Tim Wilkinson

Rom Wasn't Built in a Day, Either

...

To take just the excerpts that have been translated for this issue of HQ: the main text of Chapter 1 is unaltered from the first edition, but Note 1 (Letter from Munich, 21 March 1989) has been reshaped, with a quote from the final volume of Márai's Diary (1984-1989) being dropped altogether and Notes 3-5 being new. Chapter 3 is essentially unaltered, though it has acquired an epigraph from Camus (the quote from the author's mother was already there) and Note 4, for example, is new material. Chapter 14 is entirely new; Chapter 15 was formerly Chapter 10 (unchanged); Chapter 22 has the quotation from Nietzsche added as an epigraph but is essentially the old Chapter 17, unchanged; the Coda now incorporates the old Chapter 22, which was entitled 'Foam', and radically expands it under the same title (a second part, under the title '666' is carried over unaltered).
Obviously, it would be boring to continue, but I think that is enough to justify the characterisation of the book as a "second, enlarged edition". I shall look at the "revised" bit shortly, but anyway what is of far more interest to potential readers is whether that significantly alters one's reading of Ruin.
The paragraph that I wrote about the first edition seven years ago still largely holds up:

The uncomfortable message [...] that few of us can escape a share of responsibility, however slight, for the evil that is done in our times, applies equally to Endre Kukorelly's Ruin, though here the confrontation is with the shades of a more recent past. The wry twist of the long 'o' in the book's punning subtitle-'A History of the Soviet Onion'-has nothing to do with vegetables, or at most only decayed ones: in the Hungarian language it has connotations of 'antiquated', 'obsolete', 'clapped out'. The decrepitude of the Communist's material world is the least of the targets of the 23 laconic, mostly untitled homilies, bearing various dates between February 1987 and April 2000. They are incandescently scathing and unforgiving reactions to its sheer spiritual bankruptcy, as sparked by Kukorelly's recollections of events in his own life-childhood; the obligatory spell as an army conscript in the wake of the Czech events of 1968; a three-week holiday in the fabled West (London, Paris) in 1978; visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1980s- but more particularly a wide range of illustrative texts. The deepest scorn is directed at fellow-travelling writers, with the biggest punch being consigned to a ghastly 'Coda'. Under the ominous mark of the number 666, this responds to a line from a 1950 poem by Zoltán Zelk, then one of the most servile lackeys of the Stalinist regime ('Comrade, what else should I weave into my song'), by assembling a series of short verses concerning a death sentence passed by a "people's tribunal", a prisoner's reflections, a search for contraband in a peasant's barn, and a wife's letter to the military authorities enquiring about the fate of a husband condemned to death in 1949. The anger is so allconsuming, not even sparing the author himself, one is left wondering how any identity could survive it.

The Zelk quotation has now been moved to form one of the epigraphs to Chapter 8, which is a prelude to some anecdotes about life for a boy in Hungary of the Fifties and early Sixties, including the mysteries of Cyrillic lettering:

See-see-see-pee, trots out Pásztor in the Russian lesson and looks up from his book. The language book for eighth graders. Es-es-es-are, our Russian teacher, Mrs Kirschner, would murmur to herself, fabulous breasts she had. All my classmates fancied them too. Pásztor's real name was Pásztuh. He also fancied Mrs Kirschner.
Es-es-es-are, says Mrs Kirschner. You can barely hear her. She turns round, sideways on, really cracking, the turn points them up even better.
And her face is quite different.
She looks out of the window. Or wherever. Utterly weary, numb, indifferent. Pozhalsta, she says to herself, and Pásztor repeats: Es-es-es-are. Good, so now read! See-see-seepee, Pásztor reads. Nobody laughs.
I don't recall us laughing.

In other words, any punch that may have been lost in sheer, stripped-down savagery is more than made up for by the sustained irony, which makes repeated reading hugely rewarding.
The '666' nevertheless gains added dimensions. Thus, the section following Chapter 5 in the new edition is not Chapter 6 but Chapter 666, and its first epigraph directly quotes its source (if anyone is wondering): Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred three-score and six (Rev. xiii.18), this being coupled with an apposite quote from Dostoyevsky's The Devils. The chapter in question is a sharp review of Hungarian literature and writers in the first two or three decades after the Second World War, centring mainly (though not exclusively) on pieces published in the June 1966 (6/66) issues of two representative literary magazines: Kortárs ('Contemporary') and Új Írás ('New Writing').
The old Chapter 6, incidentally, is Chapter 9 in the new edition, with the only change being, significantly enough, that its last sentence appears in the original German (Der Menschen Worte verstand ich nie) rather than the translated form ('But human words I've never understood'), from which some may recognise the source as Hölderlin's poem "Da ich ein Knabe war", which Kukorelly draws on in, for instance, the 9 x 9 poem cycles of his 1998 masterpiece H*ö*l*d*e*r*l*i*n.
It is perhaps becoming clear that one of the things Kukorelly has done increasingly over the last decade or so is to accrete to and expand the scope of the lives that are recounted in his oeuvre. To take a simple example: 'bananas' are mentioned in passing in Note 2 to Chapter 1, but more significantly in Chapter 25.¹

I remember the bananas. If I write it down, I have it, the memory functions, it's more the imagination that is lacking. The thing with the bananas was that, as a rule, there were no bananas, but sometimes, no knowing why, a batch would be shipped in. Why of all things there were no bananas, or why there were no bananas when there were oranges, was a mystery; perhaps it was on health grounds, on account of the vitamin intake, they reckoned other kinds of vitamins were necessary. There were people who concerned themselves with vitamins, they assessed the situation, and that's why there were no bananas, and this yes-there-are-no-bananas was Commonism.

Those consignments of bananas also feature in H*ö*l*d*e*r*l*i*n:

Once, during the mid-Eighties, I queued up for roughly an hour and a half for bananas in the subway passage at the Western Train Terminal. I just mention that, it doesn't belong here.
True, it was just the once, and after that not again.
The queue came to a halt, though I had almost reached there, because they had run out of produce, but they were going to bring some more, supposedly; I'll wait it out now, I thought.
If I've waited this long.
Then I'll stick it out now.
It was bitter, particularly towards the end, my shoes were letting in water, as best I recall, and I didn't really know why I was standing there, why I was sticking it out, but what did it matter.
The whole lot, by and large, freezing and shivering.
All because I had started then couldn't desist, and all for bananas, or whatever.
They actually did bring a largish batch, whilst I stood in line for bananas, literally.²

The comparison with the availability of oranges will surely remind many Hungarians of the weekly magazine Magyar Narancs (Hungarian Orange), which in itself is an allusion to Péter Bacsó's celebrated film The Witness (shot in 1969 but not on view to the general public-and then mainly in suburban cinemas- until after it won a prize at Cannes in 1981). In one not-so-far-fetched skit, the Hungarian orange turns out to be a lemon (in every possible sense), with the punch line "It may be a little sour, but at least it's ours!"
Of course it is all very well being able to mine black humour of this sort in retrospect. I know it wasn't quite so funny for my father-in-law, for instance, who lectured on biology at the College of Veterinary Science in Budapest during the Fifties-that is, until he was kicked out for lecturing on Darwinism at a time when the absurd claims of Lysenkoism (which is in part what Bacsó was parodying) were becoming de rigueur. And that is to say nothing of the millions who died in the USSR, China, etc. etc. as a result of the catastrophic brutality with which Stalin, Mao Zedong etc. etc. enforced this particular dogma. Just to make it clear, Kukorelly does not spare them any blushes. Chapter 10, for instance, uses some telling quotes from Dostoyevsky's The Devils and Camus' The Plague to underline this.³
The interweaving of Kukorelly's works applies at least as much to his most recent prose magnum opus, Fairy Vale, or Riddles of the Human Heart (see the slightly dyspeptic review in HQ 172). In Chapter 4 of this (translated in HQ 175) one finds:

... My parents worked for their money. We work and something will come of it-that was the basis on which they did it, only nothing came of it, that's the problem. That's the basis. Enough became of it for them to bring back from the market two kilos of blood oranges, really tasty, and they didn't tot up afterwards how long they had squatted in the cotton dust showering out from that bobbin-winding machine for those eight oranges. In the fine fluff that uniformly coated the flat. Bananas were not to be had, and a good job too...

Likewise, the bicycle belonging to cousin Pali that is mentioned in Chapter 3 of Ruin is clearly the same one on which the narrator rides around in Fairy Vale. The links can be made, and the reading experience is the richer for it, but the one work is not actually dependent on the others, and there is little in the way of repetition of incidents or anecdotes, at most illumination from a different angle. What I am suggesting is that there is now quite a substantial, and still growing, body of inimitably Kukorellyian material which supplies an increasingly precise critical appraisal of life in Hungary (or eastern Europe) over the last 60 years.
As I suggested with my reactions to the first edition of Ruin, one should not regard the criticism as pertaining just to former 'Commies'. Kukorelly makes it very clear, on repeated occasions, that "we" is meant virtually all-inclusively, including himself. Which sort of brings me back to Esterházy. He had the very distressing experience of finding out, shortly before Celestial Harmonies came out in Hungary, that his own father had worked for much of the post-1956 period as an informer for the secret police, as related in Javított kiadás-melléklet a Harmonia calestishez (Revised Edition: An Appendix to Celestial Harmonies; see HQ 166). Kukorelly's own hunt for the old surveillance files on himself is the subject of Chapters 26-27. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I detect a hint of ironic cross-reference in Kukorelly's wording of "second revised and enlarged" edition...
Still displayed on the front cover of the jacket (in the best possible taste) is a small black-and-white photo of what I take to be a rear view of a Pobeda saloon- the car on the back seat of which Péter Esterházy took such a diverting ride in Kis Magyar Pornográfia in the early Eighties.⁴ I don't know whose idea this was, but since Hungarian book designers so rarely get any acknowledgement of their often witty and thoughtful contributions, let's say it originally came from István B. Gellér and for the second edition-a shot seemingly of the same car outside the same dreary block of flats from a slightly different angle (my flabber is being duly ghasted at the thought)-Tibor Hrapka.
Not that readers from the West have anything to be smug about (see the encounters that came the author's way during trips to France, Scandinavia and England, as in Chapter 22, for instance). Nor, of course, can one forget the now legendary reports that a string of distinguished but mostly fellow-travelling writers produced after having lived in the lap of luxury during their guest visits to the USSR (or See-see-see-pee, Pásztor would have it). Gide's account of his 1936 trip, when the Great Purge was reaching full swing, is exemplary in the worst possible way (see Chapters 12, 13 and 16). The brushes Kukorelly had with admirers of Kádárist Hungary in youth hostels in Marseille (Note 3 to Chapter 1) and London (Chapter 22) are tame by comparison, but the sad thing is that similar characters still seem to get away with it in the cradle of the Enlightenment (France and Scotland can argue that one out).
Perhaps finally, on a personal note, it tickles me no end that in Note 5 to Chapter 1 Kukorelly now works in a reference to my extremely modest earlier reference to his book as being one of "a total of 16 articles about it [the first edition] appeared". By chance I happen to know that the text of this note has been recycled from a longer piece by Kukorelly that ended up being published as "Nine Passages on (Literary) Criticism in Hungary."⁵
It is even more pure chance that within 150 words of my own name I note the name of a great-uncle of mine (maternal grandmother's older brother), who, to put it at the blandest, was something of a literary critic. I had nothing to do with him (nor he, most decidedly, with me), though it is likely that his adopted son played a key role in getting me a post as an (English) language sub-editor at the Central Research Institute for Physics (KFKI), Budapest, in 1970 and thus sliced through the Catch 22 in which to get a work permit in Hungary one first needed a residence permit, but to get the latter one needed to have a work permit...
Since the Institute (for experimental purposes) operated a tiny atomic reactor, the premises, located on Széchenyi Hill on the western outskirts of Buda's Twelfth District, had to be guarded. That function was discharged by civilian militiamen wearing those characteristic padded jackets:

A militiaman was called a pufajkás-a padded-jacket-because he wore a paddedjacket, but a stoolie did not hang a stool around his neck. Frank and sneaky, that's the (vast) difference, (vastly) greater than that between a hapless blackmailed and a voluntarily zealous squealer. Not by law but according to morality. Because that's how we became socialised, how we learnt from one another not to do that.
That's the thing that won't do under any circumstances, and if a person does it nevertheless, you feel shame on his behalf. But what does he do meanwhile? (Chapter 28, pp. 131-132)

One of my small but very conscious pleasures was that of being able (obliged) every workday to walk into this high-security site. I was also very conscious that my efforts (and, the more fool I, I actually did work on things I was supposed to) were giving support and sustenance, in some intangible way, to the enemy. So I do sense very personally what Kukorelly is driving at with his "you feel shame on his behalf."

¹ A translation of Chapter 25 (11 December 2006) may be obtained from the Hungarian Literature On-line website (accessible at www.hlo.hu).

² 'X. L Rückkehr in die Heimat' in: H*ö*l*d*e*r*l*i*n. Pécs: Jelenkor Kiadó. 1998, p. 97.

³ A translation of this (11 December 2006) may be obtained from the website for the on-line magazine Eurozine (at www.eurozine.com).

⁴ An English translation was published in the mid-Nineties under the title A Little Hungarian Pornography, though "A Concise-or even Comminuted-Pornography of Hungary" is nearer the mark (KMP = CPH = Communist Party of Hungary).

⁵ In: The New Central and East European Culture, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Carmen Andras, and Magdalena Marsovszky. Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2006, pp. 227-235. That title, incidentally, was "trimmed down" from "666 999: Nine Passages on Criticism"), where the '666 999' clearly reflects today's text-messaging culture, while the piece was also shorn of its four epigraphs, among which was All things, all things, all things I know. This helped me to nail down the source (Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung) of a quotation used by Imre Kertész in his "Sworn Statement" (see HQ 163).

 

Tim Wilkinson
Yorkshire bred, has been translating from Hungarian since a spell in Budapest in the early Seventies. His translations have covered historical, cultural and sociological topics relating to Hungary and, increasingly, Hungarian literary works. Of three novels by Imre Kertész that have appeared in the USA and UK, his new translation of Fatelessness was awarded the 43rd Annual PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005 and in the UK was runner-up for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2006.