From Nagyszederfa to Rácpácegres

Ervin Lázár’s literary oeuvre consists of three distinct layers. At the beginning of his career – from the early 1960s – and again toward its end, he primarily wrote short stories. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, he gained extraordinary popularity and recognition as a writer for children, especially as a creator of children’s tales. His novel called A fehér tigris (The White Tiger), published in 1971, appears almost as a detour in his career: no further novels followed. Lázár came to be regarded as a master of short prose, and The White Tiger itself received far less attention than it deserved.

This tripartite structure is further nuanced by the fact that Lázár also wrote radio plays, audio dramas, and screenplays, and that his Napló (Diary), published posthumously, offers a heterogeneous collection of notes – mostly reflections on the creative process as well as everyday impressions and observations.

Various monographic studies – most notably those by Zoltán Pompor and Gabriella Komáromi – agree that no sharp boundary can be drawn between Lázár’s writings “for adults” and those “for children.” They do so with good reason: children’s literature should be regarded as an integral and equally valued part of literary fiction in critical evaluation. It seems excessive, however, to take this “homogenization” so far as to question the novelistic status of The White Tiger, interpreting it instead as a kind of extended short story. I do not believe it is necessary to resolve the apparent contradiction that a great master of short prose wrote a single novel that was not followed by others within his oeuvre. All the more so because The White Tiger remains one of the significant novels of its period, even if, at the time of its publication – and during subsequent reissues – it did not exert a substantial influence on contemporary literary developments.

Although the novel is a rather somber, darkly toned narrative, in its essential characteristics it is closely related to the narrative mode that defines Lázár’s short stories and fairy tales.

As András Görömbei has observed: “Ervin Lázár’s literary quality manifests itself most clearly in the way his unusual and enigmatic stories combine everyday reality with a vision-like realm that transcends it, thereby conveying the events and laws of existence. He is capable of shaping the beauty, mystery, and absurdity of being into narratives of lasting validity.”

Let us unfold this dense interpretation. Ervin Lázár always tells a story – even at times when Hungarian literature is swept by fashionable currents proclaiming that stories no longer exist. Lázár’s writing is referential: it speaks about reality, though not necessarily through raw realism. Rather, he infuses his narratives with enigmatic, magical elements which, precisely through their irrational, miraculous, or absurd nature, expose and reveal reality itself. The real and the magical exchange places with one another as naturally as the characters in the tale Tótágas (Upside Down) begin to walk on their hands.

This literary “tótágas” – this turning of the world upside down – has at least a threefold origin, as Zoltán Pompor has pointed out. One of its sources is Alsó-Rácegrespuszta, and the tales of the people of the Great Plain that evoke archaic times. Its inner driving force is an irrepressible playfulness, a playful impulse that manifests itself with such direct naturalness in very few prose writers. And – lest we forget the third source – it is the child’s perspective, the world of childhood imagination and fantasy, that provides this playfulness with a sense of inviolable familiarity and belonging.

The writer never explains or justifies the wondrous elements of his stories. As Györgyi Pécsi writes in connection with Csillagmajor (Starfarm): “The writer merely announces the fact that a human being hears and sees more than what is customary. Because one is human, because one understands something of the mystery of existence – above all, that one cannot ‘understand’ or ‘explain’ everything. That what we need is not so much ‘miracles’ as a sensitivity to the miraculous, in order to connect ourselves to the great whole shrouded in mystery.”

This characterization is not yet entirely applicable to Lázár’s beginnings: the more realistic, stripped-down perception of reality in his early short stories gradually becomes saturated with various playful elements of mystery, miracle, and impossibility. Starfarm represents the culmination of this transformation.

Lázár’s earliest short stories depict individuals torn from their natural – rural, village-based – environment, wandering as strangers through the big city in a variety of life situations. As Zoltán Pompor has noted: “In Ervin Lázár’s early short fiction, the value system of the metropolitan world and that of the protagonists who enter this alien environment stand in irreconcilable opposition to one another. The central figures of these narratives adapt to the new circumstances and strike compromises with the world in order to survive. Written with almost sociographic precision, these stories are best defined as depictions of states or situations.” A recurring embodiment of this condition in several stories is Ézsaiás Illés, whose very name seems to predestinate him to prophesy the hope of a better world to the indifferent and petty-minded inhabitants of the city. Yet Ézsaiás Illés proves inherently unfit for this role, as he himself is compelled to make compromises under the pressure of his surroundings. In numerous sombre-toned stories that nevertheless portray his personality with irony (Játék álarcban [Playing in Disguise]; Mit tettél [What Have You Done], Lőrinc Forrai; Egy lapát szén Nellikének [A Shovel of Coal for Nellike], among others), Lázár grapples with the question of how long the memory of childhood and of one’s homeland can remain intact within an environment incapable of either understanding or tolerating such forms of otherness. The ambiguity and ultimate failure of Ézsaiás Illés’s relationships determine the outcome of these narratives: the realisation that, if he wishes to preserve his inner purity, he must remain an outsider forever. Hence the prevailing emotional tone is one of sadness: “Ézsaiás Illés had become as hopeless as his room; he sat dejectedly on the edge of his bed. What is more, he felt that this condition was final – that there was no way for him to climb out of this room, nor out of this bleak sadness.”

One of the emblematic short stories of this early phase is A Masoko köztársaság (The Republic of Masoko). The narrative’s basic situation is shaped by the bleakness of subsistence in rented rooms; from this state of constriction the protagonist breaks out into the world of imagination, a world he nearly loses after being expelled from his lodgings, until he suddenly realises: “He left behind the shabby houses of the outskirts; the cruel cubes of a new housing estate stared back at him, and then he felt a smile spreading from deep within. […] It was then that he understood that the Republic of Masoko had not perished. It was there, deep inside him.”

An exodus into the world of imagination? Certainly – but also the beginning of a new mode of perception, in which miracles and absurd abilities become a natural part of the world: from the figure who collects emptiness from the hollows of objects (A gyűjtögető [The Collector]) to the magician who truly turns a rabbit into a tiger (A bűvész [The Magician]). Magical elements emerge in these stories; the sociographic mode of perception gives way to the absurd (which, nevertheless, more often than not, proves powerless against the sober realism of the external world). The narrative voice, too, is no longer as austere as in the earliest works, making room for playfulness – a development already evident in the Ézsaiás-story entitled Rozmaring (Rosemary).

In his analysis of the collection of radio plays from the early 1970s (Franka Cirkusz –Franka’s Circus), Zoltán Pompor identifies several affinities between the short stories and the audio dramas. On the one hand, remembrance becomes a central element in the radio plays as well; on the other, escape into the realm of imagination appears here too as a form of rebellion against the barrenness of the world: “The apparently opposite narrative movements – depth and height – of the radio play Lenn a kútban (Down in the Well) and the short story A bolond kútásó (The Mad Well-Digger) nevertheless point in the same direction: outward, away from the world. In both cases, the dreams of the well-diggers are rendered unattainable by an uncomprehending environment – deaf and blind to miracles – and, as no other option remains, both are written out of reality into a fantastic dimension, from which their voices can still be heard by an observer attentive (to the past).” The only exception to this is the radio play Krimi (Thriller): “Krimi has a positive resolution in the sense that the past evoked by memory – contrary to the rationalist thinking of the male protagonists – does in fact become reality, and the fantastic triumphs over realism.”

Prior to the radio plays, Lázár Ervin published his parabolic novel The White Tiger. It is a chilling, sombre story about power and the abuse of power; about good intentions and the way they can turn malign. A white tiger attaches itself to Gábor Makos, a development that makes him simultaneously a social outcast and the possessor of supernatural power. With the tiger’s aid, he can overcome almost anything – even the oligarchic authority oppressing the town. Yet Gábor Makos – though the author, with great narrative skill, ensures that we root for him throughout – is in fact an anti-hero: he fails to grasp the true meaning of his mission and employs his power almost out of boredom, at times for good, at times for ill. And as he increasingly ceases to live with this power and instead abuses it, the source of that power, the white tiger – which neither smells nor feels hunger or thirst – begins to turn against itself: it starts to lose its whiteness, its spots reappear, and it begins to feel thirst. Makos Gábor flees the city together with the tiger. The novel ends with two laconic sentences: “The tiger walked at his knee. He looked down at it, and the acrid stench of wild beasts struck his nose.”

The white tiger is a peculiar metaphor: the embodiment of power itself. As long as Makos Gábor strives to use it for good, the tiger cuts him off from the outside world, rendering him an undesirable presence. By abusing this power, he can rise from being a banished pariah to become the very leader of the small town – but the price is the loss of the tiger’s whiteness. From that moment on, Makos Gábor can no longer trust the tiger either; he must flee…

If the story were to end here – where, in fact, it rather begins, since The White Tiger, published in 1971, was Lázár Ervin’s third book – then Margit Ács’s earlier observation would still hold true today: “That even power which triumphs in the most just of struggles – against tyranny – and with the aid of the purest and most ideal of beings, the white tiger, automatically turns into tyranny itself, may not be the book’s most bitter lesson. Rather, it is as though Lázár Ervin had become disillusioned with humanity itself. As though he no longer trusted that human beings possess an infallible moral measure, one more enduring and more important than any tyranny, precisely because it is the true weapon against tyranny.” Yet the critic herself already noted in 1974 that after The White Tiger, the writer seemed to have regained his composure – in that “he himself proved capable of preserving his moral measure”.

It is this moral measure that gives Ervin Lázár’s fairy tales their distinctive magic, as well as that peculiar – by now unmistakably original – Lázár-like blend of storytelling already familiar from his short fiction: the untroubled coexistence of everyday reality and the supernatural pulses through every one of his stories. From the outset, the world is turned upside down by his idiosyncratic naming alone: Riz Tejbeg (a wordplay formed from the components of the Hungarian name for semolina pudding), the giant of Norgol; Doctor Zirzurr, the dentist; the occasionally downright hot-tempered Frukkancs; the equally sulk-prone Duzma Dözmő (who is, moreover, a burbók weighed down by the earth – something like a sweet, introverted, endearingly obtuse creature). One could list without end these absurd – no, not absurd at all, but rather imagination-stirring – names, built on the most varied linguistic twists and playful contortions. Children and the adults who may be reading aloud to them can revel together in this verbal cascade, even competing to see who realises first why the true name of the cold artist Kaltzimnói Jeges Diderik is, in fact, Ólacs Óknub (the inverse of the Hungarian “loutisch swindler”).

These names have rhythm; they are playful, and they are surrounded by a certain aura of mystery which – fortunately, since children do not yet read literary history – remains undisclosed. And many of them invariably point to the nature or character of the figure they designate. Vacskamati is indeed a rather silly cat; Nagy Zoárd, the walking pine tree, evokes the austere firs of the mountains; Kisfejű Nagyfejű Zordonbordon (Littlehead Bighead Rigourmigour) is a transparently “speaking name”, one that may also bring to adult readers’ minds certain figures of the Kádár era – small-brained, yet rendered grossly thick-headed by excessive feasting and drinking.

One of the principal differences between the good modern fairy tale and traditional folk tales – and this, too, binds Lázár’s tales closely to his short fiction – is that it does not seek to deceive children with the half-truth of a simple good–evil, black–white opposition. Lázár Ervin’s fairy tales certainly do not. Almost every character in the forest called Négyszögletű Kerek Erdő (The Square Around Forest) is likeable, yet none is a paragon of virtue. Mikkamakka (Muckle Mecky) is just, helpful, and kind-hearted, yet also irritatingly pedantic. Vacskamati (wordplay with “macska” meaning cat) is adorably scatterbrained; Ló Szerafin (Horse Serafin) or Szörnyeget Lajos (Louis the Brute) are hardly intellectual powerhouses either, but they are reliable, generous friends.

And there are, unmistakably, anti-heroes in Lázár Ervin’s fairy tales as well. In Lattipa és a Nap (Lattipa and the Sun), the heroine Lattipa’s “whimsical obstinacy” seeks to imprison the Sun itself. There is no alternative: the court jester has Lattipa locked away “in the crypt of a dilapidated castle”, where, peering out through a barred window, her wish is fulfilled – she sees the Sun behind bars. Is there resolution at the end of the tale, a comforting closure? Not at all. For the anti-hero there is no redemption: “So that is how matters stand,” the narrator concludes. “What else could we do?”

Princess Kriszti, too, may disappoint young girl readers who long for the role of a fairy-tale princess. Neither her devotion to pancakes nor her excess weight can be remedied even by the “inventor of inventions”; indeed, it is the well-meaning “large, fat, sore-footed inventor of inventions” who ends up losing ten kilos while being vigorously chased by Princess Kriszti’s guards. At the end, he sighs: “After all, slimming pancakes really are a great invention!”

Good and bad people (and animals), lovable, endearing, and despicable or pitiable fairy-tale figures walk arm in arm through Lázár Ervin’s stories (and occasionally come to blows), because the true storyteller knows that children are not foolish: they encounter both the sunny and the shadowed sides of life early on, and literature is not meant to deceive them with a world of false illusions.

What renders even the sadder stories – those that end without comforting resolution –so loveable is Lázár Ervin’s greatest virtue: a creative, exuberant, overflowing language of inexhaustible richness, dazzling in colour, playful, and not infrequently uproariously humorous.

Like it or not, this language does not always conform to the expectations of today’s politically correct sensibilities. With playful humour, yet unmistakably, it mocks Princess Kriszti’s fatness: “Princess Kriszti had good reason to grow to hate pancakes. She herself was the weighty reason. For she was round like a domed oven, wide as a haystack, and thick as the Great Mulberry Tree of Rácpácegres.” And what, indeed, is Littlehead Bighead Rigourmigour like? “His head is a jug, his legs are stumps, his belly a barrel, his ears flatbreads, his chest a trough, his mouth an oven.” Aromo, meanwhile, is described as “irrepressibly brain-brained”, and in a former life, we are told, he was “a freelance rabbit. A cabbage specialist.”

The use of recurring epic epithets engraves the characters’ traits into children’s minds, while the soothing rhythm of repetition creates a sense of familiarity and safety. Repetition is one of the most essential components of human existence – indeed, of existence as such. Children, in particular, need it: the regularity that grows out of repetition. Lázár Ervin is especially in his element when he says the same thing again and again through an endless chain of synonyms. He spreads before the reader, like a magic carpet, the unparalleled richness of language, and at once the child’s imagination can take flight. Toward Mikkamakka there “approached the din, the hullabaloo, the hootenanny, the higgledy-piggledy” (Ló Szerafin legyőzi önmagát [Seraphin the Horse Overcomes Himself]). And: “What has happened to Louis the Brute? For a good half hour now he’s been loitering, roaming, reeling, dawdling about this clearing” (Szörnyeteg Lajos, jaj de álmos [Louis the Brute, Oh How Sleepy]). As for Marci, he had “freckles just where they belonged. Pretty ones, handsome ones, cheerful ones” (Szökevény szeplők [Runaway Freckles]). Animation – another characteristic feature of the child’s imagination – makes these freckles even livelier and more endearing: “The biggest was as large as a well-fed pea, and the smallest like a poppy seed on a diet.” Sírós Frukk (Weepy Frukk)’s outrageous crying becomes palpable through grotesque yet playful verbal inventions: “Weepy Frukk bawled. He wailed – wai-wai-wai, he yelped – yel-yel-yel, he boohooed – boo-boo-boo, he hollered—hol-hol-hol.” Later these are fused together: “Wa-yel-boo-hoo-hoool!” And when he is asked why he is crying, the mixture of refined and childishly playful expressions teaches children – almost imperceptibly – the flexibility of language: “Weepy Frukk’s eyes bulged, and the boo-boo stuck in his throat.”

Equally characteristic of Lázár Ervin is a playful, humorous self-reflexivity that quietly reveals to the reader the secrets of storytelling itself. A nyúl mint tolmács [The Rabbit as Interpreter] begins like this: “At the edge of the clearing a round-faced Ornamental Gourd was grinning. He was extremely talented in this genre. He could grin divinely. Of course, this is not terribly important. Because at that very moment the Goat was having breakfast in the clearing. She isn’t terribly important either, but she’s the one I want to tell a story about.” And Ha három lábon gyábokorsz (If You Limp on Three Legs) opens as follows: “I wanted to write this tale five years ago, yet only now can I finally begin. For it required a great deal of investigation. Because of the little girl the story is about. All I knew of her was that she was blond, with beautiful, green eyes. Which, by the way, anyone who isn’t blind can see. (Lázár Ervin is a master of such humorous asides.) But what use is it to me to know what someone looks like on the outside?! What I wanted to know was what she was like on the inside. And that took a lot of tracking down.” What follows is an endless, language-driven list that blends the everyday with the grotesque and the miraculous: “For I had to ask nearly everyone who knew her: a hermit, a hunter, her father, a witch, a fairy, a goatherd, a mushroom, her mother, a friend, a king, a beautiful girl, a raspberry bush, a nun, Mikkamakka, a salabacter, a kunt, a cantor, a canon, an arithmetic teacher, a doughnut and an elephonut, and Juli and Gyuri…”

With inexhaustible ingenuity, Lázár Ervin twists and turns language, and children are not the least bit fazed by expressions that may seem meaningless to the adult mind. Nor are they disturbed if they do not understand everything. A good fairy tale rises up to meet the child. Why does fasting do Louis the Brute no good? “Because just an hour ago he ate a roast capon, two plopped-down hőzönbőzönts, three spit-roasted ornamental gourds, four apple pies, five leather-apples, six greengages, and seven cream cakes” (Louis the Brute, Oh, How Sleepy).

The impossible and the miraculous go hand in hand with hard reality – this is a commonplace observation about Lázár Ervin’s tales. But the real miracle happens in language; true reality opens up within language itself. Lázár Ervin’s language is simple and sparkling. Inimitable.

Almost every story by Lázár Ervin is suffused with a kind of light, delicate melancholy. At times, Sadness itself even becomes a character. “I wouldn’t mind if Sadness were to visit me now and then,” begins the book The Square Around Forest. “Say, once a month. Or rather, once every six months. It could sit here for a while. I’d even darken the room for its sake. I’d curl myself up. And my heart would ache, ache.” Against sadness, Lázár’s stories always offer the same remedy: love. Yet we should not expect prophecy from these tales; instead, we find it in the radiant play of language itself. The reassuring, embracing, gently rocking presence of love is also formed in language. In the delight of language. And even when love is named explicitly – when a tale ends, quite literally with the word love – it is carefully prepared, shaped, and brought into being by a playfulness, humor, and verbal ingenuity that rises above sadness. As in the closing lines of A hétfejű tündér (The Seven-Headed Fairy): “For a fool cut off six of her heads, leaving her with only one. So let us all guard that one remaining head. With spear, sword, mace, baker’s shovel, saber, iron, blood, truncheon. And with love.” For what is the secret of life? “Now, with time having passed, I also know this: the tale was about the fact that in this world everyone is entrusted with something. Something very important, which must be carried all the way to the Glass Mountain. And whoever wishes to reach the Glass Mountain must know their brother, their mother, their grandfather; must know that the castle of the Glass Mountain stands open to everyone – one needs only love and a pure heart” (A manógyár [The Gnome Factory]).

Perhaps only Starfarm came close to matching Lázár Ervin’s success as a writer of fairy tales. This collection of short stories provoked a vivid critical response. Here the narrator returns to Alsó-Rácegrespuszta, to the beginnings – but not in the manner of Illés Ézsaiás, who can register only loss and decay. Nearly every piece in the volume is a masterpiece, among the most accomplished examples of Lázár Ervin’s storytelling art. A “fairy-like” or magical realism akin to that of Áron Tamási, combined with an inherently cheerful, playful narrative tone, immediately draws the reader in. In the story A tolvaj (The Thief), objects mysteriously vanish from houses; when the thief – who turns out to be an angel – leaves a void behind by never returning to “steal” again, people offer him objects to take in vain. The mystery often remains unresolved, as in the story A csillagmajori (The One from Starfarm). We never learn why the young man in the white shirt joined the corn pickers, nor why, after harvesting mountain-high quantities in such a short time, he leaves, abandoning the tool that had sped up the work. Indeed, we never discover who he was at all: a dead man risen from the grave, or a living human being? In A grófnő (The Countess), the heroine Isztike outfits the villagers in brand-new, flashy clothes – on the condition that they burn their old ones. But the new garments prove unfit for village work and rural life. The villagers laugh at one another, and in the end they alter the new clothes to suit their needs. “This story is sheer brightness. With gentle irony and extraordinary linguistic and imaginative sensitivity, ingenuity, and richness, the narrator presents both the disruption and the restoration of the order of Rácpácegres.” (András Görömbei)

For this volume, too, is about the same thing as Lázár Ervin’s tales and earlier short stories – or even his sole novel, The White Tiger: somehow, we must preserve our moral dignity. Even when this makes us feel cast out.

His life path – otherwise rich in tasks and roles, from journalism through work as a layout editor, reader, and prose editor, with particular emphasis on the decade spent at the journal Hitel – stands as proof in itself of this striving to preserve moral dignity. Perhaps even more important than this is that the works themselves radiate the very same thing as the author’s life: the invincibility of love (Jenő Alföldy went so far as to call Lázár Ervin a “genius of love”), and the duty and the joy of finding one’s way home – always, from everywhere.

Many felt that Lázár Ervin lacked a single “great work”. He wrote about this in an entry of his Diary, published in 2007: “There are writers who lead you to bright, unknown lands; there are those who take you up to high mountain peaks; there are those who dissect a living body before your eyes; and there are those who want nothing more than for you to feel at home for a moment, as your mother gently lays her arm on your shoulder.” There is no doubt which of these paths he chose – and no doubt that he succeeded. He travelled the entire road, from Nagyszederfa through Budapest to Rácpácegres.

[2012]

Ervin Lázár

Selection of works