Hungary's conflicted history—its shifting frontiers, drastic amputations of territory and population—has produced, George Szirtes suggests, a particular reaction in Hungarian writing—"an interest in the grotesque, the black joke, the magical gone wrong [my italics]". That last thought might have been written—perhaps was written—with Gyula Krúdy's extraordinary fictions especially in mind. Even more than Sunflower, the novel which immediately preceded it, Ladies Day, now available in John Batki's American-English translation, is shot through with a queer magic, a disturbed energy of language, character and situation for which it's hard to think of a parallel, in the Anglo-Saxon literatures, at least. One can perhaps find echoes of that disturbed magic in some of the writing of near-contemporary writers in parts of East Central Europe that had been subjected to the same sort of historical tribulations. Think, for instance, of the less robust, more painfully haunted imaginative world of Bruno Schulz, disclosed in The Street of Crocodiles, his bewitched, obsessional drawings, and the strangely-lit stories of Cinnamon Shops. Schulz and Krúdy have other things in common, too: the shaman's gift of metamorphosis, and some interest in fetishistic humiliation, got from the work of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, so fashionably influential in Austro-Hungarian cultural milieux of the early twentieth century. (Hungarian may be the 'orphan language' John Lukacs calls it, but its writers were not, after all, excluded from the cultural family of the Empire and Central Europe generally.)

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W.L. Webb
wrote about literature and politics for the Guardian for more than 30 years, and was subsequently a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has edited An Embarrassment of Tyrannies (Gollancz, 1997) from the work of the magazine Index on Censorship.