I first visited Budapest early in 1969, angry and frustrated at what was happening to my journalist and writer friends and acquaintances in Prague and to all the improbable hopes of their premature revolution. Refused visas by the no longer friendly Czechoslovak embassy in London, I had discovered that for the moment it was still possible to get a week’s laissez-passer to Prague from the thus far unpurged embassy in Hungary. En route, I spent a week or so trying to take the political temperature in Budapest and finding my way to what was then The New Hungarian Quarterly and its then literary editor and György Lukács’s study, before being summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be asked what the hell I thought I was up to and why hadn’t I reported to them on arrival, as protocol required.

The official before whose desk I found myself seemed an intelligent, not entirely unsympathetic fellow of about my own age, and what began as an interrogation turned into a polite enough sort of argument—until I offered my too warm sympathies on the indignity, the embarrassment, the shame he and his historic nation must have felt, having to join the Russians and East Germans, not to mention the Bulgarians, in sending tanks into a friendly, neighbouring country. At this point he lost his diplomatic cool. "You Western liberals are all the same," he snapped. "You know nothing about life here, and what has happened in this part of the world. Let me tell you where you are, and what is at stake here. In my lifetime and yours, in the village where I was born, not so many kilometres from Budapest, the local magnate still exercised the jus primae noctis with a young bride he happened to fancy, and quarrels were more often settled with knives than in courtrooms. You’re not in some comfortable English suburb now, at the end of centuries of comfortable English history!" A strange outburst, I thought then, oddly mixing Party line and what sounded like a real, personal exasperation at yet another Englishman failing to understand that Hungary too shared what the historian Norman Davies once described as Poland’s unhappy geopolitical situation in "Europe’s gangland".

Out in the countryside a day or so later, in the courtyard of a once great house—just where I can no longer remember—the caretaker told me a no doubt oft-told tale, pointing out the spot where just such a landowner, once again in the decade in which I was born, had shot himself after losing at cards, having staked successively his horses, the estate, and his wife.

I thought of these encounters as I was reading this trio of novels and stories by Hungarian writers recently published in English translations. To an English reader, for example, Gyula Krúdy’s luminous and wilful pastoral, peopled with archaic, semi-mythical figures—damned poets and doomed aristocrats, dreamily erotic hetaerae and rude country squires—is pure fin-de-siècle, art nouveau in prose for which I can’t think of a real Anglo-Saxon or even Celtic-English literary equivalent. It seems a curiously late arrival in history, published in 1918 by an author who didn’t die until after Hitler had seized power in Germany. But remembering what I had been told during that first encounter with Hungarian culture and history, what had looked oddly dysynchronous began to settle into place. Even allowing for Krúdy’s own particular nostalgic and elegizing disposition that John Lukacs evokes so well in his devoted and helpful introduction, it is clear that this novel was a product of a time and place where the past routinely haunted the present, a culture full of noonday ghosts. Wasn’t it another Hungarian writer, Zoltán Szabó, who wrote, "The past… is never idle"? Though perhaps the problem here is better illuminated by the English novelist L.P. Hartley, (in The Go-Between), who wrote, "The past is another country. They do things differently there."

At any rate, it would be fatal to read Sunflower anachronistically, in an end-of-the-twentieth-century English or American time-frame—on a plane journey, say, or sporadically amid the usual half-distracted hustle of current reading. Happily, I had the luck to read it in an old house in a village surrounded by forest in an unsmart part of the Provençal arrière-pays where an archaic wildness lingers. It was a long way from the misty melancholy of Krúdy’s heartland in the great Hungarian plain, but there were nights of uninterrupted reading to adjust to the pace of prose of a richness we can no longer afford, and the wood- smoke and the mistral that rattled branches and shutters weren’t uncongenial to his entranced conjurings of a Magyar dreamworld.

Lukacs is right, surely, to see Krúdy as less a Proust than an impressionist painter—Monet, he thinks, painting in words his love for the things he saw and remembered, though some of the English Pre-Raphaelites come to mind too. Even more I was reminded sometimes of his con- temporary, the equally impressionistic and muse-intoxicated composer Frederick Delius, Krúdy’s narrative depending, as it does, on something very like Delius’s arrogant but not meaningless "All that matters is a sense of flow". This writing has that riverine, musical flow, and to a remarkable degree it carries the reader along through the Klimt-like whorls and swirls of a story that doesn’t bear synopsis. Its characters appear and dissolve as people arrive and fade in dreams: the aptly-named Álmos-Dreamers, generations of romantic country gentlemen dying for love, and their unearthly glamorous women; Kalman Ossuary, the penniless gambler and homme moyen sensuel, more than a little a self-parodying sketch of the dangerously addicted author himself ("I have a wicked but honest nature"); Pistoli, the sexually predatory squire, a latter-day Magyar Falstaff ("...he sized up feminine gullibility as precisely as a grocer weighing out saffron"). There is some luscious erotic writing, and his people often step out of their Jugendstil frames to say things that surprise: Álmos-Dreamer lives "a life as melancholy as the Jack of Spades"; "The one thing I’ve learnt at the madhouse is that you mustn’t be depressed," Pistoli muses.

What abides chiefly is the scene-painting, little pastoral and urban scenes lamplit by the intensity of his nostalgia. Barefoot peasant women march at twilight to the chapel on the Feast of the Virgin: "Sunbrowned faces, white teeth, liquid eyes, lush eyebrows, these maidens of The Birches must have learned their gait from the geese, for their ancestresses had come all the way from Asia on carts drawn by buffaloes." An old Jewish gambler in the grey dawn of Pest makes his way home from the gaming tables where he once dissipated a fortune and at which he can no longer play, imagining the wholesome, orderly ease of the bourgeois families under whose windows he passes.

Outside his own context it’s not easy to place Krúdy in a world in which American hegemony spreads ever more widely a Henry Fordlike attitude to history and nostalgia (if history isn’t exactly ‘bunk,’ it has surely come to an end in the triumph of economic liberalism). Best approach him and his Sunflower as a happy stumbling on an extraordinary attic of the rambling house of the European imagination, strangely lit, and crammed with richly faded dreams. (A note on translation: Throughout my reading of these books, I was aware of how what John Lukacs calls "the loneliness of the Hungarian language" must compound the problems of producing at least resonant analogue texts in English, and felt grateful as always for those who take on these intensely demanding and illrewarded tasks. All the same, while John Bátki’s version of Sunflower produces many nuanced and aptly glowing pages, there are sudden irruptions of American neologisms that would have startled Krúdy, and not just his new English readers: "Let’s see the dough," says a croupier in the high years of Budapest’s belle époque, no doubt he was a sceptical chap. "Drop by", "looks like" and "breakup" (of a relationship) are just about manageable; "that creep", "ducks ass haircut," and "Hot diggety-dog!" require a fairly serious suspension of disbelief.)

Miklós Mészöly is a thorough-going modernist (a mode which, of course, itself can seem sometimes a little old-fashioned now), but the title of this collection of his stories and critical writings—Once There Was a Central Europe—not only raises the eternally vexed question of whether there is or was a common regional identity, but provokes other thoughts. What time is it in Central Europe? Once-upon-a-time, or so it often seemed until quite recently, when capitalism managed at last to synchronize all clocks.

In fact, the most brilliant of these pieces, a long story called "The Glory of Colonel Sutting", touches the fringes of Krúdy’s world as it carries us on a sort of a mythologized, magic carpet tour of the later history of the eastern marches of the Habsburg Empire. The colonel is, in the most literal sense, a legend in his own lifetime: "His name rang from the Beskid Mountains to the lower Danube"—his campaigns in love and war are spread across the map and the years leading up to 1848, but his origins are obscure, as indeed are the actual details of his career. Is he a harmless, romantic eccentric, or—the view of some in the empire’s large department of professional paranoiacs—has he remained in the k.u.k. army "only to be able, at the given moment, to stand at the disposition of the revolution with the full weight of his rank and connections." (The narrator/author comments: "It is likely that this, too, was close to the truth; only, it lacked convincing proof.") The level of parody and fantasy, the play with history and period styles, are of the post-modern kind, but some of the fugues and flares of metaphor combine manic playfulness with a tenderness, a passion, even, whose source becomes clearer when you discover the story’s date—October 22, 1986. It is an elegy not only for the Hungarian Uprising whose thirtieth anniversary this was, but for the whole tradition of oppressed revolutionary nationalism and its struggles throughout Central Europe. Here is a love scene of almost operatic eloquence, like a parody of Mickiewicz; at other times he seems to be trying to distill an essence of Romantic revolutionism in all its drastic colours—blood, the glinting sword, flashing eye, pale bosom, the wild night sky. The story’s climax is a great ride across the landscape, the history, the very consciousness of Mitteleuropa, a rich poetic evocation of a vividness that quite forgets the masks of postmodernity:

At night he rode into Baja, the former Francovilla, in moonlight commanding awe. On the city’s eastern edge, he rode past a fenced-in hog market on a wagon road boggy with manure. Under lean-tos, drivers snored in uncouth obliviousness, having waited for weeks for the consignment to arrive from Siberia that they would then take over from the local swineherds and drive on to Vienna...

Before turning west, he first rode along the course of the Danube up to Bogyiszló... Sometimes he would lie down for the night with the black mare on the musk-smelling moss. He would draw close to the horse’s thigh and fall asleep under the gravid arch of her drenched, bulging abdomen...

Even allowing for the fact that these stories were written over a period of almost forty years, Mészöly is a strikingly eclectic writer, whose experimenting and search for form, however, is never simply a kind of showing off but clearly a matter of need and nature. There is nothing else like Colonel Sutting’s story here, except an occasional gleam in the dark rememberings of in memoriam revolutionis, another lateish piece, which also has plenty of what one critic finds characteristic of much of his art, "a very fascinating cruelty and enchanting sadism".

Certainly in several examples of a kind of ominous pastoral in which he specializes ("Encounter", "Shade", "The Old" and "The Dead") there is a very insistent sense that in the midst of life we are in death—born astride of the grave, as Beckett puts it; though perhaps that is an unhappy gift of his central European generation. Mészöly’s own view is that he is "more drawn to the tableau of suffering than that of happiness," and in an essay "On the Craft of Writing" (1969) he describes his own initial impulse as neither to entertain nor improve the world, but as "mental hygiene": "…art wants to ruin the simplicity of happiness with its own resolute anxiety: ‘Let whatever torments me torment others, too’". In his case there seems warrant enough for such a view in some brief autobiographical disclosures in an interview, "The Map of Intransigence", printed at the end of the collection. This shows him as a prisoner of war carrying "still fresh corpses in a wheelbarrow," then, post-war, deep in the wasted provinces, working as a manual labourer, later flour-mill super-visor, in a world that presented itself "with a little exaggeration, like the short pauses for breath during the Thirty Years War—children and women pulled the ploughs, they gave birth beside streams, food was lacking, walls sooty and smouldering… a theme and a panorama from Gogol." No doubt such "gifts" from experience show too in a kind of dangerous, "folk-expressionist" comedy not unlike that of the Bohemian Hrabal, of which there are some notable pages in the long and often moving novella-length "The Old and The Dead", and in a strange piece from 1971, "A Map With Cracks. Wimbledon Hyacinth", the last story here, written in the early 1950s but unpublished and, like much of his work, unpublishable until the late 1980s, carries the rubric In memoriam 1949–89, and memorializes the Hungarian experience of actually existing socialism by casting a baleful eye on the manoeuvrings and petty corruptions of life in a tennis club frequented by the jeunesse doreée of the system’s heyday.

The collection is completed with a few other brief critical pieces, some of which I found rather aridly abstract and oracular, and a dozen or so short pieces called Video Clips, snap-shots or negatives from his past, wartime, the bitter ‘Fifties, practising an increasingly enigmatic minimalism as they progress. But taken as a whole, this is a valuable introduction to the work of a writer whom Anglo-American readers can now add to a reading list of post-Kafka writers from geopolitical Central Europe with such names as Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, Tadeusz Konwicki, Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub.

The spirit of Bruno Schulz seemed to me to hover over several of the best stories in the Corvina collection of contemporary Hungarian short stories called Give or Take a Day; or if this is not Schulz’s ghost in propria persona, as it were, at least one senses the spirit of that tradition of masochistically absurdist fantasy which he preeminently adorns, and which in itself amounts to a significant common Central European cultural inheritance. I find a benign version of it, for example, in the innocent witchcraft of "Yesterday", by Attila Mózes, one of the four Transylvanians among the twelve writers represented, a haunted elegy in which the widow of a banned writer sits at a window over a dozing courtyard reifying memory and fantasy, and time slides back and forth like clouds in changing weather. László Márton’s wonderful "Meditation on a Great Big Zero" has a truly Schulzean father, engendering a similarly fraught domesticity, but also incorporates a dire parable of the way people used to play at freedom. Lying awake at night, a boy remembers snatches of new-fangled patriotic verses... from my schoolbook: the new houses in our fatherland are like young girls, and new dresses of plaster are being put on them; that electric light is like a bouquet of pearls, and new factories clatter more loudly than a hundred lads’ boots, and the iron bridge reverberates and the tunnel roars, and up on high shines the star on the wing of the aircraft. All that was splendid, it was the honest truth, and most of all it was very sad.

It was sad to think that, however spacious, however alluring the future was, this brand-new world, scarcely built yet, was nearing its end; that everyone would shortly have to leave this still beautiful country...

Which might serve, I suppose, as an ironic envoi for part of the historical experience of all the authors in this collection.

Mihály Kornis’s "Morning" begins balefully: "Mother’s body hangs decorously from the rope, her shapely legs doing a light pirouette"; later, "Dad visits us from the grave to eat apples. He waits until it grows dark and we are fast asleep, then sneaks out to the kitchen and makes a racket with the plates"—a tone and a vision from one of the darker patches along the fantastic continuum between Schulz and Bohumil Hrabal, and one of several stories depending, so to speak, on a suicide by hanging.

László Fábián, however, is a more sui generis sort of fantasist, using precise visualisations, like instructions in a film-script (he did in fact work for the MAFILM studio as a scriptwriter), for his meditations on the lives and extreme experiences of the great early twentieth-century Arctic explorers of the early part of the century. "Amundsen, Amundsen" reminds me very much of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s fruitful speculations in his "portraits from the history of progress", but this is less cocky and ironic in tone, more poetic and trance-like in its summoning of these Arctic scenes on such hallucinatory detail. Bernard Adams, incidentally, is the excellent translator of this story, as of those by Márton and Mózes, the best of the collection.

Pervasive fantasy apart, these writers resist generalization, except for the fact that Fábián’s story is the only one not rooted in the dark soil of the nation’s experience in this century. Péter Nádas, in "August" (from Yearbook), writes of a three-cornered love affair and of the Hungarian way with civil war: "The oldest son took up arms in 1956 and was sentenced to death… But the sentence had not yet been carried out… The next oldest was a political officer assigned to military counter-intelligence." Nádas’s real concern though is the microscopically precise analysis of motive and behaviour, work of the finest emotional engineering, which generates an almost erotic intensity of perception. Of the stories written more directly out of the Hungarian people’s experience the most powerful is "Diamond", by Ottó Tolnai, a writer from the Vojvodina part of the forced Hungarian diaspora.

It is an almost unbearably painful ac- count of the life of a doubly alienated compatriot, a woman Gastarbeiter in Germany. Born in the Bácska, in the shadow of suicide and bitter poverty, abandoned then perforce by the socialist grandparents whose devotion to Stalin didn’t prevent them from being sent to the Gulag, her husband’s early death leaves her to the punishing work of picking grapes in the Rhineland, then crippling, brutal work in the asparagus fields between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, where the lines of women poison themselves with painkillers at the end of every other row. (Until he began popping pills too, a student who worked for a time with them "simply couldn’t understand why the whole thing looked so dreamlike, so ballet-like, why the women would tell such odd stories while working.") It is a clear and remorseless account of such work and of the struggle of the spirit as well as the body with such a life. But perhaps, after all, this is fantasy of a kind, too: the fantasy-in-reality of the daily world of the outcast, the marginal in the latest phase of the never too comfortable, sometimes murderously surreal history of Mitteleuropa, Zwischeneuropa, whose artists must be expected from time to time to echo the old woman’s last words, "It’s too much. Too much."