The Hungarian community in Croatia may indeed say this of itself. The first appearance of Ferenc Kontra’s works within the literary sphere of Vojvodina (Vajdaság) articulated a quality previously unknown there. From the outset, Kontra was not drawn into the currents of the post-avant-garde; instead, he dared to seek out his own voice: the voice of unflinching candour in representing minority existence, the voice of a deep attachment to the Drava Triangle (Drávaszög), the sober, prose-inflected voice of guilt and moral transgression, articulated in the language of authenticity and self-identity.
At the outset of his artistic career, he appeared with volumes of poetry (Jelenések [lit. Revelations], 1984; Fehér tükrök [lit. White Mirrors], 1986). His poetry sought its voice between rock lyrics and lyrical landscape verse; he subsequently turned to prose, which from 1988 onwards has defined his creative oeuvre. His prose, in turn, searched for and found its form at the intersection of the ballad, the folktale, modern essayistic prose, and the lyrical monologue – a form whose distinctive rhythm endows it with a singular magic rarely encountered elsewhere in our reading experience.
This prose world finds its most emphatic expression in his novel Drávaszögi keresztek (lit. Crosses of the Drava Triangle, 1988), a work that processes a vast body of material and presents the everyday life of a Hungarian village community in Baranya through Jani’s recollections, in the ballad-like voice of a first-person narrator. The narrative approaches its subject less through sociographic objectivity than through a mythicising, folkloristic, and self-reflexive prose idiom, while the loosely linked episodes project the authentic chronicle of a dwindling community. A strikingly recurring motif – already signalled by the Christian symbolism of the title – is a sequence of deaths (the characters fall victim to murder, suicide, accident, or abortion), which at the same time provides the text with an inner cohesion; in this Hungarian community beyond Hungary’s borders, everyone walks their own way of the cross, and it is precisely this that lends their destinies a particular existential depth. As Gábor Kránicz argues from a hermeneutic perspective, “the participation of the people presented in the novel in the way of the cross is not to be grasped […] in the taking up of the Redeemer’s cross, but rather in the way in which the interpretation of this way of the cross, as reflected in the text, is refracted through the characters’ paths, which also intersect one another’s lives. […] The command to bear the cross therefore calls, on the one hand, for the revelation of communion with Christ and with other human beings, and, on the other, for the conscious undertaking of personal martyrdom. In Ferenc Kontra’s text, the assumption of a community of fate and personal martyrdom – as participation in the suffering story of others – appear as conditions of one another.” The novel also bears the innovative marks of postmodern textual construction, most conspicuously in its distinctive segmentation and typographic layout: there are no chapters, the novel forms a single textual corpus, and the author continuously disrupts the boundaries of sentence-units, a procedure he himself calls “line-breaks collapsing beneath one another”. The work can also be read as a stream-of-consciousness novel: as Jani hurries to the hospital because his father is dying, he recollects, framed by the almost verbatim repetition of the opening and closing sentences (“I’m arriving late.” – “I arrived late.”). The second edition of the novel, published in 2008, differs substantially from the first: it introduces conventionally numbered chapters, lineation aligned to the outer margin, and a new closure to the plot, while the revised ending suggests a far more optimistic outlook; by his own admission, Kontra reworked the book in order, at the age of fifty, to take stock of his literary oeuvre to date.
In the short stories of his confessional cycle Nagy a sátán birodalma (lit. Great Is the Empire of Satan, 1991), Ferenc Kontra looks deep into the historical past of minority Hungarians while addressing themes of perennial urgency. In a story that evokes the figure of Géza Csáth, it is as though the occasion arises to clarify the major questions that preoccupied the writer himself. In A galambok titka (lit. The Secret of the Pigeons), as he watches a one-legged pigeon he imagines that “all at once it takes flight, loses its way among the clouds, and cannot find its way home. When it no longer has even a single leg, it must do nothing but fly, and then its wings too will wear away, and it will drown in the cloud.” The author’s worldview – built on an acute sense of lostness, the fear of having to flee, and the bitterness of being stigmatised – culminates in his so-called war stories. In these works, questions of fate present themselves in their concrete historical determination, as Kontra evokes characteristic episodes from the lives of the Hungarians of Baranya: driven from their homeland, dispossessed, and subjected to profound humiliation. In Hazát hazudni (lit. Lying a Homeland), an old woman, falling at the feet of the “rusty Redeemer”, prays: “If we go, Lord, who will finish the church? Where shall we find a home, we who are homeless? You will let us go, for everyone is being uprooted. Grant, Lord, that we may survive this modern-day migration of peoples. Until now we have lived far from feast days. Forgive us, Lord, that we leave in silence, for our silence is more than complicity.” In the figure of the praying old woman, the cruelty of flight takes on tangible form. This book, writes Imre Bori, traces the coherent line of development of Kontra’s oeuvre – a trajectory that would determine the creative principle of an entire decade.
In the first section of the tripartite volume, entitled Hazudtak szép hazát nekünk (lit. They Lied a Fair Homeland to Us), one finds one of the collection’s most harrowing and formally accomplished pieces, Esős napok (lit. Rainy Days). The short story creates the impression that the narrator is in a constant process of shifting perspective, seeing events anew each time through the eyes of the person who, in reality, could have witnessed them most closely; as a result, the text alternates between the surreal lyricism of archaic folk prayer, retrospective passages that scan the past, and moments of painstaking enumeration marked by the detached precision of an objective observer.
In the second cycle, entitled A túlélés elátkozottai (lit. The Cursed of Survival), a surreal, nightmarish procession of the dead comes to the fore. In these narratives, the author addresses the total devaluation of moral values. Particular emphasis must be given to the short story Sármadár (lit. Mudbird), which opens with a darkly comic episode of urban folklore – a pig slaughter using bottled gas, culminating in the animal’s explosion – an episode that leads into the first tragedy and then, with a virtuosity worthy of the finest masters of horror, unfolds a sequence of ever more terrifying scenes by exploiting the mysticism latent in everyday life. Whereas in some of the stories Kontra merely allows the weight of events themselves to generate their effect, here he gives precedence to psychological portrayal: through delays and digressions he elevates the accumulating forebodings of the ordinary into mysticism, thereby making it clear that he handles the horror genre with assured mastery as well.
The third unit of the book bears the title Háborúk vigyáznak ránk (lit. Wars Are Watching Over Us); its short stories are tableaux of life in wartime that confront the reader with the irreplaceability of the human being and the singular value of human existence.
The short prose pieces of his volume A Holtak országa (lit. The Land of the Dead, 1993) are likewise marked by a documentary quality, with a strong emphasis on fact-finding and unflinching directness. The earlier allegorical and oblique modes of expression give way to precise designations of place, time, and name; combined with authorial fiction, these generate a distinctively lyrical form of factual literature.
With the short-story collection Kalendárium (lit. Calendar, 1993), Kontra creates a magical narrative space. By casting into story the events, formative moments, memories, emotions, experiences, and visions of childhood, he simultaneously erects a monument to the metaphysics of childhood and to the concrete realities of his own life; the stories of Kalendárium, too, unfold as a loosely linked sequence. Throughout, he remains faithful to the aesthetic standard he has set for himself: he addresses children as if speaking to adults – without condescension, without infantilisation – always taking them seriously.
In the short-story collection Úgy törnek el (lit. They Break Like This, 1995), Ferenc Kontra continued to document the Golgotha of the Hungarian minority in the Southland, above all that of the Hungarians of the Drava Triangle (Drávaszög). At the same time, he moved beyond his earlier perspective: the articulated content acquired a more general validity, while his mode of expression partly distanced itself both from the earlier documentary, almost verbatim recording of events and from the essayistic short story. The volume is also distinctive in Kontra’s oeuvre in that it marks the first appearance of the so-called ‘I-story’, a sharpened form of the stream-of-consciousness short story, in works such as Iatrogén ártalom (lit. Iatrogenic Harm) and later Break of Day. In these texts, the present-tense immediacy of plot-driven narration is replaced by inner experience; fractured perceptions, accumulations of experience, and memories move into the foreground. Largely absent from this volume is the deep lyricism with which Kontra approached past events in his earlier narratives. Here, the reader is confronted instead with the concreteness of the present and with a fault line that renders any act of reintegration impossible.
In 1998, Kontra published the prose collection Gyilkosság a joghurt miatt (lit. Murder Because of Yoghurt), bearing the subtitle A bűn mint próza (lit. Crime as Prose). In the first cycle of the volume, guilt comes to the fore – a guilt that takes hold in the wake of perceived or real transgressions, built upon reminiscences of childhood naivety. The short stories grouped in the opening cycle, entitled Apám földrajza (lit. My Father’s Geography), without exception shape the fears and enthusiasms of childhood into narrative form. From scenes of school and family life to formative experiences in the cinema of Lug (Laskó), a number of moments from adolescence are here given literary embodiment – moments that would recur in the author’s later works as well.
The volume’s second cycle, Felhőszakadás (lit. Cloudburst), comprises narratives that present the stark life-situations of a war that has receded from the ‘yesterday’ of the present into the near past. These five stories are distinctive precisely in that they are not conventional war tales: they are not about soldiers, not about battles, not about heroic offensives or prudent retreats. Instead, they fuse the surreal realism of the everyday lives of victims, their families, and civilian survivors with the chilling effect of instinctive and irrational human actions. A telling example is Murder Because of Yoghurt, whose title and central episode – the impulsive killing of an Albanian burek baker, borrowed from a real newspaper report – not only illuminates the background to the act committed by a demobilised, traumatised soldier, but, through its allusion to the Serbian ‘yoghurt revolution’ of 1988 that curtailed the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo, also unmistakably evokes the region’s historical tragedy. The short story Felhőszakadás (lit. Cloudburst) recounts the journey of a couple transporting their child’s remains in a crate. In the cycle Fénykazuisztika (lit. Light Casuistry), the author returns to a deliberately slow-paced mode of narration: in a chapter told as a single long sentence he speaks of experiences and impressions in phrasing that, alongside the often lyrical reverberations of the lived moment, also projects the creator’s inner composure. Composed of seven stories, Light Casuistry is, in a sense, a collection of ‘found objects’ thematically arranged; as the title’s second element suggests, it is a set of cases – an assemblage of case-studies – yet ‘casuistry’ also carries a figurative sense, referring to verbal quibbling and hair-splitting. The most formally disruptive and narratively innovative texts in the volume – pieces that the literary historian Györgyi Pécsi reads as prose poems – cannot be tied to a specific life-stage, landscape, or historical memory, because in them the act of writing itself becomes the subject. The cycle’s title story, for instance, directs attention to how meaning is produced through stimuli that operate both visually and verbally, and through shifting narrative perspectives; A mi macskánk megdöglött (lit. Our Cat Died), the story of a man entering a self-service shop, opens up an entire range of literary possibilities; while the closing piece, Csáth Géza utolsó novellája (lit. Géza Csáth’s Last Short Story), exemplifies the formative power of literary tradition, as the author attempts – on the basis of a drawing and a few sketches – to identify with his intellectual predecessor and to write in his place what Csáth himself was no longer able to complete.
A four-character drama brings this panopticon of fates to a close. The text moves retrospectively from individual destinies towards the general: the four figures are so interchangeable – in both character and their assumption of fate – that each acquires emblematic significance only against the backdrop of the general historical processes that shape their conduct. That backdrop is history itself, bearing a burden no lighter than the period “between the two rains” – November 1944 to November 1956 – in the border zone, a span delimited at both its beginning and end by the culmination of individual and collective (ideological) evil. Határsár (lit. Border Mud) thus emerges as a striking metaphor: for existence as such, for minority existence in particular, and, beyond this, for human moral endurance.
While Drávaszögi keresztek gives voice to collective memory, Gimnazisták (lit. Students at a Grammar School, 2002) turns instead to the unraveling of personal narrative threads.
This novel centres on the experience of alienation lived by a Hungarian adolescent boy from Vojvodina as a grammar school student in Pécs. Set during the period of Kádár-era and Titoist socialism, the narrative depicts a world in which the everyday lives of both the poorer, provincially born students living in the dormitory and their more affluent Pécs-born classmates are shaped by the playful exuberance of student pranks, the excitement of adolescent love, a passion for rock music, and the frustration and vulnerability produced by institutionalised teacherly authority. Within this environment, the boy from outside the national borders, arriving at a school in the mother country and carrying his family’s intellectual and moral legacy, encounters the existential experience of “being outside the community – that is, of inner alienation” (Erika Bence). As an explicitly autobiographical novel, Gimnazisták also offers insight into the beginnings of the author’s literary career.
Ferenc Kontra’s most cathartic novel, The Hour of the Wolves (2003), is a descent narrative. The narrator is an adult man who attempts to process memories tied to four major phases of his life, recurring in the form of tormenting dream images. The condition that sets in during the early-morning hour indicated by the title – an assault-like state that returns involuntarily and resists conscious control – is the psychosomatic consequence of the protagonist’s sense of being cast into alien environments. The first traumatic dream sequence is rooted in bitter childhood family memories, his father’s tyranny, and the death of his friend Ciga; this is followed by the loss of illusion and inner rupture associated with a long-anticipated journey to Australia. The third nightmare derives from his experiences during the days spent in the neurological ward of a military hospital in Sarajevo. In the final section of the novel, the narrator – bound emotionally only to his German shepherd – is confronted with memories of extreme cruelty and trauma lived through while working as a body handler during the NATO bombing campaign.
In Wien a sínen túl (lit. Vienna Beyond the Rails, 2006), the narrator, Wian, grappling with the last earthly remains of a single dead man, attempts to piece together the great puzzle of truth, as though assembling a mosaic. As Judit Mudriczki observes: “The final piece of the novel cycle is an immense metaphor for life, human identity, purity and sin, and above all for death. Its settings – cultivated Vienna (Wien) and the ‘beyond-the-rails’ suburb, governed by its own, harsher laws – are inner landscapes in Hermann Hesse’s sense, Seelenlandschaften, while the two principal narrative strands project a process of thought that may elucidate the philosophy of existence. Gradually, and only in fragments, the frame narrative unfolds before the reader: Wian’s Bildungsroman initially dominates; then, increasingly, the completed arc of Thomas’s life – a boy of the same age, later a young man – comes to bear the primary narrative weight. Throughout, the emphasis rests on meditative elements, within a narrative of extraordinarily complex symbolism, in which the dialogues at times seem merely the external projections of an inner dialogue. We move through interior landscapes, ‘the rooms of memory’, rooms that must be furnished even when doing so seems painfully hard.”
Ferenc Kontra’s novel, constructed as a sequence of interconnected short stories, is concerned with the fate of the individual as it unfolds at the intersection of space, time, and death. Angyalok regénye (lit. The Novel of Angels, 2014) follows a protagonist in search of the road leading home. He must keep the map constantly before his eyes. The map itself is the plan. He can rely on nothing but the angels, who come to his aid in a variety of guises. The work approaches the singular phenomenon of identity loss from broader spatial and temporal perspectives, and through its brilliant narrative technique makes clear that one may become an outcast even without ever having left one’s homeland. In this novel, Ferenc Kontra unfolds further stations of fate before the reader and reflects on the paradox of a person’s inability to be who they essentially are.
In The Novel of Angels, the voice of the “speaking” boy emerges from behind a world of historical, art-historical, cultural-historical, and religious figures and legends, filtered through the narrative and visual universe of a family breviary, and articulated together with “other” narratives. The overlapping, alternating, and mutually reinforcing stories – as one reviewer of the book aptly observes – transmit messages and meanings concerning “the great mysteries of life”. The mystical and wondrous narratives thus revealed reach back to mythological time and, passing through the world of medieval legends, the great Renaissance creation narratives, Baroque works, nineteenth-century anticipations, fin-de-siècle histories of decline, decadent epochs and sensibilities, and the narrative vortex of twentieth-century global catastrophes, lead toward an understanding of the events of a family history unfolding in the second half of the twentieth century. In the imagination of the protagonist, who seeks the key to understanding existence in the world, novella-like short narratives come into being: parallel lives and alter egos, called forth by journeys and by objects, as well as by the sight and legend of places – historical sites, architectural structures, and works of art. Two constant motifs create continuity among the individual pieces of the short-story sequence that constitutes the novel: the various manifestations of the angel and of death – from visionary apparitions to the stone angel.
Ferenc Kontra’s novel Az álom hídja (lit. The Bridge of Dreams) was published in 2018. At the centre of the author’s interest stand the traumatic effects – physical, psychological, and communal, manifesting in multiple forms and persisting to this day – of NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Serbia, which lasted seventy-eight days, on the lives of ordinary people, the citizens of Novi Sad (Újvidék). The novel gives rise to a textually compelling literary flow of unprocessable horror. The central motif of the novel, foregrounded already by the title, is the bridge: the bridge that “formerly connected the populations of the two riverbanks” and embodied a sense of cohesion and belonging. During the bombardments, however, the bridge was destroyed as a strategic target, thereby rendering rapid and unhindered crossing of the river impossible. On the level of the text, the bridge motif is organised into a variety of rhetorical configurations, while also playing a significant role in the construction of the narrative units, thus contributing to the fragmentary compactness of the work. Az álom hídja also evokes, among other things, the passage between the relative backwardness of the East and the technological development and material wealth of the West. The novel constitutes an authentic literary gallery of war-time horrors – a memento and, at the same time, a work of literary sociography.
The articulation of liminal situations had already played a prominent role in Kontra’s earlier novels. From this perspective, it suffices to recall, for example, the Australia–Europe axis foregrounded in A Farkasok órája, or, even more pointedly, the sharp opposition between suburb and inner city in the fictional world of Wien a sínen túl. In these cases, however, liminality is experienced and articulated primarily by individuals – above all the protagonist-narrator and a limited number of characters – rather than by a community as such. In Az álom hídja, by contrast, the traumatic liminal condition produced by war becomes, even at the level of articulation, the shared concern of an entire community. It is precisely this narrative collectivity that constitutes the decisive difference and the major prose-poetical innovation of Az álom hídja when compared with the author’s earlier works. The bridge and the railway had functioned as semantic and symbolic counterpoles to one another; the destruction of the bridge annihilates this opposition. It is therefore no coincidence that, in reflecting specifically on the 2018 novel, Zoltán Czini refers to Kontra as “the most significant Southland novelist of death, alienation, and the longing for elsewhere”.
A community may count itself fortunate if it has sons who think with prophetic inspiration. The Hungarian community in Croatia can say this of itself. It may justly take pride in its outstanding writer, Ferenc Kontra, whose prose evokes the dark periods of our history with both documentary force and lyrical expressiveness.
References
Beke, Ottó. “Traumafeldolgozás az álom hídján” (lit. Trauma Processing on the Bridge of Dreams). Review of Az álom hídja, by Ferenc Kontra. Bárkaonline. Accessed 2 June 2020, 11:23. http://barkaonline.hu/kritika/6571-traumafeldolgozas-az-alom-hidjan
Bence, Erika. “Kontra Ferenc: Angyalok regénye.” Kortárs (Budapest), no. 12 (2014): 95–98.
Czini, Zoltán. “Kontra.” Review of Az álom hídja (Budapest: Magyar Napló, 2018), by Ferenc Kontra. Családi Kör (Subotica), vol. 29 (2018), 6 September, 21.
Fekete J., József. “Félúton a halál felé. Kontra Ferenc elbeszéléseiről” (lit. Halfway towards Death: On Ferenc Kontra’s Short Fiction). Új Forrás (Tatabánya) 30, no. 7 (1998): 74–85.
Huszka, Árpád. Kontra Ferenc írói munkássága (lit. The Literary Oeuvre of Ferenc Kontra). Budapest: Coldwell Art Bt., 2016.
Jakab-Köves, Gyopárka. “Aki dacol a kánonokkal” (lit. One Who Defies the Canons). Afterword to Ferenc Kontra, Idegen. Trilógia. Budapest: Magyar Napló – Írott Szó Alapítvány, 2013, 611–635.
Kránicz, Gábor. “Egy faluregény vége” (lit. The End of a Village Novel). Review of Drávaszögi keresztek, by Ferenc Kontra. ÚjNautilus, 2010. Accessed 21 June 2020, 00:32. http://ujnautilus.info/egy-faluregeny-vege-kontra-ferenc-dravaszogi-keresztek
Mák, Ferenc. “Az álmok mindig visszatérnek” (lit. Dreams Always Return). Review of Nagy a sátán birodalma, by Ferenc Kontra. Tiszatáj (Szeged) 45, no. 12 (1991): 101–102.
Mudriczki, Judit. “A bennrekedt történetek folyton körbejárnak: Személyes, kulturális és metanarratív emlékezet Kontra Ferenc Angyalok regénye című művében” (lit. The Stories That Remain Trapped Keep Circling: Personal, Cultural, and Metanarrative Memory in Ferenc Kontra’s Angyalok regénye). In Újrealizmus és modernség a mai magyar irodalomban, edited by Margit Ács, 125–133. Budapest: Magyar Napló, 2015.
Mudriczki, Judit. “Irodalomterápia a hídon innen és túl” (lit. Literary Therapy on This Side of the Bridge and Beyond). Review of Az álom hídja (Budapest: Magyar Napló, 2018), by Ferenc Kontra. Tiszatáj (Szeged) 72, no. 9 (2018): 118–120.
Pécsi, Györgyi. “Kontra Ferenc: Gyilkosság a joghurt miatt.” In Olvasópróbák 2, 93–99. Miskolc: Felsőmagyarország Kiadó, 2003.
Tóth, Erzsébet. “A gyermekkórház titkai” (lit. The Secrets of the Children’s Hospital). Review of Az álom hídja, by Ferenc Kontra. In A macskám Pasolinit olvas (lit. My Cat Reads Pasolini), 117–128. Budapest: Nap Kiadó, 2019.
Kilátással a tengerre. Esszék, tanulmányok Kontra Ferenc műveiről (lit. With a View of the Sea: Essays and Studies on Ferenc Kontra’s Works). Budapest: Arany János Alapítvány, 2018.