Magda Szabo’s fiction shows the travails of modern Hungarian history from oblique but sharply illuminating angles
Twriter Magda Szabo, who died in 2007, knew from personal experience what it meant to have dreams smashed by arbitrary power. As a young poet she won her country’s chief literary honour, the Baumgarten prize, in 1949. On the same day, the communist regime cancelled this award to a “class enemy”. She lost her civil-service job, went to teach in a primary school, and only began to publish novels a decade later as a thaw began.
Readers meet the upright, naive headmaster Mr Elekes, who will see his obedience to authority traduced by two kinds of tyranny, and his wife and daughters: sensible, thoughtful Iren, who narrates part of the story, and scatty, lovable Blanka. Next door lives the affable Jewish dentist Mr Held, with his wife Anna and dreamy daughter Henriette. On the other side resides the kind-hearted warrior Major Biro with his housekeeper-mistress Mrs Temes and son, Balint.
To these adjacent households on a quiet street between the Danube and the castle, public tumult often feels as remote as the distant sounds of unrest that reach survivors during the anti-communist uprising of 1956. They dwell most happily in memory, in longing, even in fantasy. Their pasts haunt their present: “The dead are not dead,” Szabo writes, “but continue living in this world.”
Devoted to order and ritual, headmaster Elekes seeks to “impose stability on the uncertainties of life”. History, with its “concentrated unreality” of cruelty and absurdity, will wreck all such hopes. Szabo summons the cosy, closed world of the three clans with a lyrical, quicksilver touch. That makes the thuggish intrusions of despotic power—the Helds’ deportation, the shooting of Henriette—all the more wrenching.
Szabo is no nostalgic sentimentalist. The pre-war bourgeois idyll between river and castle had defects aplenty. Yet gilded recollection fortifies and binds the families; Iren and Balint, tetchily married in the end, have both “seen the same blue sky shining, before the thunder broke”. That thunder blew trust and justice out of daily life. Now, only force and chance hold sway. “Life isn’t a schoolroom,” Balint says when the mercurial Blanka defects to the West. “There aren’t any rules.
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