Lajos Nagy

Café Budapest

Excerpts from the novel

[...]

---

Lajos Nagy (1883–1954) published his first volume of stories in 1911. The illegitimate son of a village girl who worked as a servant in the capital, all his life his sympathies remained with the poor, the miserable, the humiliated, the underdog. Their lives he described in hundreds of stories and some novels with a sharp eye in a dry, sometimes passionate, sometimes sardonic, precise style. He was among the pioneers of what could be called descriptive literary sociology in the thirties, the genre that also produced The People of the Puszta by Gyula Illyés, now known in a dozen languages. Café Budapest (1936) also springs from a quasi sociological approach, aiming at the presentation of a particular way of Budapest life. Though on the political left all his life, a trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 opened Nagy's eyes and he completely rejected "socialist realism", with the result that he was not allowed to publish during the fifties. He died a bitter man. Besides his stories, his journal of the 1944–45 siege of Budapest and his two volumes of autobiography are now classics.