Ambrus Bor: Miklós Szentkuthy
The special “breviary” of Saint Orpheus was begun in 1939 by that lonely -or perhaps not lonely, simply uncomparable-figure of Hungarian literature, Miklós Szentkuthy, who called himself Saint Orpheus. Criticisms and literary history always compare and look for similarities in for mcontent and intellectuality, therefore-lacking any Hungarian comparison-they compare the writer to James Joyce or to Marcel Proust. And probably not without reason. The writings of the young Szentkuthy preceding the “Breviary”, showed a mastery of Joyce, and the 66-year-old writer’s new translation of Ulysses is also an unprecedented Hungarian recreation of the style of Joyce. The comparison with Proust also has some foundation although this has been provided by the seven great volúmes of the “Breviary” already published, the endless flow of pictures and thoughts, and the several thousand pages rather than the world brought alive in them, or the synthesis endeavoured in the work. In the world of Joyce the psyche is endlessly complicated, while in Proust the world seems to be an unacceptably rich cosmos, but both of them try to analyse and synthetize the private world of one single man, while Szentkuthy endeavours to synthetize history, European and Mediterranean culture-has endeavoured and will in the future too, with an ever-increasing need-not following the paths of time, nor searching in the present for the answers to the great questions of art, but by breaking the dimensions of time, binding the earlier half of the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, viewing Europe with the European-humanist type of man, searching for unchanging humanity within changing history.
This is the endless song of Orpheus. It begins with the account of human feelings, but soon turns to the world of the Christian Middle Ages -so rich in material for the iconographist-then passes through Venice, Byzantium, the Italian Renaissance, coming to the extravagant world of Baroque. Here it seems to linger: the new volumes of the “Breviary”-the latest included, expected some time in 1974-turn back to the past, glance ahead into the future, and provide all reachable knowledge, artistic creation and treasures for the Baroque scientists and kings. Extravagant richness, lavish play of thoughts and style-considered surrealistic by some-oblivous, cloudy, Baroque-artistic, the humane celebration of a European with unprecedented education. Although this is meant to be the breviary of uncertainty, the symbolic figure in the background of the new volume is also Saint Thomas the Apostle, and in the whirling content and pictures of the chapters, one is aware of the presence (although also a symbolic figure) of the Archbishop of Grenoble, Saint Hugo the Sceptical. But only the details of this life celebration itself. And if love comes hand in hand with hatred, viciousness with devoutness, if Popes kill and Queens prove to be whores with golden crowns, and if those in doubt have a reason to ask what is changing, where is peacefulnesswhether Christian or other-and if it seems that all that is produced by the history and confession of Europe is an unnecessary and eternal selfrepetition: the continuity and flow of this European thousand-and-one-nights is magic.
It is not an easy book to read, as even the admirers of Szentkuthy admit. Endless chains of association, the richness of every single group of pictures, the ever-repeated virtuosity of thought -“blason barocco”: the writer’s favourite trick is to draw each picture from forty or fifty aspects, with a hundred and one comparisons and reflections, and the endless, artistic word-music, ornaments and decorations, Baroque and Art Nouveau, flamboyant Gothic and perhaps endless eroto-myths set in the stone carvings in the Mallapuram and Ellore Hindu rock churches.
And there are times when the reader will come across the present in Baroque-Albert Speer goes through a chapter on his name too-though there are times when this is noticeable only to those searching for the similarities. And there are things that will only be noticed by those with a deep knowledge of modern Hungarian literature. A wanderer in Sicily called Antonio Serbello, whose name when translated back to Hungarian will turn out to be Antal Szerb, the great Hungarian writer, literary historian and wellknown aesthetician of the 1930s.
The writer once remarked that he could resist his own work: the richness of the European train of thought is divided unconditionally in his mind, it changes, develops and multiplies like a godly cancer of the body. Such ironically provocative thought as this, that can turn the dangers of death into life with laughing security, is naturally only possessed by a writer like this.
Ambrus Bor