His art stands on the triple foundation of prose, drama, and film.
He attributed an important role in the start of his literary career to the friendship of János Pilinszky. He was encouraged to begin publishing by Sándor Weöres. He names three cornerstones of his literary and artistic career, these being individuals who continually shaped Hernádi’s art of writing. The first is his acquaintance with Miklós Jancsó. István Nemeskürty introduced them to each other, thereby launching a decades-long collaborative work that enriched Hungarian cinematography with numerous opuses, and simultaneously giving life to a friendship that transcended their professional collaboration. András Fodor is the ‘second pillar’, to whom he sent his poems in the early 1950s and who later became his friend. The third is József Czimer, a dramaturge, who encouraged Hernádi to write drama, which led to his first play, Falanszter (lit. Phalanstery), and through this anticipated trust, Gyula Hernádi became a man of the theatre, the author of many stage plays.
Gyula Hernádi’s oeuvre organically fits into the innovative process that characterised Hungarian prose literature of the 1960s. Experimentation, the search for new forms, and means of expression are keywords in Hernádi’s literature. Due to his character, he always moved counter to the canons and those behaviours which advertise and represent a consumer quality rather than the originality of the personality. The generic backbone of the Hernádi oeuvre consists of the novel and the short story, complemented by the triple of poetry, drama, and film. However, this complementation by no means implies the inferiority of the other two genres.
His career began in 1955. His first poems were published in Csillag, but the continuation was slow in coming. In 1959, his new volumes were published: the novel A péntek lépcsőin (lit. On the Steps of Friday) and the collection of short stories Deszkakolostor (lit. The Plank Monastery). Both books spoke in a remarkably unusual voice, so it is no wonder that the literary public immediately noticed them, along with the originality of their creator.
A péntek lépcsőin (lit. On the Steps of Friday) is a biblical parable novel. The parable, or parable, is a literary form of symbolic-metaphorical communication. It became popular in times when the ruling power prompted artists to use an indirect mode of speech. The novel’s title refers to Good Friday, Jesus’s suffering and death, which also carries the possibility of resurrection. The protagonist of the novel was once a creative intellectual but later became a weary official. He cheats on his wife while she is giving birth to their child. The infant is born in a critical condition, and the husband blames himself for what happened. The man’s calvary also reveals the failure of his generation: the wounds left by history, which may not always affect a person directly, but indirectly leave an imprint on our lives, decisions, and steps taken or not taken. The tragedy of the protagonist, just like that of Good Friday, is rendered bearable by the catharsis that provides perspective. The protagonist can still hope for his child’s recovery, and the motive of sin and penance culminates in absolution. It is interesting, however, that this latter element is missing from the original version; the parents can only visit their child in the cemetery.
The short story collection Deszkakolostor (lit. The Plank Monastery) was published at the same time as the novel. This collection, rich in both thematic and generic terms, contains traditional parables, which are modern versions of Aesop’s fables. Easily understandable stories contain philosophical truths and wisdom. The majority of the short stories are autobiographically inspired memories, and as such, their tone is direct and often lyrical.
The collection of short stories has a particularly important role, as – albeit on a small scale – almost all the tonalities of the entire Hernádi oeuvre can be found within it. A group of works in the volume comprises psychological and existential-philosophical short stories. These writings are continuations of Karinthy’s short story writing. But Hernádi can also be associated with all those artists (e.g., Iván Mándy) who previously renewed epic material with poeticism or surrealism. The compositional structure of these short stories is similar to that of a fairy tale; fiction and reality are barely distinguishable in them. The fairy tale fiction is later replaced by the voice of surrealism and the fantastic. The heroes of these stories are mostly ordinary people, often living on the fringes of society, and it is an almost common feature of the characters that only a secret, a long-cherished desire, or joy makes their lives bearable. In the short story Assisi Szent Ferenc bűne (lit. The Sin of Saint Francis of Assisi), the protagonist, a tamer who speaks the language of animals, asks the tiger for forgiveness because he failed to recognise its damaged vocal cords in time and tried to speak to it. The protagonist of A csillagszekér kocsisa (lit. The Driver of the Star-Wagon) loses the meaning of his life when his horses, banned from the city, are taken to the slaughterhouse. With the disappearance of the last horse-drawn carriages, the direct connection between man and animal also ceases; the nostalgia, reminiscent of Krúdy, can also be interpreted as a symbol of a more complete life. The antipodes of these short stories are also present in the volume; alongside the everyday ‘saints’, there are also violent figures and ruthless self-assertors. This counterpointing typology is vividly manifested in the narratives using the experiences of war and captivity (Csak egy nap a világ [lit. The World is Only One Day], Visszavonulás [lit. Retreat], Gyilkos [lit. Murderer]).
Another group of short stories could be called social parable short stories; they are realistic, yet they also carry a hidden multi-layeredness (A csend [lit. The Silence], Angyali üdvözlet [lit. Annunciation], A színész [lit. The Actor], A csodagyerek első csodája [lit. The Child Prodigy’s First Miracle], Parókás Sámson [lit. Wigged Samson]). The protagonists of Angyali üdvözlet [lit. Annunciation] are a young married couple who, despite their tiny apartment, hopeless future, and determining circumstances, decide to have a child, believing that all this is only temporary; it is amidst the daily deprivation that they hear the annunciation over the radio. The biblical nature of the title carries one of the main characteristics of Hernádi’s writing: the everyday is elevated into the spheres of the lyrical and the transcendental. A csodagyerek első csodája [lit. The Child Prodigy’s First Miracle] discusses the genesis of artistic vocation, in which music, with its Orphic power, stifles the hatred born from physical disability, loneliness, and poverty.
Confessional short novels are also included in the collection (Hideg van [lit. It is Cold], Só és kenyér [Salt and Bread]). The latter focuses on the mood and experiences of intellectuals who passively suffered the war.
The second stage of the oeuvre consists of short story parables and the psychological novel. The short stories of Száraz barokk (lit. Dry Baroque) and the novel Kiáltás és kiáltás (lit. Shout and Shout) beautifully exemplify the intertwining of parabolism and lyricised surrealism.
The original title of the novel Kiáltás és kiáltás (lit. Shout and Shout) was Az ég bútorai (lit. The Furniture of the Sky), the tragedy of two vulnerable people. “G. and the woman” have already given up on self-fulfilment; they do not protest conspicuously against the inhumanity of fascism, but merely fulfil their lives in private harmony. The style and composition of the work clearly indicate that it actually belongs to an earlier phase of life; the novel’s creation can be dated to 1981, but the 1967 Száraz barokk (lit. Dry Baroque) not only indirectly conveys the novel’s message, but its seven short stories are extracts from the novel, stylised into independent psychological parables. The novel is set in 1958; Gerencsér, the protagonist working at the slaughterhouse, falls in love with Hászné, the personnel officer. The woman’s previous partner was a former State Protection Authority officer [the secret police of the People's Republic of Hungary from 1945 to 1956], and although their relationship is over, the man still clings to her. Gerencsér and Hászné travel to the Mátra Mountains, where men break into their cabin at night, and the former State Protection Authority officer, the ex-boyfriend, beats Gerencsér half to death. In this novel, Hernádi writes about the calvary of innocent, vulnerable people, and with this, his writing is definitively branded as scandalous. He said, “It is only thanks to my ‘roly-poly toy’ nature that I was not eradicated, that I didn’t commit suicide, or defect.”
The same theme reappears in the pieces of Száraz barokk (lit. Dry Baroque). In the case of the short stories, there is a noticeable distinction, not only objectively but also in perspective and style, between the short stories recalling the years of the personality cult and those reflecting the psychosis of the later consolidation. The Hernádi of the sixties sought poetry in small things, and the transcendence in the earthly world. The pieces in Száraz barokk (lit. Dry Baroque) are perfectly saturated from a thematic point of view, yet their imagery is baroque in its complexity. The short stories do not have a traditional plot; their characters reach the world of visions from the most mundane situations. The portrayal of loneliness is key in the pieces of the volume, yet this is not a representation of finding peace in solitude or viewing loneliness as a state of grace. While his portrayal of loneliness can undoubtedly be related to the philosophy of Camus or Sartre, in Hernádi’s case, it is aimed at the fullest possible self-knowledge. “Man is forced to recreate man at every moment without any support or assistance” (Sartre). Most heroes of the volume say “yes, in spite of everything”, which relates him to the Christian poetry of János Pilinszky; Western counterparts include Céline and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
His essay-novel Folyosók (lit. Corridors) (1966) caused just as much sensation in literary life as his earlier novel, and it further develops the train of thought that began in Péntek lépcsőin (lit. On the Steps of Friday). Because of this, it is often referred to as a ‘twin piece’. The work is divided into two parts; in the first, the narrator recounts the death of the protagonist’s father, and the other part deals with economic and philosophical issues, placing an innovative economist at its centre (Tibor Liska, Széchenyi Award-winning economist, creator of the Liska-model). There is no organic connection between these two parts of the novel; the narrator only grammatically ties the text together. In this novel, Hernádi also dissects the fundamental questions of human existence: the possibility of freedom and happiness. Critics saw Folyosók (lit. Corridors) as an upward-curving station in Gyula Hernádi’s career, due to its presentation of the example of the active human being, a humane perspective that transcends the oppressive hopelessness of existence.
His novel Sirokkó (lit. Sirocco) (1969) was originally written as a screenplay. Its interesting feature is that it blends the text from two layers: dialogue and descriptions composed of surrealistic sequences of images, relying on free associations. The novel was not received with great enthusiasm by critics; they viewed the author’s innovative and sometimes truly exaggerated attempts and experiments with suspicion. Gyula Hernádi’s programmed experimental mentality, the deliberately undertaken denial of ‘the traditional’, is also evident here. Alongside fine arts, he mostly tried to apply the means of expression of film to literature. The heightened significance of locations; the movement of characters, and the composition that juxtaposes scenes and dialogues refer to the years spent in film studios and the collaboration with Miklós Jancsó.
His work Az erőd (lit. The Fortress) (1971) conquers the reader with an almost crime-story excitement. His creative method is again narrative neutrality. Its theme is not entirely new either; he writes about violence and the socio-psychological aspects of pathologically distorted power. It speaks highly of Hernádi’s writer’s ingenuity that he does not strive for an abstract description of reality but depicts the subject of the novel as part of a broader novelistic reality. The ‘novel subject’ itself is the ‘venture’ of an elderly, wealthy lady who decides to offer a new kind of entertainment to the rich, who have already experienced everything and are thus insensitive to everything: an artificial war. The unexpected twist of the novel is that real society, as ‘external reality’, enters the fiction. We read excellently written situations in which the language of the present-tense descriptions almost evokes a clumsy, careless usage, as the role of the narrator is reduced merely to recording facts.
The protagonist of the novel Vörös rekviem (lit. Red Requiem) is Imre Sallai, executed in 1932; the work is essentially a psychological novel-fiction built around the persons and martyrdom of Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst. Through their figures, he attempts once again to scrutinise the relationship between the individual and history; the individual’s possibilities for action, decision, and choice within the mechanism of history. A world literature parallel can be drawn with Joyce’s novel Ulysses. It has a pacifist tone, a protest against violence and manipulation. It can also be considered a coda, as its appearance already extends into the period of the Hernádi short story renaissance.
The short story collections Logikai kapuk (lit. Logic Gates) and Jézus Krisztus horoszkópja (lit. The Horoscope of Jesus Christ) caused a great surprise to the readership and brought novelty within the oeuvre. They are collections of fantastic short stories. A new unit in the Hernádi oeuvre begins in 1982. His writer’s creativity is unleashed; the bold plotting of his novels drives the reader into the world of the fantastic. This provoked great antipathy among those who considered sci-fi to be a lower-rank genre, as from this time on, he drew even more from the world of scientific fantastic literature. The pseudo-horror tetralogy begins with the novel Hasfelmetsző Jack (lit. Jack the Ripper); it highly creatively processes the themes of Hernádi’s previous works: the duel between power and morality, and the relationship between dictatorship and the individual. The other three parts of the tetralogy rise into surrealistic spheres, discussing the fundamental questions of life and death. The writer casts his apocalyptic visions into a form that becomes an organic unit of associative poeticism, pornographic farce, and a blend of absurd, grotesque, and sci-fi elements. The message of the tetralogy proclaims: let us at least flash the power of the intellect against the demonic forces.
In 1986, his novel A boldogság templomai (lit. The Temples of Happiness) saw the light of day; its first and most striking feature is its refined artistic quality. This is surprising, as Hernádi’s earlier novels contain a wealth of vulgarisms, and over the years, he had become a famously outspoken novelist. The novel itself evokes the Orpheus myth, centring on the tragedy of an artistic love.
Gyula Hernádi also holds an important role in our literature as a playwright; his dramas began appearing from the 1970s, and the inspiration of film is also discernible here. He breaks away from the main current of Hungarian drama literature – historical and pseudo-historical works – but the depiction of the grotesque nature of everyday existence is equally alien to him.
In the structure of A szép magyar tragédia (lit. The Beautiful Hungarian Tragedy) and Vérkeresztség (lit. Blood Baptism), surrealism is less pronounced. Examining the drama Vérkeresztség, we can see that Gyula Hernádi, as a true man of the theatre, uses the means of creating effect (here, the ‘theatre within a theatre’ method). In this work, the tragic motif of ‘Bloody Thursday’ is connected with artistic conduct: art or revolution, creation or action. A szép magyar tragédia (lit. The Beautiful Hungarian Tragedy) is regarded as his most poetic and moving drama. His biggest and most unequivocally successful play is Királyi vadászat (lit. Royal Hunt). It is the ‘sibling piece’ of Sirocco, Az erőd (lit. The Fortress), and Borotvált tabló, which model the unlimited manipulation of power. Királyi vadászat (lit. Royal Hunt) is based on the transplanting of a motif already known from Az erőd (lit. The Fortress) (an artificially arranged ‘war game’ played as a sport). This war-game takes place on Count Erdődy’s estate, its participants being Hungarian aristocrats who accidentally kill the visiting royal couple, Charles IV and Queen Zita, during the game. “The Count has the royal couple’s roles played by civilian look-alikes, who, however, get so into the roles that they don’t want to remain obedient puppets. The result is the sequence of events already known from the history books – the royal coup of 1921, the ‘Battle of Budaörs’, and then the exile. The Count wants to get rid of the now superfluous alter egos – which is why his men also accompany Charles into exile, to eliminate him at the appropriate moment.”
His play Falanszter (lit. Phalanstery) brought Gyula Hernádi his true success as a playwright. The characters in the drama are members of a communistic community organised according to Fourier's teachings, and we can follow the dissolution of this community in the work, which is also an interpreter of Hernádi’s concept of freedom. “Equality and freedom are the two categories that have always been the most current problem for humanity. I would like all my writings to be about this,” said Gyula Hernádi in an interview. The drama recounts the failure of this idea, but it doesn't question the authenticity and viability of the ideology itself. His play Antikrisztus (lit. Antichrist) is also built around this pair of concepts, complemented by the voice of the fantastic. The possibility of freedom is brought to a backward South American village by the passenger of an alien spaceship. The community is given a prominent role in both dramas. A few figures in this community embody the forms of behaviour that Hernádi wishes to show and communicate. This structure is characteristic of most Hernádi plays.
In Csillagszóró (lit. Sparkler), Hernádi once again explores the individual’s possibilities for action in a decision-making situation. An anarchist group seeks to create a utopian community on an unknown island. The hierarchical ladder would be based on belonging to different blood types, guaranteeing a protected status for the minority and condemning the majority to slow destruction. The drama concludes with a ‘victorious victory’, the triumph of the good characters.
The drama A tolmács (lit. The Interpreter) is set in 16th-century Germany, with real historical figures. Its protagonist, Thomas Müntzer, exemplifies that in certain situations, even the passive humanist being must choose action. In Sparkler and Antichrist, mysticism, transcendence, and the crudest political reality merge, also illustrating that there are situations when a person simply cannot remain an outsider, even if their personal ethics dictate otherwise.
A change occurred in Gyula Hernádi’s work as a playwright in the second half of the 1970s. “The pieces written in the first phase of his career were essentially thesis dramas; works that exemplified the superiority of the ideals of rationalism, progress, and freedom, and the necessity of the revolution’s victory. They were consistent, logical deductions that demonstrated these ideals by presenting various possible decisions and behaviours within a given – rational or irrational – situation. From the second half of the seventies, Hernádi again turned to history for raw material; however, in the pieces of this period, history appears as a comic farce, a carnival spectacle, a burlesque, a circus act, and a bluster. And it shows the darker, more hopeless side of history, the lowest and most negative embodiments of the individual shaping history.” (A magyar irodalom története [lit. The History of Hungarian Literature] 1945–1975).
He attracted criticism precisely because of the changes mentioned above, and rightly so. But we must by no means forget that Gyula Hernádi ultimately presents himself as a great experimenter in everything, including drama writing. However, he always owns up to his mistakes. His dramatic oeuvre, along with his more and less successful pieces, had a beneficial effect on the not-so-diverse contemporary Hungarian drama and theatre art. With his extremes and exaggerations, he remains an original colour on the stage and in the world of drama literature.
Although Gyula Hernádi is primarily known as a prose writer and playwright, the language he uses in his writing makes him look much more like a poet. He uses the Hungarian language brilliantly; András Fodor wrote the following of him: “his writing method, which suddenly collapses and projects perspectives, associating them with images, carries a sui generis poeticism.” He uses a dimension that is not common at all, expanding the fabric of sentences sometimes through dry reason, sometimes through the absurdity of humour, or even through sentimentality.
Film occupies a distinguished place in Gyula Hernádi's oeuvre. When asked what it meant for his writing career, he replied to the interviewer, Bulcsu Bertha: “I think it took such a prominent place in my life because meeting Miklós Jancsó made this relationship a very important defining factor. It is not simply about writing screenplays, but about an alliance aimed at achieving some goal, which is realised in a symbiosis, in perfect cooperation, for almost twenty years.” Their first joint work was Oldás és Kötés (Cantata) (1962). More than twenty films were born from the friendship and collaborative work of Gyula Hernádi and Miklós Jancsó. They established a new style, a new film language, and achieved world-class recognition (Szegénylegények [The Round-Up] (1965); Csillagosok, katonák [The Red and the White] (1967); Csend és kiáltás [Silence and Cry] (1968); Fényes szelek [The Confrontation] (1968), etc.). Hernádi’s work as a screenwriter also had a stimulating effect on him as a prose writer; the literary work often came into being later than the screenplay, as was the case with Kiáltás és kiáltás (lit. Shout and Shout) and Sirocco.
Gyula Hernádi’s very rich and multifaceted oeuvre serves as an example. He masterfully demonstrates how to think in terms of story and history, and how to combine symbol and poetry within them.
[2015]