Miklós Györffy

Writing Unwritten Stories

Almost without anyone noticing, Ádám Bodor at 65 has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, with a name that is also known further afield. He doesn't belong to any generational, political or stylistic grouping; his books apart, he is hardly ever in the public eye, and as far as the books themselves go, he publishes infrequently and sparely at that: all slim volumes. He is self-confessedly lazy by nature, but his short novels are extremely terse and compessed, poetically condens-ed, charged. The author's persona and autobiography are manifest only at multiple removes and are thus virtually unrecognizable. Zsófia Balla, a fellow writer from Transylvania who, like Bodor, has made a new home in Hungary, seems to have felt like many of his readers in wishing to know more about this curious author.
This is the genesis of the A börtön szaga (The Stench of Prison), in which Ádám Bodor testifies directly, without transpositions or stylizing fictions, about himself, his views and his life. The book is subtitled "Responses to Questions by Zsófia Balla", and those questions are printed for form's sake, placed in the relaxed atmosphere of the conversation, structuring as well as chanelling it in the meantime, but remaining in the background. So this is not at all an interview in the conventional sense. Once the skilfully tied-up framework has loosened his tongue, Bodor speaks freely; or to be more precise, since he was tape-recorded, it looks very much as if what appears here was written by him on the basis of the recording. For the text of The Stench of Prison is a written one, as the title page indeed suggests by presenting the book's contents as one of Bodor's works. This has produced a distinctive kind of autobiographical confession: the text is addressed throughout to a conversational partner, and to that extent is composed of answers to questions; at the same time there are passages that, by the way they are formulated, might equally be read as short stories or essays. Thanks to Zsófia Balla, then, we are the richer for a work by Bodor that, without her, most likely would not have come into existence. The real merit of The Stench of Prison, nevertheless, is that it is an enthralling synopsis of a life story, upliftingly fine even in its grimness, and an intellectual and moral stance won at the cost of many tribulations.
Bodor was born into a middle-class Calvinist family in Kolozsvár (Cluj). His father, a true patrician of the old school, was the manager of the biggest Transylvanian bank who, despite being in Hungary at the end of the Second World War and being offered a post as permanent under-secretary, chose to return to Transylvania. There the Romanian Communists imprisoned first him then, in 1952, the sixteen-year-old Ádám, a secondary school boy, who, along with fellow pupils, had been turning out and distributing leaflets calling for the overthrow of the régime. The fact that he was Hungarian only further aggravated the offence. Young Bodor served a term of two years, first in Kolozsvár, later in the notorious prison at Szamosujvár (Gherla). The Stench of Prison tells, first and foremost, about the experiences of the still growing boy ("I grew another four inches whilst in prison") as he matured into manhood in direct proximity to unimaginable horrors. By then, the bloody era of ruthlessly violent political "re-education" was drawing to a close ("To this day, the general public knows nothing about what happened in Romanian prisons between nineteen forty-nine and 'fifty-two"); yet he was still on the receiving end of humiliations and acts of cruelty. The only reason why he was freed before the end of his sentence was because the father of one of his fellow-conspirators was in the régime's good books and interceded with Gheorghiu-Dej, by then Head of State as well as First Secretary of the Communist party, on the boys' behalf.
After release, Bodor worked as a lathe operator in a machine tool factory. He later applied to study at the Calvinist theological college, the only higher education institution that would take him, and was thus able to continue an education devoid of Marxist propaganda. Though having no intention of becoming a minister, he had no literary ambitions at that time. He became an archivist in the diocesan record office at Kolozsvár but clashed with his bishop and resigned. He was nearly thirty when his first short story appeared.
For the seventeen years afterwards, as one of his colleagues put it, he lived as a sort of private writer in Kolozsvár. A freelancer with no affiliations, a solitary person even in the tight, isolated community of Transylvania's Hungarian-language literary life, publishing little, constantly under surveillance by the Securitate, the censor's department only just tolerating his grotesque tales set in a fictive, timeless domain, because it did not know what to make of them. He was so impecunious that he only just managed to keep body and soul together by retiring regularly for months to lead a hermit's life in the remoteness of the Carpathians, in a simple, godforsaken hut where he effectively lived off the land. He was also sustained by the experience of the perfection of a Nature untouched by humans, above all compared to the fraudulent, execrable East European dictatorship that, bit by bit, was erasing all traces of Transylvania's once rich multiethnic culture.
With the political climate becoming ever more unendurable, and after official formalities that dragged out over five years, Ádám Bodor moved to Hungary in 1982. Although in more recent years he has again been feeling homesick for his native land, the localities of his youth, and especially the mountains and clouds of the country of the Székely, he is also quite clear in his mind that he would no longer be able to live there: "Our once-familiar middle-class milieu has been degraded, but nothing equivalent has arisen in its place that we accept with any sympathy and can respect." The process from which he fled has continued ever since:

Even from a bird's eye view it is unpleasant to witness the proprietors of this country-sized region seemingly incapable of knowing what to do with its wealth and diversity, any more than its inhabitants with their freedom. The concept of a native land is slowly starting to become distorted in those who have stayed behind-to the extent that one fears they are going to move away from there permanently with ever-lighter hearts. Now that the glorious Saxon churches have grown empty, slowly those of the Magyars are also growing empty, and not a single Romanian patriot will have cause for rejoicing at the still that will ensue.[...] Rather, I have the feeling that when they will ceremoniously declare that the very last stranger is now safely beyond the borders, there will be none of the promised revels, but a forlorn stillness of dismay will settle amongst the empty churches and upon those who are left behind.

Bodor does not feel entirely comfortable even in Hungary. He believes that those who, like him, have been schooled in the harsher, more rigorous climes of East Europe and gained more first-hand experience of life as members of an ethnic minority, are better positioned than people in the home-country to discern that the curses of East-Europeanness are still being visited even on that land as well-and he would include here the more recent manifestations of affronted national arrogance. In his view, the concept of democracy has yet to be fully clarified even in Hungary, and he is deeply ashamed on that score, irrespective of whether this really is part and parcel of the region's nature or not. Regarding the nature of the place, he asserts with bitter, resigned sarcasm:

To be quite frank, there is something about the flatter part of this Carpathian Basin that doesn't quite add up. Great as the warmth that it is capable of radiating from the idyllic world of its isolated farmsteads, so too is the bleakness and indifference carried by the biting winds that brew up, from time to time, over those plains. Petoýfi loved this part of the world, and so have many more besides him, but they are certainly not a majority. Yet almost every fortnight there pops up some crackpot who likens our country's potential and prospects to those of Switzerland. A curious posture, no doubt about it. As far as our endowments and talents go, Switzerland is the very last place that would come to my mind in connection with my little homeland, smack-dab in the middle of apathetic plains without prospect, blasted by flood and drought in turn, and a fathomless up-yours attitude. What I increasingly find myself wondering is how it was possible to stick it out here for a thousand years... Unfortunately, most of the more pleasant spots were already occupied a thousand years ago, whilst we Hungarians were unable to hang onto the prettier part of our territories. Now it would be nice if at least what is left were to stay-of course, with an internal order that would induce us to learn to cherish this place even in a clear awareness of the gap between us and Switzerland.

Works by Bodor, or reviews of them, have appeared in German, English, French, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Bulgarian, Serb, Czech, Croat and Romanian.