In his first major interview, given to György Gálfalvi, István Szilágyi recounted the story of his early beginnings as a writer. When he was a second-year law student, upon going home from the cinema, he stopped outside the railway workshop where, five years earlier, he had worked as an apprentice; moved by what he later described as a “somewhat foolishly self-indulgent experience”, he immediately wrote it down in his student dormitory. He then sent the story to Utunk [lit. Our Way, a Hungarian-language literary weekly in Cluj-Napoca, Romania], where it was soon published under the title Te kis sorskovács (lit. You Little Shaper of Destiny).
The success inspired Szilágyi so much that he gathered the courage to enter a short story competition announced on the fifteenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Romanian People’s Republic. From that point onwards, there was no turning back – whether because his story Ahol nem történik semmi (lit. Where Nothing Happens), whose title alone was somewhat provocative at the time, won first prize, or because he already felt a stronger inner drive to write prose rather than to deal with court files and legal documents.
He also ventured into journalism: even before graduating, he joined the staff of Utunk, working in the reportage section. During that year, he was encouraged to try his hand at virtually every journalistic genre, from feuilleton and sketch to leading article. His publicistic writings remain buried in the columns of that weekly; though he never expressed the same dismissive attitude towards them as he later did towards his first two volumes of prose – saying he would prefer to consider those books “unwritten” – he never thought of compiling them into a collection. Yet his critical reports from the Hungarian Film Festivals (Budapest), which he regularly attended for a time, would be just as worthy of inclusion as his portraits of fellow writers and friends, or as such pieces as Karácsony Menyőben (lit. Christmas in Menyő), which evokes the dramatic final days of the dictatorship, and the multi-part Krónika, a Renegátlástalanul (lit. Chronicle, the Shamelessly Renegade), written after “the victory of the revolution” – and so on.
Thus You Little Shaper of Destiny) and Ezen a csillagon (lit. On This Star) appear, in the author’s own retrospective self-assessment, as works of only minor weight and significance. Both contemporary and later – indeed, present-day – critical opinions contradict this view. At the time, Domokos Szilágyi [Transylvanian Hungarian poet and critic] highlighted, in one of the short stories (Szerencsekerék [lit.Wheel of Fortune]), the “superhuman struggle” of its “candidate for humanity” against the resistance of material reality, his own smallness, and the pettiness of his colleagues; Gyula Szabó was captivated by what he called the “plastic poetry of everyday realities”.
István Szőcs, who introduced Szilágyi’s first short story collection and later reviewed his third, Jámbor vadak (lit. Meek Beasts), wrote that “István Szilágyi, both as writer and as man, was genuinely, sincerely inspired by the grand theme of ‘work’ – particularly industrial work – with all its physical, intellectual, and technical aspects; he was fascinated by every form of trial of strength, by the experience of all kinds of great exertion.”
In our own day, Imre József Balázs has arrived at a similar conclusion in his examination of short prose written during the Gheorghiu-Dej era [the early communist period in Romania, 1947–1965]. He emphasises that Szilágyi’s stories do not operate within an idealised, generalised model of the working class; their strong “reality effect” stems from the fact that “they approach the lives of working-class characters as a subculture”, rather than as the embodiment of a dominant ideology. They are therefore far from schematic; their author stands well apart from the “socialist realist depiction of the worker”.
Margit Ács, in her essay written to honour the seventy-year-old writer, goes so far as to note that the young Szilágyi’s outlook was in step with the broader intellectual currents of the world – particularly in his scepticism toward grand systems of explanation, including the social utopia of socialism itself.
Instead of party jargon – we may add – he employed professional jargon, the slang of specific (mostly industrial) trades. Much like members of Hungary’s so-called “renewal generation” (the ‘megújulás nemzedéke’), such as Ferenc Sánta, István Csurka, István Szabó, László Kamondy and others, he separated what schematic literature had merged: the spheres of public and private life, distinguishing the trials of personal initiation from ideological or political tests. The pride of coming of age in his fiction does not arise from communist consciousness but from the voluntary acceptance of the challenges of work. This same determination and willpower were conveyed through the use of the interior monologue – an artistic method condemned by contemporary critics as leading to “self-indulgent psychologising”.
This inward portrayal of characters achieved through free indirect discourse, combined with a partly externally observing perspective, also became a hallmark of Szilágyi’s first novel. Yet Üllő, dobszó, harang (lit. Anvil, Drum, Bell) occupies a curiously neglected place in the author’s memory – he occasionally forgets it altogether and only rarely mentions it in interviews. Nevertheless, the story of Anna Gencsi, a young village schoolteacher living in an isolated hamlet at the end of the Second World War, and her partly coerced, partly voluntary coexistence with István Karatna, a military deserter hiding from the front in her home, is in itself a compelling psychodrama. In external terms it is truly a struggle for life and death, but when one listens to the densely woven exchanges between the two, the novel also unfolds as a “closed hearing” on moral responsibility.
The narrative world is made distinctive by a stylistic decision that withholds all proper names from the warring armies: there is no mention of Soviets fighting Germans, nor of the Romanian and Hungarian forces ranged against each other. Some critics discerned in this generalising approach, this striving for universal validity, an affinity with the French ‘nouveau roman’ (the ‘new novel’). The most striking critical judgement at the time declared that since Gyula Szabó’s Gondos atyafiság (lit. Careful Kinship), there had not been such a “deeply unsettling” novel – that is, it ranked among the finest works in post-1944 Hungarian literature in Romania. “It is so markedly different from our usual fiction that its very otherness compels a deeper self-examination,” wrote one reviewer. Later critics have wondered whether the subsequent neglect of the novel “wandering in the forest of problems of the philosophy of history and of moral philosophy” might have been due to sheer coincidence: it appeared in 1969, the same year as Tibor Bálint’s highly successful novel Zokogó majom (lit. The Weeping Monkey), Sándor Kányádi’s poetry volume Fától fáig (lit. From Tree to Tree), and Domokos Szilágyi’s collected works A láz enciklopédiája (lit. The Encyclopaedia of Fever) and Búcsú a trópusoktól (lit. Farewell to the Tropics).
It is also possible that attention shifted away from the novel toward the short stories in Meek Beasts, either because of their autobiographical tone or because of their chosen setting, the town of Jajdon. The personal note is evident in the recollections of childhood games, adventures, and mischief, replacing the earlier detailed depictions of tools and work processes. The locale of Jajdon, in retrospect, would gain importance: it foreshadowed the small-town setting of the as yet only vaguely conceived novel Kő hull apadó kútba (lit. Stone Falls into a Drying Well).
At the same time, Szilágyi published autobiographical stories in the yearbooks of Utunk – among them Katlanváros (lit. Cauldron City), Vesztesek (lit. The Losers), Asszonyélet egy sírkövön (lit. A Woman’s Life on a Tombstone), and Kóborló évek (lit. Wandering Years). Drawing on family and ancestral memory, these narratives sketch the portraits of four principal figures – mother, father, maternal grandfather, and paternal grandmother – against a background in which the author’s own figure and emerging destiny are clearly discernible.
The other cycle within Meek Beasts, however, seems to point toward Agancsbozót (Tangle of Antlers), portraying protagonists who are exposed alike to fate, environment, society, and nature – patient sufferers who endure attack like meek beasts. This world of short fiction, with its unidentifiable, alien settings and characters and its strange, unsettling episodes, is built in a manner reminiscent of the work of Ádám Bodor [b. 1936, Hungarian novelist]: its eerie, oppressive atmosphere embodies a distinct outlook on life.
In tone and underlying mood, the novel Stone Falls into a Drying Well stands close to Meek Beasts. When the prospect of a film adaptation arose, the author himself described the story of Ilka Szendy – the tanner’s daughter who murders her day-labourer lover – as a “ballad-like, grief-stricken frenzy”. At the same time, he also emphasised the sociological precision of his depiction of Jajdon – modelled on the town of Zilah [today Zalău, in Transylvania] – and the authenticity with which he portrayed the guild-based craft industry of the early twentieth century.
Critics reacted in diverse ways. Some reflected on the beauty of grand artistic undertakings; others felt they were “floating” in a dreamlike current between thought and vision within the novel’s hallucinatory imagery. Still others drew attention to its recurrent motifs of decay and the degrees of an order stripped of freedom. One critic went so far as to call the novel “a One Hundred Years of Solitude from Transylvania”. Ernő Kulcsár Szabó’s review at the time effectively summarised its virtues: its ethos of recording the life of a small Hungarian town at the turn of the century, its rich social layering, and its inexhaustible linguistic power. Like other commentators, he saw in it a conception reminiscent of László Németh [a leading twentieth-century Hungarian novelist and essayist], noting that – as in Iszony (Revulsion), where the heroine Nelli Kárász is drawn ever closer to her doom through a chain of deaths – Ilka too is propelled towards her fate by successive acts of mortality. Several critics have observed that Stone Falls into a Drying Well may be read simultaneously as the story of a family’s decline, a psychological study, a historical novel, and even a detective narrative – centred on the mystery of whether the murderer’s identity (known to the reader) will ever be revealed, or how the concealment of guilt consumes the soul.
Among the writer’s motivations – as he often stressed in interviews – perhaps foremost was his determination to write in the language of Kölcsey, Ady and Arany, the Hungarian he had “inherited, mastered, and carried” from the Szilágyság and the Partium regions [in present-day north-western Romania]. The next novel, Tangle of Antlers, written slowly and without any expectation of publication, belongs rather to the “acquired life” than to the inherited one, drawing upon three experiential pillars: nature, art, and work.
Beyond these pillars lay a germ of a story: that of a clerk-like man who finds himself, for reasons never explained, in a cave high atop a mountain. There, together with three other nameless men, he is compelled to forge swords day after day. Who obliges them? Is it the Intention That Rules Over Us – written, in the novel, in capital letters – or some unknown earthly master who sends up food from the “underworld” below, strewn with the shed antlers of deer, via a crude winch-like device? A clear answer is hardly possible. What can be said, in the author’s own interpretation, is that this absurdly allegorical story illustrates how one may become so absorbed in work – even the most arduous and seemingly meaningless labour – that the surrounding circumstances fade into irrelevance. The task itself, the tinkering, the toiling, the fumbling, becomes its own justification. The dictatorship that coincided with socialism, too, created such circumstances. And this, paradoxically, was one way of escaping it.
As the critic Ferenc Takács observed, Tangle of Antlers is “a solitary and companionless work – an enigmatic parable of epic breadth, a mythical culinary Robinsonade and an ironworking Cantata profana, at once a naïve tale and a hyper-conscious novel.”
Words of praise were no less abundant for the next novel – indeed, Hollóidő (lit. Time of the Ravens) met with even greater and more unambiguous success than Stone Falls into a Drying Well. If the two are to be compared, one might begin where György Poszler [literary historian and essayist] did: both are masterpieces. “The first is an analysis of a social–historical cross-section – concrete in space and time. The second is an interpretation of history itself – abstract in space and time. More precisely, the first shows that a social–historical cross-section can be analysed. History itself, however, cannot be interpreted. In the first, the cruelty lies in the given historical situation; in the second, cruelty (the time of ravens) pervades all of history.”
The period is that of the early Turkish occupation of Hungary and the beginnings of the Reformation. At the centre – as confirmed by the author himself – stands the fate of István Szegedi Kiss (known in the novel as Lukács Terebi), a preacher and convert of exceptional destiny, whose life follows, with some artistic freedom, the account written by his contemporary biographer, Máté Skaricza. As Valéria G. Kiss, perhaps the most perceptive interpreter of Szilágyi’s oeuvre, has written, everything in the novel points toward the finality spread with the dead, toward the pyramids of skulls – even love itself, the intoxication of sensual delight, which can only briefly make one forget the existential state of captivity.
In Time of the Ravens, culture offers no refuge from enslavement, unlike in the earlier novel; nor does religion, nor even the most searching meditations on faith and theology, which here turn from private anguish toward the fate of a people and a nation. Thus it is justly said that, although this historical novel provides no model for how to live, it raises – with dramatic force – both the perennial and the contemporary, unresolved questions of Hungarian identity and of the human condition. Meanwhile, its gallery of characters is even richer and more vividly drawn than the one surrounding Ilka in Stone Falls into a Drying Well.
Szilágyi István, who has never been driven by the urge to publish nor by any desire for literary visibility, seems to have remained faithful to his principle of producing a new work only every ten or fifteen years. The collection published for his seventieth birthday, Bolygó tüzek (lit. Wandering Fires), contains among its selected short stories only one or two new pieces; yet, besides excluding his early stories and sketches, he also omitted such acclaimed works as A végállomáson leszállsz (lit. You Get Off at the Terminus), which several critics had praised.
Of the eleven pieces included, the majority show textual revisions, though the volume makes no mention of these reworkings. By erasing the traces of his early career, the author shifted his focus from the myth of labour to the observation and analysis of the cult of violence spanning different epochs and regimes – a defining concern of his first collected volume of short prose. His omission of several strong stories (A Dermes [lit. The Dermes], Úgy magamban [lit. All to Myself], and Víkend [lit. Weekend]) may attest to his rigour. The fact that he also left out A hóhér könnyei (lit. The Executioner’s Tears) perhaps signals a promise – that he intends, at last, to complete the long-awaited major work bearing the same title.
The true surprise, however, would be if he were to publish this long-anticipated historical novel together with the other work he has repeatedly mentioned in interviews – an “anti–Ilka Szendy story”, of which Utunk évkönyv ’83 (the 1983 Utunk Yearbook) had already offered a foretaste under the title Az emlékezés göröngyein (lit. Over the Clods of Memory). Several hundred pages of this text, he has said, have long been written. Having recently looked through it again, he found that it was “not at all bad – a story full of life”.
On the occasion of the writer’s seventy-fifth birthday, many readers of Szilágyi would surely consider it a privilege to look into – or better still, to read – both the tale of the strange girl and that of the executioner.
[2013]