A writer, playwright, and dramaturg, honoured with the title Artist of the Nation and recipient of the Kossuth Prize and the József Attila Prize. A founding member of the Digital Literary Academy and the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Károly Szakonyi was born in Budapest on 26 October 1931. His family originated from Sopron County: his grandfather had been an estate servant and a liveried coachman in Zsira; his father moved to the capital from Füles to work as a waiter, and later the family became restaurateurs in Dob Street. The family name was originally Németh; adopting the name of his paternal grandmother’s native village, he first used ‘Szakonyi’ as a pen name when his first short story appeared, and then, in 1963, also as his legal surname.
The recalled images of his youth – those of his ‘career memoir’, Családi töredékek (lit. Family Fragments) – are, in the tradition of old photographs, patinated, ennobled, almost idyllic – were it not for the backdrop provided by the history of the last century. This autobiographical family narrative traces the rise of the writer’s relatives and parents from the depths of society. The scenes of his father’s years as a waiter, and later the stories of the more comfortable years as restaurateurs, are shaped by diligence and decency, a noble bearing, and the dignity of everyday morality, which illuminate them. Were this autobiographical sketch fuller and more substantial, it might amount to a genuine family novel. Yet even from the ‘fragments’ we can learn what inheritance Károly Szakonyi carried in his satchel into literature – what foundations he built his writerly world upon.
He learned much from the family’s legendarium; yet his childhood and youth also offered him material to process emotionally and intellectually. His writerly ‘university years’ included: the trials of war, the confusions of the coalition period [1945–49, multi-party government in Hungary], the icy 1950s [early state-socialist dictatorship], the flame of the revolution [1956 Hungarian Revolution]… And, in a country shaken by earthquakes, he was especially influenced by the atmosphere of his parents’ restaurants in Budapest, the fates of their patrons, family events, quarrels, bereavements, successes; the lives of relatives in Nagycenk; the soot and gleam of the smithy; the sight of victims shot into a mass grave – no ordinary picture book. In that turbulent, harried world, and within this industrious, upwardly mobile, value-respecting family, he gathered not only experiences but principles to live by.
He began his education at Szív Street Primary School, then attended Madách Imre Secondary Grammar School in Budapest’s District VII. After sixth grade, he left school and applied to the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts to study acting, but was not accepted. Subsequently, he applied to the Air Force Officers’ Academy. His application was refused, but he was called up for active military service in Piliscsaba. There, he tested and developed his talent for drawing and painting through decorative work, while also sharpening his writing skills. After two years, he was demobilised as a lance corporal.
Then begins his period as a worker and clerk. He became an unskilled labourer at MEGÉV, an agricultural machinery sales company, and later a packer and storeman. After some time, he worked as a materials buyer and freight escort, then as depot manager at the company’s provincial site in Kecskemét. In the spring of 1954, he was ‘rationalised’ [laid off under socialist workforce ‘reorganisation’] and joined the Ministry of the Interior as a civilian employee; this was when the new identity cards were introduced. He travelled across the country, visiting Baranya, Somogy, Tolna, and Hajdú-Bihar Counties. Afterwards, he became a semi-skilled worker at the Zugló Knitwear Factory, operating eight machines. At night, beside the machines, he read Balzac and other volumes from the Olcsó Könyvtár (Cheap Library) paperback series. In 1956–1957, he worked as a semi-skilled labourer at the Décor Company, then as an agent for copper engravings at the Fine Arts Fund (though he sold no prints). Afterwards, he became a sickness inspector at the State Social Insurance and Outpatient Clinic System (SZTK); from August to November 1958, he was a material handler and unskilled worker at the Budapest Gear Factory. Meanwhile, he gained experience, met people face to face, read, and learned – preparing for his true vocation.
His first short story was published in Népszabadság on Sunday, 14 December, under the title Kuzmics fusizik (lit. Kuzmics Does a Bit of Moonlighting), marking the start of his freelance period. He moved from one rented room to another, created in cafés, and frequented clubs. There he met contemporaries and friends: István Szabó, Dénes Kiss, István Csukás, and Kamil Kárpáti. Short stories followed quickly – in Élet és Irodalom, Jelenkor, Pest Megyei Hírlap, on the radio, in Népszava, Új Írás, and Kortárs. His first book was published by Magvető Publishing House in 1961.
With ministerial permission, he attended university, studying Hungarian and ‘people’s education’ [adult/community cultural work] alongside István Szabó and Ákos Kertész, but he soon dropped out. From January 1963, he held a scholarship in dramaturgy at the National Theatre. He wrote his first play, Életem, Zsóka! (lit. My Life, Zsóka!). From then on, his life remained connected to the world of theatre. He worked at the National Theatre until 1966; from 1975 to 1978 at the Miskolc National Theatre; from 1982 to 1988 at the Kisfaludy Theatre in Győr; from 1989 at the Pécs National Theatre; and from 1993 as a dramaturg at the Csokonai National Theatre in Debrecen. Meanwhile, from 1984 to 1990, he also contributed to Magyar Nemzet.
Married and father of four
Alongside his short fiction and novels, his plays, television dramas, and stage adaptations were produced consecutively. His radio plays were frequently broadcast, and from the 1970s, his extensive work as a writer of feuilletons and brief newspaper pieces developed.
He was also remarkably active in organising literary life. From 1977 to 1982, he served on the editorial board of Kortárs; from 1989 to 1991 on that of Új Idő; and from 1990 to 1991 on the Advisory Board of Új Írás. From 1993, he became the honorary publisher and a member of the editorial team of Lyukasóra.
The respect and confidence of literary circles are shown through his appointments to committees and boards. In 1962, he joined the Hungarian Writers’ Association and the Literary Fund. From the early 1970s, he served on the elected committee of the Writers’ Association, then led its Drama Section, and in recent years, as its chair. For two decades, beginning in the early 1970s, he was part of the Literary Fund’s leadership. From the late 1970s, he was a member of the board of the Kazinczy Prize, and later of the Szabó Lőrinc Foundation. From 1992, he served as chair of the Domján Edit Foundation. He participated in the Book College of the National Cultural Fund Programme and later on the decision-making body of the Páskándi Foundation. For years, he was a member of the Literary Subcommittee of the Kossuth Prize and of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. Since 1996, he has been a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and the National Association of Hungarian Artists.
On the wall of one of his early flats hung a huge blown-up photograph of Hemingway; people were afraid it represented him at the time. Later, they were worried about Chekhov for him, his other master. He did not follow either man’s path. He also learned from Dezső Kosztolányi, fortunately, but he did not become Kosztolányi. He became Szakonyi.
“He writes only about what he knows intimately and can claim as his own,” wrote his fellow writer István Gáll. “One could compile a biography from the material of his volumes.”
Childhood is a rich seam for him. In his short stories and feuilletons, his father’s restaurant repeatedly appears with its regulars. It does so, too, in the broader world of the Nagycenk estate, along with the faces and gestures of craftsmen. His first major, widely acclaimed story, Ezüsthasú halak (lit. Silver-bellied Fishes), reveals how deeply adolescence and the horrors of war have left their marks on him. Then there is the life of the conscript, serving as the background for stories such as A fogoly (lit. The Prisoner), Emberi üdvözlet (lit. Human Salutation), and Francia tanya (lit. The French Farm). From his years of drifting – from memories as an unskilled labourer, a travelling agent, a freight escort – came a series of short stories. And from his years as a clerk, decades later, emerged the great love-storm and the anatomy of fear in the novel Bolond madár (lit. Mad Bird). In his adult, writerly life, the faces that surface, the fates he has encountered – battles between men and women – become stories, become dramas. Always, life lived through or witnessed at close quarters.
“I spy on them, I listen to them, I eavesdrop on people. I keep my ears open…,” he confessed. He observes in the street, on the train, in the soul – and, like a dog picking up burrs, he gathers stories, figures, phenomena. A calm-handed plastic surgeon: he takes his material from living matter for the new face, the made face.
He has conquered almost every genre. In the 1960s, anxiously – and, as an editor, jealously – I watched as the theatre ensnared him as a dramaturg. The most ‘novelist’ of short-story writers was straying. Drama, the radio play, the television play, the feuilleton, the short polemical piece, the memoir, the greeting, the sketch – one after another swept him off his feet. He does not write poetry; he writes his poems as short stories.
Who does he write about? – It is almost beside the point. Soldiers, clerks, spouses, broken older men, comedians appear not by class or occupation, but by their conduct, their emotions, their souls. In Human Salutation, Corporal Botos is driven towards inhumanity, towards tragedy, by disinheritance and lovelessness. My Life, Zsóka! is the drama of compromise; its characters are lost ‘in the labyrinth of instincts’. What matters is the soul’s gesture, its mimicry – not the face’s, not the body’s.
He does not favour adventurous, implausible plots or the grandeur of romantic drama. He abandons – generously – the use of brute force tools: the horrific, the shattering, the heart-rending, the dazzling action. Instead, with everyday stories and objectively told dramas, he dazzles and unsettles. Even death and violence are softened in his writing. In A porcelán baba (lit. The Porcelain Doll), Johanna, an accomplice to her father’s killer, madly breastfeeds the porcelain doll; yet it is as if we see the scene from behind a curtain, muted and blurred.
That is Szakonyi’s character. There is no hatred in him, no prophetic severity, no impatience. He is drawn not to the Christ who drove the money changers from the temple, but the one who calmed the sea and bewitched his disciples with parables – who does indeed enumerate the world’s sins, yet does not strike with his staff, but instead draws spells and parables with it.
He is shyly emotional, a moralist out of love. He is also a realist-naturalist, in that he delights in capturing the world’s small phenomena – faces with precise, fine strokes; the flavours and abrasions of life. He is intellectual, on par with a good writer: he enjoys interpreting and commenting on what he has seen. It may be that the dominance of one or other trait would have earned him greater success, more adoration, and more outrage, but he would not be interchangeable for the esteem and standing with which we now regard him.
The chief secret of his success – and his likability – lies in his sensuous, colourful, inventive, supple, suggestive, opalescent, elegant, melodic, and gently cultivated narrative style. He embellishes with taste in a restrained manner. Like a painter who values detail, he brings objects to life: he places small lights on surfaces, attaches gentle, soft adjectives to his figures, and animates them along with their mood and setting. A single savoury, caressing – or grotesque – epithet subtly sharpens the writer’s judgement: either his recoil or his wonder.
He is not an experimental writer; he has no formal showpieces. He accepts, naturally, the natural materials of new prose, but does not become intoxicated by them. Where necessary, he ‘translates’ the word – at native-tongue level – into the grotesque, into suggestive symbolism, into irony, into impossibilities.
His irony warrants separate mention: it is a strong, defining trait. In his most successful play, Adáshiba (lit. Transmission Error) – performed over sixty times in more than ten countries – its vivid humour and its sharp yet affectionate mockery are among the play’s driving forces. The other is the writer’s grotesque conceit: he depicts the miracle-working Christ into a contemporary family living room, only to bitterly reveal that even he cannot redeem this indifferent, petty, mechanised world.
There is a certain distanced superiority in his gaze: a critical understanding that does not exonerate. The wise yet powerless Providence, the priest of a religion of love, looks down from the heights of ideas upon the little people – those rejoicing, those fussing, the wounded busying themselves with pulling out their thorns, the Sons of Man bent and broken under burdens. Behind this figure, we glimpse the sensitive soul who believes in art’s power to heal human beings: the boy who once learned music, did a bit of painting, wrote a few lines of verse.
Since the 1960s, his short fiction has demonstrated how delicately he explores human destinies and distinct, unique characters. Yet, he also portrays the lives of his everyday protagonists with profound empathy and insight. Besides the empathetic writer, there is always the softly spoken yet strictly judgmental writer: the consistent moralist who insists on values. In the collection Tudatom, jól vagyok (lit. I let you know, I’m Fine), a notable story is Idegen a hegyen (lit. Stranger on the Hill). The vagrant stranger who escapes from the town to the vineyard hill because ‘there is nowhere for him to be’, and whom the shadow-seeing, suspicious, hate-filled hillfolk want to lynch – this helpless, wretched Stranger is almost the writer himself. Yet he also struggles alongside – and identifies with – the other character: the old woman who perceives the wandering vagrant’s misery, who would save him, and then, in an unexpected turn, still cries ‘crucify him’. He understands – has endured – the fate and motives of those driven feral too: the psychology of suspicion and hatred.
He enjoys telling stories as monologues; this, too, evidences a desire to understand and to identify. Yet, he does not recount his own fate or direct experiences; nor does he solely focus on those of intellectuals close to him in lifestyle, the fashionable ‘intellectual’ struggles. Instead, he vividly depicts the lives of simple villagers, waiters, trapeze artists, elderly people living modestly, and female factory workers – the narrow-minded world of thought of those who persist in near-vegetative existence. “He is drawn to the most exposed part of humanity: women and the old,” wrote István Gáll. For this reason, the detailed and convincing depiction of movements, habits, and reflexes is both skilful and compelling in these stories; equally, the finely nuanced portrayal of everyday situations and ordinary characters. Through them, the tension from the most incredible contrasts becomes believable; so too does the inexplicable operation of the human soul. We shudder at what unfolds within a soldier when, on an ordinary day of war, he kills a fellow human being with such indifference that he hardly notices. (I let you know, I’m Fine.) Or when we observe the conflicting forces of instinct and consciousness in Stranger on the Hill. The powerful, angry, pulsating monologue in the story Testvérpár (lit. Siblings) presents love wearing the visage of hatred, yet never, for a single moment, breaking free from psychological and everyday reality. In the musty, miserable room, it feels as though we are there, listening to the breathless, stumbling flood of words – the helpless old woman’s irritated, accusatory – yet, love-choked and anxious in her care – lament-confession about the other helpless one, her dear sibling.
The genre of the large-scale novel, it seems, does not come easily to Szakonyi. Occasionally, he attempts to write a broader-based, multi-character epic, yet even his most significant works remain novellas. The French Farm, Mad Bird, or Szívek zárkái (lit. Cells of Hearts) have become chamber pieces – ‘one-act’ prose.
The theatre and drama became a lasting passion in Szakonyi’s life. Even today, his ‘side occupation’ is dramaturgy, and his plays continue to be staged quickly. His first stage work, My Life, Zsóka!, contrasts compromise with steadfastness: exploring how and why a writer might be tempted by easy success. The conflicts of marriages corrupted by selfishness remain themes for him later as well; so do false paths, careerism, and acquisitive mania (Hongkongi paróka [lit. Hong Kong Wig], Holdtölte [lit. Full Moon], etc.). His sharp, biting comedy about indifference, superficial living, and our increasingly mechanised age – his most successful dramatic work so far – is Transmission Error. Its core idea is television-mania, which already in the 1960s overwhelmed our lives; it targets a shallow existence: a family fussing over petty daily vanities and staring at the television in a daze fails to notice that Christ is among them, has come again to redeem the world. Similar impossible situations underpin the drama Ítéletnapig (lit. Until Judgement Day): we see the struggle of a prisoner and a guard handcuffed together, until we no longer know who the prisoner is and who the jailer is.
His other conquest also proved successful and enduring: an exploration into the world of radio and television drama. In these powerful genres that reach many, he depicts conflicts already familiar from his short stories: family dramas and quarrels; people reassuring themselves with little falsehoods; those longing, out of their anxieties, for a more meaningful life – ourselves. A verseny (lit. The Competition) is the pointless, destructive race of amassing material possessions; Milyen nap van ma? (lit. What Day Is It Today?) reveals the emptiness of an ordinary family’s life.
[2024]