points: at once judgment and symbol. The human being’s compulsion to ‘change the points’, which may raise him or cast him down. Gyurkovics treats his protagonist with deep humility – with compassion for the stumbling, striving human being who seeks happiness – and, stepping out of his authorial role, he would gladly lift him out, redeem him (if only humans possessed such a capacity) from the tragedy into which his small joys have become distorted.
Gyurkovics first presented himself as a short-story writer in 1973 with his collection Elcseréljük egymást (lit. Let Us Exchange One Another). Having worked for many years as a clinical psychologist at the National Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry, he approached the human being from the side of the soul, placing at the centre that substance which guarantees the specifically human quality of the person. The 1977 volume Öngyilkosság receptre (lit. Suicide on Prescription), followed in 1980 by Az utolsó karácsony (lit. The Last Christmas), and the collected stories published in 1987 under the title A bíboros (lit. The Cardinal), were all written in this spirit: in disturbed, fragmentary lives, he detects and highlights the neuralgic points, while seeking to confront his characters with the forces that hinder the genuine unfolding of existence.
The fundamental problem that runs through Gyurkovics’s work – in lyric, epic and drama alike – is formulated with precision in the short story The Cardinal: “Love is a state into which one gets entangled and in which one abides, and then it passes. In the end, I loved my husband too, and before that, with the youthfulness of love, I loved others as well. It was not a matter of the woman’s redemption, for I was already redeemed, already set free. It was something else, something different, perhaps more than that. For women, love comes from outside; it is men who give it to them, entirely as a gift. This came from within me; it arose from among the parts of my being, was a part of me; every fibre of my personality was set in motion and took part in it, and even the word “I love you” did not sit well with me. It did not express what I felt, and I wanted to speak more precisely in time. I think that once, in great simplicity, I tried to fire off this word in a small inn one evening, when we were standing at the window, and the common table and bed awaited us in their cool whiteness, that I am alive – but you brushed it aside, saying you did not like big words. It was no big word, I can tell you, but by now I also know that you knew that too; you knew me as well as you know your own palm-lines, and you knew, only you brushed it aside because you were ashamed of being the sole, indeed at that time the only reason for my existence.” It would be difficult to find a more concise formulation of Gyurkovics’s philosophy, his confession of life. The double structure of redemption appears here (”it was not a matter of the woman’s redemption, for I was already redeemed”), and in the oeuvre this duality – the natural and the supernatural dimension of faith – is built upon one another.
“Poetry, then, is grace, a tiny ‘toe of God’s foot at dawn’, whereas prose is a daily task. Recently, he wrote the novel Alibi (lit. Alibi), which was published in instalments in the journal Hitel. He writes fewer short stories than before. Another genre has taken its place: the newspaper column, which is in greater demand among editors.” Thus was born the figure of Jezovics. “I turned to column-writing for reasons of livelihood. It is a more publicistic genre, more closely bound to current affairs, but it spoils that way of seeing whereby one constructs a story around a single body. This is why I invented the character of Jezovics, because I do not need a story but a poetic hero around whom I can write a story,” he confessed [23]. And, as in all his works, the poetic hero is, in truth, the author himself.
Writing of the publicistic volume A Szent Bal (lit. The Holy Left), Tibor Tüskés observes: “Even in these ‘stinging, bullet-like columns’ Gyurkovics remains a poet; he speaks as a lyricist. “…time hung like a damaged angel’s wing.” In the book’s dedication, Gábor Görgey speaks of the author’s four faces: the poet, the dramatist, the short-story writer, and the comic actor. Well then, Gyurkovics’s fifth face, that of the publicist, stands closest to the poet’s. These writings, too, preserve the imprint of their time and age, yet they are not directly linked to political and social questions. They either dramatise or turn a news item into a short story, telling some kind of tale (Író-boksz [lit. Writers’ Boxing]), or else they are the projections of surreal visions, lyrical meditations, poetic dreams. The writer’s central theme is love and its absence – aggression. “Aggression moves. It needs much nourishment, much fuel.” In the same place, he says, “To love is difficult. Love requires perfection – outwardly, that is. Inwardly: disarmament.” Gyurkovics’s criticism is sharp and outspoken, yet at the same time charming and enchanting; his humour is witty and uncompromising, ‘thickly malicious, yet full of love’. Yes, these stories – however biting – also suggest understanding and forgiveness. At the end of this carefully composed volume, we read, in the memoir of Pongrác Galsai: ‘There is no deed more important than to search for one another’s hand in the dark. If you agree, mark this document with your heavenly countersign.’ [24]”
The books written for children are organically connected with Gyurkovics’s prose works. High-quality literature for young readers is always multi-layered and thus never speaks exclusively to children. Gyurkovics’s children’s and young adult works – whether in verse or prose – likewise do not address only the young: their soaring imagination, their refusal of baby-talk, their weaving together of reality and dreams into emotional, noble adventures – as Elemér Szeghalmi points out – captivate child and adult readers alike. In Üveggolyó ([lit. Marble], 1973), Kudi, a levegőember ([lit. Kudi, the Air-Man], 1985), and especially Rikiki (1978), the inspiration for which was his brother, nicknamed Riki, “this curious human–otherworldly being, with his tiny figure, finds himself amid events and adventures in which pure humanity, sound-mindedness and a true heart lay down the law for the various happenings.”
Stage Works
Finally, Gyurkovics’s dramatic works must also be mentioned. Director Géza Pártos took note of the one-act Estére meghalsz (lit. You Will Die by Evening) and asked the author to expand the play into a full-length work. Gyurkovics then wrote two acts to precede the existing one, a solution that lent the drama a distinctive dramaturgical feature: the protagonist appears only in the third act, while the first two acts consist of continuous references to him and his circumstances.
As a dramatist, Gyurkovics sought direct answers and direct reactions through the theatre. One might think his works fit into the Central European – though less characteristic of Hungary – grotesque tradition, or, stretching the lineage toward Beckett, into the theatre of the absurd. His plays, however, are not directly akin to the worlds shaped by Bohumil Hrabal or Sławomir Mrożek, and even less to Beckett’s; should we discover any similarity, it lies in the grotesque mode of expression. Erzsébet Ézsiás captured this well when she wrote of the questions raised in Gyurkovics’s plays: “They are tragic and fateful. Yet tragedy (not in the generic but in the expressive sense) is alien to his writerly disposition. He therefore formulates his questions and answers – paradoxically – with the help of the grotesque. This gives his works their distinctive outlook and characteristic humour [25].” Gyurkovics does not relinquish his love of humanity; he does not estrange himself, nor does he perceive the human condition as hopeless. Imre D. Nagy also refers to the grotesque characteristic of his drama: “this distinctive method of dramatic writing becomes the basic element of the Gyurkovics plays [26].”
The Pesti Színház (Pest Theatre) staged his second dramatic work under the title Az Öreg (lit. The Old Man). (A novella version of the theme appears under the title Szeretetotthon [lit. Rest Home].) There followed, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a series of theatrical premières that brought the poet wide recognition: A döntés órája (lit. The Hour of Decision); Nagyvizit (lit. The Grand Round); Csóka-család (lit. The Csóka Family); Magyar menyasszony (lit. Hungarian Bride); Isten bokrétája (lit. God’s Bouquet); Fészekalja (lit. The Brood); Bombatölcsér (lit. Bomb Crater); Fekvőtámasz (lit. Push-Up); Boldogháza (lit. Happyster); Halálsakk (lit. Death Chess); Császármorzsa (lit. Semolina Dessert, directed by the author himself); God Is No Gambler; De ki lesz a gyilkos? (lit. But Who Will Be the Killer?) and the adaptations Édes Anna (lit. Anna Édes) and Kreutzer szonáta (lit. The Kreutzer Sonata). In the Veszprém production of Push-Up, the multifaceted talent of the poet was further demonstrated by his portrayal of the Colonel.
Gyurkovics had no wish to perform for its own sake – rather, the desire for direct utterance drove him, the desire that something infinite and definitive, some mystery, might be born. For this reason, he accepted the offer to act when the Madách Theatre revived his play Grand Round, though his illness later prevented him from undertaking the demanding task.
Béla Czére offered the following assessment of Gyurkovics’s plays: “If we examine the genre, the writerly problematic and the theatrical means, it becomes clear that there are two sharply distinguishable currents in Gyurkovics’s dramatic writing. One current runs from the ‘doppelgänger–drama’, in which his lyrical self is foregrounded (You Will Die by Evening, Bomb Crater), and from the monodrama or lyrical montage (The Hour of Decision), through to dramatic forms that are already ‘objectivised’ in their ideas and structures – to the tragedy based on the Tolstoy novel (The Kreutzer Sonata) and to the ethical drama (God Is No Gambler). // The other current consists of works orchestrated to the stage techniques of humour and the grotesque, the absurd and alienating effects, and dialogues of highly individual technique (Rest Home, Grand Round, Őszinte részvétem [lit. My Sincere Condolences], God’s Bouquet). In these, lyricism appears only in refraction, in a distorting mirror, just as the catharsis of these dramas, which entirely dispense with conflict and plot in the traditional sense, is markedly profane. […] Gyurkovics’s protagonists cling to human relationships with breathless urgency, yet in actual human relations they always fail [27].” This failure, however, is nothing but the frustrated hope of attaining that totality which the mere act of clinging to one another cannot itself achieve.
*
How might one grasp the ‘Gyurkovics phenomenon’, the personality of Tibor Gyurkovics and his oeuvre? Tamás Tarján expresses it fittingly: “He is the preacher of love, only to find at every turn that love has ceased to be the norm of life. And with love, reasonableness and order fall out of our everyday existence [28],” adding that Gyurkovics never relinquished the hope of the eternal earthly–heavenly union of lovers, as we read in the poem Mi lesz velünk? (lit. What Will Become of Us?): “Az űrbe dobva mint a kő / a végtelenbe térülő / időben hol lesz az a nő / aki te vagy és én meg ő / és én meg ő?” (lit. “Thrown into space like a stone, / in time turning toward the infinite – / where will be the woman / who is you, and I, and she, / and I, and she?”)
[2017]
[1] Elemér Szeghalmi, Ambrus Zoltántól Gyurkovics Tiborig (lit. From Zoltán Ambrus to Tibor Gyurkovics), in Irodalmi tanulmányok, Jel Kiadó, 1995, pp. 228–244.
[2] Imre D. Nagy, Gyurkovics, mint olyan (lit. Gyurkovics, As Such), Gondolat, Budapest, 1994, p. 19.
[3] ‘Ki nekem Jézus?’ (lit. ‘Who Is Jesus to Me?’), Vigilia, December 1970, p. 885.
[4] Magyar Nemzet, 7 June 2001.
[5] Tibor Gyurkovics – György Szemadám, Az alkotás vegetatív bája (lit. The Vegetative Charm of Creation), Napkút Kiadó, Budapest, 2007, pp. 59–60.
[6] Ibid., p. 60.
[7] Imre D. Nagy, Gyurkovics, mint olyan (lit. Gyurkovics, As Such), p. 20.
[8] György Rónay, ‘Az olvasó naplója’ (lit. ‘The Reader’s Diary’), Vigilia 1961/6, p. 369.
[9] Erzsébet Ézsiás, Fecskekód (lit. Swallow Code), papirusz book, 2006, p. 32.
[10] Elemér Szeghalmi, Ambrus Zoltántól Gyurkovics Tiborig (lit. From Zoltán Ambrus to Tibor Gyurkovics), p. 231.
[11] Kelemen János Kassai, ‘Gyurkovics Tibor. Emberfia’ (lit. ‘Tibor Gyurkovics. Son of Man.’) Tiszatáj 1966/9, p. 780.
[12] György Rónay, ‘Az olvasó naplója’ (lit. ‘The Reader’s Diary’), Vigilia 1966/11, p. 773.
[13] Elemér Szeghalmi, Ambrus Zoltántól Gyurkovics Tiborig (lit. From Zoltán Ambrus to Tibor Gyurkovics), p. 235.
[14] Zsolt Kőháti, ‘Gyurkovics Tibor költészete’ (lit. ‘The Poetry of Tibor Gyurkovics’), Kortárs 1980/3, p. 458.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Lajos V. Mohai, ‘Gyurkovics Tibor: Halló, Krisztus’ (lit. ‘Tibor Gyurkovics: Hello, Christ’), Kortárs 1992/7, pp. 107–109.
[17] Imre D. Nagy, Gyurkovics, mint olyan (lit. Gyurkovics, As Such), pp. 37–38.
[18] Fecskekód (lit. Swallow Code), pp. 144, 148.
[19] Elemér Szeghalmi, Ambrus Zoltántól Gyurkovics Tiborig (lit. From Zoltán Ambrus to Tibor Gyurkovics), p. 237.
[20] Istenigazából. Gyurkovics Tibor válogatott versei (lit. In All Truth. Selected Poems of Tibor Gyurkovics), Tiszatáj 1979/9.
[21] Béla Czére, ‘A szeretet és az akarat áramkörében. Az emberi kapcsolatok jelentésszintje Gyurkovics Tibor regényeiben’ (‘In the Circuit of Love and Will: The Meaning Levels of Human Relations in the Novels of Tibor Gyurkovics’), Új Írás 1983/3, p. 97.
[22] Béla Czére, ‘Gyurkovics Tibor szabálytalan drámáinak világa’ (‘The World of the Irregular Dramas of Tibor Gyurkovics’), Kortárs 1982/5, p. 809.
[23] Erzsébet Ézsiás, A Mágus (lit. The Magician), p. 117.
[24] Lyukasóra, September 1993, p. 30.
[25] Erzsébet Ézsiás, A Mágus (lit. The Magician) p. 127.
[26] Imre D. Nagy, Gyurkovics, mint olyan (lit. Gyurkovics, As Such), p. 73.
[27] Béla Czére, ‘Gyurkovics Tibor szabálytalan drámáinak világa’ (‘The World of the Irregular Dramas of Tibor Gyurkovics’), Kortárs 1982/5, p. 809.
[28] ‘Dühöngeni, szeretni. Gyurkovics Tibor, a drámaíró’ (lit. ‘To Rage, to Love. Tibor Gyurkovics, the Dramatist’), Forrás 1981/5, pp. 53–58.