Győző Határ was born in the year the First World War began, in the month of Scorpio (13 November 1914), in Gyoma (now Gyomaendrőd). As the last descendant of a multi-ethnic, multi-rooted family, he literally carried a Central European sense of destiny in his veins. His father, Vilmos Hack, was the child of a Transylvanian Saxon hatter and a Székely girl, who, after many years of wandering as a journeyman, became a paper-store clerk at the Kner printing house in Gyoma. His mother, Margit Mária Turi, was born of a union between a Russian youth from Kiev and a thoroughly ‘born and bred’ Hungarian girl. After her husband returned from the war psychologically broken, it was she, a tradition-respecting and careful housewife, who kept the family afloat. In 1920, they moved to Budapest, so their lively, inquisitive son could attend school there.
Győző Hack completed his school-leaving examination at the Secondary School of Science on Markó Street, a prestigious Budapest school recognised for its strong science programme. He secured second place in a national technical drawing competition, which guaranteed his admission to the Faculty of Architecture at Budapest University of Technology in 1932. In the summer of 1933, he embarked on a tour across Western Europe, visiting Austria, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Germany; upon returning home, he immersed himself in the study of philosophy at the university’s extensive library.
He read the philosophers in the original Greek, German, and French, from Diogenes Laertius to Hegel and Bergson; he then went on to study the English sceptics and the oeuvre of Nietzsche, who instilled in him the ideal of the ‘heroic life’ (‘es lebe gefährlich!’). Although he graduated with honours as an architect in 1938 and then worked for two years as a design engineer in the office of the chief government counsellor, Alfréd Hajós, he was, in reality, by this time devoting all his energies to novel-writing. In his politico-philosophical works, Taurobolium and Veszélyes fordulatszám (lit. Dangerous Revolutions per Minute), he examines the natural history of power; in two vitriolic, Horthy-critical satires (Darályvilág Buzdugániában, Torlon Péter [lit. Darály World in Buzdugany, Peter Torlon]), he lampoons the Hungarian political élite bowing before German influence [Miklós Horthy was an admiral and statesman who was the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar period and most of World War II, from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944.]. Between 1938 and 1942, he travelled throughout the entire Carpathian Basin, with particular attention to the regions re-annexed to Hungary as a result of the Vienna Awards [the 1938 and 1940 territorial arbitrations]; in a two-volume novel (Csodák országa, Hátsó-Eurázia [lit. The Land of Wonders, Farther-Eurazia]), he depicts the suffocating poverty and public backwardness of the Hungarian countryside. Then, in the spirit of the ‘dangerous life’, he and a few friends become involved in an intellectual conspiracy. With duplicating machines, they prepare leaflets and propaganda material, which they distribute openly in the city. They think in terms of a large Central European federation, following and extending the line of Lajos Kossuth and Oszkár Jászi [liberal politician and federalist thinker], dreaming of reconciliation among the peoples of the Danube region. He illustrates the reality of this vision in his novella Bukaresti asszony (lit. Lady of Bucharest).
The investigative authorities naturally clamp down on them: they are brought before a military tribunal on charges of treason and high treason. The prosecutor demands the death penalty for Győző Hack; in the end, considering that most of the incriminating material comprises ‘only’ novels rather than political pamphlets, his sentence is reduced, after multiple appeals, to five years’ imprisonment. Thus, he could become familiar with the hidden life of the ‘prison republic’ and the sophisticated forms of torture in the Intellectuals’ Section of the Defensive Department in Gödöllő. It is a true relief when he is finally transferred to the penitentiary at Sátoraljaújhely, where, by a stroke of fate, he also survives the prison uprising of March 1944. By this time, however, the hour of his release is approaching: the prisoners are placed in a punishment battalion and marched to Transcarpathia. Due to the guards’ laxity, he manages to escape at Görömbölytapolca. In Budapest, he finds refuge and employment in the Wallenberg House at 1 Jókai Street, where he lives to see the end of the Arrow Cross rule [Hungarian fascist regime, 1944–1945].
The year 1945, therefore, brought, understandably, a profound sense of relief to Győző Hack, who in 1946 changed his name to Győző Határ, a Hungarian-sounding name, and entered literary life under this name. Up until 1947–1948, it seemed that, within the emerging democracy, cultural life would flourish and that various artistic currents could develop freely. Győző Határ maintained closer ties with the circle around Újhold [New Moon, a modernist literary review] and with artists of the Szentendrei Iskola (Szentendre School of Painting). During these years, he painted, sold his artworks, and partly lived from this. Among painters and art theorists, figures such as Jenő Barcsay, Endre Bálint, Pál Gegesi Kis, Ernő Kállai, Dezső Korniss, Tamás Lossonczy, Ferenc Martyn, Árpád Mezei, Imre Pán, and others – those aligned with the avant-garde – were closest to him. In literature, he felt connections with Zoltán Jékely, László Kálnoky, István Lakatos, László Lator, Balázs Lengyel, Iván Mándy, Miklós Mészöly, Ede Szabó, Sándor Weöres, and, somewhat distantly, Miklós Szentkuthy. He highly esteemed the ‘princesses’ of his generation: Erzsébet Gyarmathy, Stefánia Mándy, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and Magda Szabó – and, as later decades proved, not without good reason. He viewed the populist–cosmopolitan (népi–urbánus) opposition [polarisation in 20th-century Hungarian literary life] as “the nightmare of provincialism”, a kind of “Curse of Turan” [A belief that Hungarians have been under a malevolent spell for centuries. The ‘curse’ manifests as internal strife, pessimism, misfortune, and various historic catastrophes.], that literary circles needed to rid themselves of. He also sympathised with the esoteric school linked to Béla Hamvas, Lajos Szabó, and Sándor Török. The ‘party mafia’s cultural leadership – represented by the Lukács–Révai–Márton Horváth trio [György Lukács, József Révai, and Márton Horváth – key communist cultural figures] – gradually pushed them all to the margins because they refused to conform to the ‘command of the age’, meaning they did not produce ‘socialist realist’ literature or murals. Deprived of publishing opportunities, most of them had to follow their own painful paths – many into inner exile.
Győző Határ’s masterful novel Heliáne still appeared at Christmas 1947, but the party press branded it nihilistic and surrealist, and the remaining stock was immediately pulped. Fortunately, a few copies of those already sold survived and, through secret routes, reached readers. His poetry collection Liturgikon (lit. Liturgicon), however, was known to his friends only in manuscript. In 1948, publishing houses were nationalised, and the excluded could no longer help one another through the institutions of intellectual life. Like many others, Győző Határ found himself once again writing for his desk drawer. One after another he wrote his satirical–fantastic novels of contemporary life, in which the appalling reality of a spiritually devastated age is unveiled: the manipulation of standardised people by the ‘dumidugdist ideology’, the moral self-surrender of those pushed to the periphery, the complete vulnerability of those who resist the command-state, the ruthlessness of the machinery of power, and so forth (Az Őrző könyve [lit. The Book of the Guardian], Eumolposz [lit. Eumolpus], 1948; Bábel tornya [lit. Tower of Babel], 1949).
By 1948–1949, he viewed the expanding, anti-intellectual dictatorship of Bolshevism with the same smouldering rebellion as he had the expanding Hitlerism of the early 1940s. Having learnt from his earlier experiences, he avoided open confrontation and regarded crossing the frontier as the only possible form of escape. On 13 January 1950, he was arrested at the Yugoslav border. His carefully chosen, well-paid ‘guide’ turned out to be an official informer of the State Protection Authority. In the cellar of the State Protection Authority in Szeged, he once again endured the complete destruction of human dignity and the Orwellian interrogation methods of the ‘thought police’. After the sentence was passed (two and a half years’ imprisonment), he was transported by prison van to the notorious Szeged Prison (Csillagbörtön), where, locked in with forty common criminals, he ‘enjoyed’ the free-speech seasoned life of the ‘prison republic’. Working in the prison printing house, he finally gained access to paper and pencil. He could begin recording his poems (which he then passed out through the visiting room to his first wife, “the beautiful Mrs Határ”, who, although divorced from him, continued to visit).
In 1950, he was transferred to the Budapest remand prison, where the educated prisoners were set to work together in a large drafting room (preparing standard designs and technical drawings). On Friday mornings, the Little Prison echoed with the death screams of those led away for execution.
In the spring of 1951, an armed State Protection Authority detachment occupied the Death House; the technical inmates were transferred to Dudujka, near Miskolc, to work on the construction of the Technical University of Heavy Industry (now: the University of Miskolc). At the end of summer, under the pretext of ‘labour mobility’, the prisoners were marched on foot, in chains, to the penitentiary at Sátoraljaújhely, where a plaque now commemorated the former prison uprising. From here, in late autumn, in heavy snowfall, they were sent on their way up into the mountains. At the end of the terrible march, a monastery awaited them: Márianosztra. All felt relief: so, they were not being dragged off to the Great Motherland, the Gulag. On this dreadful journey, the central idea of his world drama Golghelóghi was conceived: Satan rules over this world.
He was released only at the end of 1952 from what he called ‘the university of teaching the prisoners a lesson’ (sadistic guards, cruel tortures, and perpetual hunger). Through old professional contacts, he found employment in a design office; soon afterwards, with help from the translation section of the Hungarian Writers’ Union, more specifically from Klára Szőllössy, he gained his independence as a literary translator. His excellent rendering of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy earned him general respect and authority; from that time, he received a continuous stream of commissions to translate from English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish. At the end of 1955, he was invited to translate the complete works of Rabelais. As an esteemed translator, he might gradually have secured acceptance for himself, but there could be no question of publishing his own works. In 1953–1954, he wrote the novel Anibel and, in the summer of 1956, Pepito és Pepita (lit. Pepito and Pepita), both inspired by his new love, Piroska Prágai. But he did not even attempt to have these published at home; in December 1956, he left the country with Piroska. They spent Christmas on free soil, in Vienna.
In the spring of 1957, they arrived in ‘London-Land’, but their lives were not to stabilise until after almost a year of hardship and wandering. In the summer of 1958, Győző Határ obtained a contract post in the Hungarian Section of the BBC (where he was made permanent three years later). He describes the life of the section and the work’s exciting yet crowded demands in his novella Az éjszaka műszaka (lit. Night Shift, 1964). In Hampstead, a well-known district of London where many Hungarian refugees settled, they bought a small flat (the ‘Dolls’ House’), which they furnished in a ‘Hungarian’ spirit – visitors dubbed it ‘Hongriuscule’. In the 1960s, Győző Határ was even able to launch his own programme on the BBC under the title Korforduló (lit. Turning of an Age), in which, by surveying those works of contemporary world and Hungarian literature he regarded as most modern, he elaborated a distinctive literary–historical system of values (one that aesthetically far surpassed that at home). He also worked regularly for Szabad Európa Rádió (Radio Free Europe, Munich) and for various émigré periodicals (Látóhatár – Új Látóhatár in Munich; Irodalmi Újság, published from 1957 in London and later Paris; Magyar Műhely in Paris; and the publications of the Mikes Kelemen Kör in the Netherlands and the Magyar Intézet in Stockholm, among others). He was a regular speaker at the world congresses of the international PEN, and his wide-ranging erudition, command of the history of philosophy and literary expertise secured him an exceptional place in the intellectual life of the émigré community.
In the first half of the 1960s, he travelled throughout Britain on BBC assignments, delighting in the architectural marvels of Northern England, Wales and Scotland; he later delivered a series of BBC talks on “the peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon world”. In the summers, he and Piroska criss-crossed Western Europe and travelled farther afield (Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Andalusia, the Canary Islands, etc.). To cultivate contacts, he frequently hopped over to Paris, Amsterdam, Oslo, and so on. Through the mediation of László Gara, the unselfish patron of émigré Hungarian writers, Pepito and Pepita appeared in French as early as 1963 (Julliard), followed in 1970 by Anibel I. könyve (Napsütötte zápor) [lit. Book of Anibel No 1 (Sunlit Downpour, Denoël] and in 1972 by Archie Dumbarton (Éjszaka minden megnő) [lit. Archie Dumbarton By Night All Things Grow, Denoël]. With the help of Géza Thinsz, the Hungarian Institute in Stockholm published Tower of Babel in 1966; and in Munich, at József Molnár’s press, Pantarbesz [lit. Pantarbes] – a philosophical meditation – appeared.
By the mid-to-late 1960s, visitors from Hungary had also begun to call on the Határ couple: Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Balázs Lengyel, the Weöres couple, and Pilinszky; later, old friends came from America (Miksa Fenyő and Ádám Makkai, son of Rózsa Ignácz, who had once belonged to Sándor Török’s esoteric circle); and from Paris, the young writers associated with Magyar Műhely. The Dolls’ House gradually proved too small; in 1967, the Határ couple moved to Wimbledon (taking the name ‘Hongriuscule’ with them). Their large house and garden henceforth became an important ‘harbour’ for Hungarian writers and poets, both émigré and visiting from home.
Amid his numerous activities, Győző Határ compiled a collection of his previously unpublished poems (Hajszálhíd [lit. Hair-Bridge]) for the press, which was published by Auróra press in Munich and printed by József Molnár. With this volume, he embarked on a three-month lecture tour among the Hungarians of the American diaspora at the invitation of Ádám Makkai. He visited twelve major cities’ ‘Scythian centres’, delivering nearly forty literary evenings and gathering subscriptions for future publications. He returned to his Wimbledon home with great moral and financial success; he was able to purchase his dream machine, the IBM electronic Composer typesetter, and to launch his beautiful Auróra Ezotéria (lit. Aurora Esoterica) series, each volume of which is a bibliographical treasure. The covers were typically designed based on ideas by Piroska Prágai.
In 1976, changes within the BBC’s editorial staff led to his retirement; almost immediately, however, he found work at Radio Free Europe. As an external contributor, he could write at will about books, exhibitions, festivals, theatrical premières, and other vital events in Hungarian literary life. From his broadcasts, notes, and short commentaries for the BBC and Radio Free Europe, Határ Győző irodalomtörténete (lit. The Literary History of Győző Határ), edited by István Lakatos (1991), later emerged.
At the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, domestic cultural policy, although far from supportive, at least tolerated contact between some prominent literary historians and Győző Határ. Imre Bori, a professor of literature at the University of Újvidék (Novi Sad), and the circle around the journal Híd (Bridge) had already been engaging with his work in the 1970s; in the mid-to-late 1980s, the ‘bolder’ Hungarian literary scholars (Mátyás Domokos, Zoltán Kenyeres, Béla Pomogáts, László Rónay, among others) also paid their respects to him. In 1988, Professor Lóránt Kabdebó tape-recorded a life interview with him, which soon appeared, in three volumes, as an autobiographical novel titled Életút I–III. (lit. The Course of My Life I–III., 1993–1994–1995) from the publisher of the journal Életünk in Szombathely. Against the background of the uniquely exciting life material revealed in the novel, the contradictions of the murderous twentieth century and, within it, the catastrophic turning points of Hungarian history emerge with clarity. The fate of Győző Határ represents that of all those who could not endure intellectual Gleichschaltung either in the 1930s/1940s or in the 1940s/1950s – that is, under neither Hitler’s nor Stalin–Rákosi’s reign of terror. “In a country where ten per cent of the population, a round million, were minced through the meat-grinder of penal institutions and prison camps,” he writes, “I am not the exception but the rule” (vol. I, p. 7).
In the triptych-like structure of The Course of My Life, the writer’s three life-phases and creative periods are clearly distinguished. The first volume (Oly jó követni, emberélet [lit. How Good to Follow, Human Life]) portrays childhood and youth, the process of becoming acquainted with the world and of inner unfolding. The second (Minden hajó hazám [lit. Every Ship Is My Homeland]) presents the advanced schooling of intellectual and human maturation: his creative profile is shaped by the processing of experiences of being twice imprisoned (1942–1944; 1949–1952) and of total suppression. The third volume (Partra vetett bálna [lit. Beached Whale]) recounts nearly half a century of emigration. Győző Határ was a citizen of the world who never forgot his roots and remained faithful in spirit to his homeland and his mother tongue. His works appeared in astonishing abundance and in every genre. From them, over the years and decades, one of the most interesting and significant spiritual cathedrals of Hungarian literature was built.
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Like the greatest avant-garde artists, Győző Határ sought to bridge the gap between life and literature by incorporating into his work the dimensions of archaic culture, primordial pagan feeling and tradition, and abstract intellectuality. Consciously breaking from classical traditions, he reinterpreted cultural-historical topoi and mythological symbols by embedding them in bold new connections, creating a synthesis between the ancient and the modern. While moving easily on the most everyday levels of reality, he extended the boundaries of artistic communication towards social philosophy and ontology, offering insights into the specific laws governing the multiverse, no less than into the inner harmony of the human microcosm and the biological. In his monumental oeuvre, the moral decline of our apocalyptic age and the fatal defeat of human strength under totalitarian power relations become clearly legible. He was an encyclopaedic creator like Joyce, Ezra Pound, Pessoa, T. S. Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges. With him, there are no rigid partitions between the creative subject and objective reality, nor between the separate literary modes and genres. The epic becomes lyrical or charged with dramatic tension; the lyric becomes objectified and merges with the epic; drama keeps its boundaries open in both epic and lyric directions. All three are permeated by his distinctive philosophy, which, in his philosophical works, he elaborates in a manner characteristic of art. Perhaps this is why the domestic philosophical ‘clan’ does not regard him as a true philosopher and continues to ignore his philosophical novelties. In every genre and every work, he kept the entirety of the problem of existence in view – in their primordial, undivided unity – taking the spiritual content of life as the subject of his writings. He was a universal intellectual type like Béla Hamvas (one of them approaching the problem of the primal whole with a rational mode of vision, the other with an intuitive one). For both, mother tongue represented ‘home’ after their works had been effectively ‘banned’ from their country.
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His early novels are still fairly rich in plot. He runs several strands in parallel; he then works the individually written sections into a single piece, so that the novel's world is woven from a rich and exciting mosaic (a symphonic composition). At the same time, from the outset, we perceive in him a desire to interpret events philosophically. Both the inner world of the characters and the contemporary social panorama are important to him. Donning a contemplative attitude, he observes, from outside and above (’from his tower cell’), the common world reduced to the plaything of Fate (the ‘human-god’), and by the power of his rational mind illumines the social structure built upon the interplay of lies. His novels – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly – reveal the hidden mechanisms of the ‘monster-state’s’ machinery of power, created and maintained by human beings in the hope of relative prosperity and apparent freedom. The writer regards Bolshevism as one manifestation of an atheist religiosity based on the manipulation and ideological stupefaction of the credulous masses. In this secular version of the former ‘Holy Inquisition’, the ideological enforcers tortured to death those who dared doubt the Single – Holy – Idea as cruelly as heretics were once tortured in the deep pits of the dungeons.
In the mask of his alter egos, Győző Határ himself forms part of the novel’s world (sometimes as observer or ’Guardian’, sometimes as suffering, vulnerable, humiliated figure). Yet he always keeps his distance from a human breed that has forfeited its dignity. He achieves this by mixing aesthetic registers: he tests every tonal range from gentle humour through merciless satire to deadly blasphemy. With his alienating devices (which verge at times on the postmodern), he compels his readers, too, to view the represented world critically. If we trace the internal system of connections among the organically linked works, which complement one another in their treatment of both the problem of existence and contemporary reality, it becomes clear that the writer leads our vision up some spiral staircase, so that, looking out from the World Tower, we may eventually gain an overview of the full extent of the monstrous reality.
His view of being and world-picture fundamentally differ from the materialist and idealist philosophical systems that have shaped European thought. The novels written in emigration can, in fact, only be approached from the basis of his idiosyncratic philosophical system and cannot be sharply separated from his philosophical opus. In the Aurora Esoterica series, his prose works were published almost annually (among the most important: A fontos ember (lit. The Important Man, 1974); Intra muros [lit. Within the Walls, 1978]; Özön Közöny [lit. Torrent of Indifference, 1980]; Szélhárfa I–III. [lit. Wind Harp I–III, 1982/1983]; Köpönyeg sors – Julianosz ifjúsága [lit. Cloak of Fate – The Youth of Julian, 1985]; Angelika Kertje [lit. Angelica’s Garden, 1986]; A szép Palásthyné [lit. The Beautiful Mrs Palásthy, 1987]; Az Ég csarnokai [lit. The Halls of Heaven, 1987]; etc.) Even in the years after the regime change, he wrote his own works with incredible stamina (Filozófiai zárlatok [lit. Philosophical Closures, 1992]; A fülem mögött [lit. Behind My Ear, 1994]), while the earlier ones were gradually published by Hungarian publishers.
In Győző Határ’s conception, the human being can in no wise be the centre of the Universe (’the measure of all things’ – as Greek and, following Sophocles, European aesthetic philosophy had held), but is merely a ‘microbe’ – a human infestation with its own physiological laws, a peculiar, and far from ‘immortal’, manifestation of the eternally pulsing Multiverse. A self-perceiving particle, cast into the ‘flood of indifference’ of the Universe, plaything of cosmic powers. Yet the human phenomenon cannot be understood purely in terms of its biological–physiological determinations, for, bound to its material existence, it also possesses an intense spiritual life. Equipped with the curiosity of a true natural scientist and with impressively extensive physiological knowledge, the writer investigates the functioning of our biological organism, our sensory constitution, from which our psychic and mental activities cannot be dissociated. “We think with our whole body.” The entire range of our intellect is encapsulated by the body of flesh (we are imprisoned in the ‘prison of sarx’). Our pride in ‘superiority’ is thus sheer delusion: the human species – yoked to bios – is by nature predatory. For this reason, even the noblest theories concerning the ‘improvement’ of society prove vain: the interest- and profit-driven nature of humankind drags every idea down into the mud. The most important weapon of the human mind, in Győző Határ’s view, is doubt (“we cannot conceal anything that is thought within us”). Questioning falsehood, tearing the veil from illusions, in a state of “free swing of the spirit”, far above the everyday, he contemplates, in “cosmic solitude”, the proliferating human infestation, seeking the laws of existence. “The byways of utilitarian philosophy are invalid in philosophy.”
And in art, too, of course. He does not believe in the power of writing to ‘change the world’ and thus, in the traditional sense, does not wish either ‘to teach and educate’ or ‘to entertain’. On the other hand, he would like his works to help us, too, become clear-sighted, so that we may more easily find our way through the labyrinths of our own lives and of social reality. For this reason, he is furious with all those who, in the name of some idea or ideology and on the strength of their purificatory power, brand, or even bring before a firing squad, those who think differently, “leaving them at most the choice of who shall kill them and by what form of death”. In his system of ideas, the so-called “Luciferian beings” – the doubters, deniers, and rebels – are the true “light-bringers”, who, by unmasking falsehoods, questioning pseudo-values and telling the truth, advance human thought. With their critical spirit, they ripen our clarity of vision, strengthen our sense of reality, and deepen our self-knowledge and knowledge of the world – precisely by exposing and even attacking our supposedly eternal truths.
In Győző Határ’s extensive body of work, drama holds as significant a place as narrative prose. Most of his plays were written during times when he grappled with internal conflicts and experienced the absurdity of existence as a deeply personal reality. In the mid to late 1960s, his role as editor of the BBC’s theatre and film review section greatly influenced his imagination, giving him the chance to witness some of the most exciting avant-garde premieres, from Pinter to Osborne, from Beckett to N. F. Simpson, from Bennett to Barnes. Consequently, he mastered every technical device emerging from twentieth-century dramaturgy, ranging from Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’ to Brecht’s alienating, ironic intellectualism, Dürrenmatt’s analytical grotesque, and the absurd flowering following Ionesco and Beckett. Most of his stage works share the same esoteric perspective on existence as his prose: they reveal the secrets of being, offer insights into the laws governing the psyche and the mind, and present us with the stripped-down skeleton of the world at the end of the millennium.
His magnum opus, the nine-part Magnus Ludus Passionalis, designed for twenty-four hours of playing time – the “marvellous tale of Golghelóghi, heavy with evil adventures” – had dwelled within him since the memorable journey to Márianosztra. In the mid-1960s, struggling with severe depression, the memories of past torments surged once more from his subconscious: the terrible visions of Lord Satan’s triumph experienced in the wolf-cold ice-pit of the interrogation cellar and solitary confinement. In 1976, he shaped his former visions into drama and launched his world drama in the Aurora Esoterica series; in significance, it can only be compared with Imre Madách’s vision of humanity, Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man). Magnus Ludus is constructed of grotesque elements; catharsis is absent, indeed impossible, for the little man of the twentieth century is merely a victim of history, not its shaper. Golghelóghi, who has served Satan’s rule and created the Magnum Latrocinium, and who has suffered under it too, journeys along the World Road unredeemed, alongside his many millions of companions, each dragging along his own flawed life. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, whom the Button-moulder seeks to melt down again because, in life, he was neither truly good nor truly evil, and is thus unworthy of redemption (glorification). He is condemned to life – that is, to the earthly Hell…
In 1972, Győző Határ’s two-volume collection of plays, Sírónevető (lit. Laughing-Crying), appeared; the plays in this volume, along with earlier radio plays and fairy-tale dramas, were later included in the collection Drámák (lit. Dramas), published in Hungary in 2002. His stage pieces are more topical today than when they were composed. Some he himself defined – on account of their mythic character – as ‘mystery plays’ (Gargilianus, Kötélvilág [lit. World of Rope], Pásztoróra [lit. Love tryst), though these, too, parody our own age under the cloak of esotericism. Several other works may be regarded as social satires which address our times and speak directly to them, in which, by means of the devices of the theatre of the absurd, he predicts the ‘world explosion’ at the turn of the millennium or depicts, as negative utopia, our terrifying future (A ravatal [lit. Catafalque], Libegő [lit. The Chairlift], Szalamandrák [lit. Salamanders], Hamu a mamumondó, Bunkócska [lit. Dear Club], etc.). In Hernyóprém (lit. Caterpillar Fur), he parodies the working of power; in a few psychological absurd plays, he illuminates the mental deformations of modern civilisation with the help of tale-like, mythic archetypes (Mangún, Patkánykirály [lit. Rat King], Némberköztársaság [lit. Republic of Shrews], Elefántcsorda [lit. Herd of Elephants]).
Taken as a whole, his dramatic oeuvre belongs to that strand of Central European absurd theatre associated with the names of Gombrowicz, Hrabal, Mrożek, and Örkény, which by the 1960s and 1970s already had Hungarian representatives (Géza Páskándi, Károly Szakonyi), and in the 1980s and 1990s further exponents such as Géza Bereményi, Péter Dobai, Lajos Parti Nagy, György Spiró, and others.
His lyrical oeuvre – though in many respects provocative – is not to be understood through the shock tactics of the avant-garde. He employs, freely and always in a highly individual manner, the full formal repertoire of the lyric tradition: with him, it is the feeling of life, the thought to be expressed, that generates the form. In both versification and diction, he remains linked to the Hungarian accentual-syllabic tradition and to classical Greek and Western European verse; he often uses simultaneous structures (for instance, he treats the ancient eight-syllable line or the twelve-syllable line as trochaic or, alternatively, as iambic, and he is fond of choriambic ‘spinnings’, etc.). From folk-lyric structures and song-like stanza patterns through playful, rapid-fire rhythms and stylised role-lyrics to complex, ceremonial or, indeed, de-poeticised, ironic textual ensembles and perfectly crafted sonnet variants, he makes use of every formal possibility, including free-verse configurations. We find nowhere in his work any strained formal innovation; the novelty of the life-feeling and the familiar ring of the forms lend his poetry a particular tension.
One of the most significant and touching aspects of his later poetry is the depiction, with shattering authenticity, of the ‘near-death state’ (for instance, Medvedorombolás [lit. Bear-Purring, 1988]; Halálfej [lit. Death’s Head, 1991]; Üvegkoporsó [lit. Glass Coffin, 1992]). He treats the fact of passing away with light irony, for – as in all things, and in relation to himself – he accepts the objective law of existence (“Álomkardok forgatója voltam / lehanyatlok – kivívtam magam” [lit. “I wielded swords of dream / I fall – I have fought my way through”] – Megadás [lit. Surrender]). He likewise regards as natural the death-dance-like vanishing of friends, loves, memories and dreams in Time: “alápergésünk Urunk bárányegében / malaszt és megnyugvás: megérkezés” [lit. “our trickling down in the fluffy clouds of our Lord / is grace and repose: arrival.”] He acknowledges without rebellion the ancient law (“dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”): “Íme visszafogad a nagy-könyörületes – a földevő – pondró – férgek körforgásában – téged is fölevő: a televény! A veled-termő! – visszafogad a te földed – a Föld!” (lit. “Lo, the great All-Merciful takes thee back – the devourer of earth – in the round of maggots and worms, that will devour thee, too: the humus! Fruitful with thee – takes thee back the earth that bore thee – the Earth!” Portré [lit. Portrait]). In the maelstrom of being we emerge and disappear: sweeping Time before us, we all gradually fall through the gullet of Nothing (Időseprők [lit. Time-Sweepers]). We are tiny candles, shedding our own light in the darkness as long as our fate permits – and then we burn out. Thus the world ends – at least for each separate subject. Yet something of our light may perhaps remain in the hearts of those who come after us.
Today, his complete lyrical oeuvre is accessible in Hungary: the ‘letter-box’ of Győző Határ [his extensive collection of letters and poems] appeared in 1998; Szélhárfa (???) was reissued in 2000; his lyrical grotesque Karkasszban ([lit. In Carcass] – a blasphemous depiction of the circles of the ‘earthly hell’) also in 2000; his late poetry, Télikék [lit. Winter Blues], was published posthumously in 2010.
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The recognition and reception of Győző Határ in Hungary have already begun, in part. He returned home for the first time in January 1989; at Sándor Weöres’s funeral, he delivered the eulogy. In the autumn of that same year, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he was decorated with the Order of the Star of the Hungarian People’s Republic with a Golden Wreath, which he received in person at Parliament. After 1990, he attended every Book Week (Könyvhét) [annual national book week in Hungary]; his earlier and recent works appeared steadily in Hungary; he published regularly in Hungarian periodicals and took part in the work of the Writers’ Union. On 15 March 1991, he received the Kossuth Prize; in 1993, the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts elected him a member (he held his inaugural lecture – Léptékváltás [lit. Change of Scale] – in his capacity as philosopher). In 1994, on his eightieth birthday, he was awarded the Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary; Gyomaendrőd made him an honorary citizen, and the University of Miskolc conferred on him an honorary doctorate. In 1998, at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Technology, he received his gold and diamond diplomas from the rector. In the same year, his complete oeuvre was admitted to the Digital Academy as part of the ‘Digital Immortals’. He lived through the turn of the millennium – on which so many of his Cassandra-like prophecies had dwelt, some of which have already been fulfilled – at the full height of his creative power.
Despite all this, he remained critical of the events following the regime change. Honours did not cloud his perspective. He considered it deplorable that the ‘Marxist salvation-history’ had been replaced by the hypocritical permissiveness of liberalism, which “has led to a totalitarian rule more horrifying even than the dictatorship” – the unlimited reign of Money. And not only in Hungary. “In the Europe of the millennium, the administration of justice has slackened, moral norms have become relative”, and through the nullification of millions of human beings, the power of the mafias has “cast the strata that create the foundations of social existence by their work into a condition of ‘subjection’ surpassing all previous forms” (a new slavery). The country, once again, found itself in a ‘trap situation’.
On 13 November 2006 – the ninety-second birthday of Győző Határ –, Prince Charles hosted a reception at St James’s Palace in honour of the Hungarian émigrés of 1956 living in London. The programme was organised by the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London; an interview was recorded with Győző Határ, the eldest in age and rank, who was present. His wife, the seventy-nine-year-old Piroska Prágai, was already seriously ill in hospital; she died a few days later. Her husband survived her by just one week: on the afternoon of 27 November, he died of heart failure in St George’s Hospital. In accordance with their wishes, their final resting place is in Hungarian soil, at Farkasrét cemetery in Budapest, their togetherness now eternal in Eternity.
[2013]
The author holds a Candidate of Literary Science degree and is a member of the public body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.