Guardian 1988
Miklós Szentkuthy: defiant personal vision
The bulky “official” History offers a single sentence on Miklós Szentkuthy: “An erudite and
cultured scholar, rejected all traditional elements in his novels, as in Prae (1934).”
The quotation testifies to the failure of Marxist scholarship to keep abreast of the times. Szentkuthy, whose restless mind has only now come to a standstill, was perhaps the most original creative writer Hungary has produced this century.
Szentkuthy was a solitary figure. His first appearance in 1934, with a lengthy narrative text published out of his wife’s income, was clumsily tucked away under a Latin preposition. It was hardly noticed Armed with not-yet-fashionable philosophers such as Carnap, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein in particular, he set out with unbound energies to gain an insight into the whole gamut of human existence. Since Szentkuthy believed that the world is essentially chaotic (pace Hegel) and consequently all rational approaches to a knowledge of the world are impossible, the protagonist of Prae, Touqué, is devoid of all conventional qualitities. The novel itself has perplexed, fascinated and irrirated critics for half a century. Its richness of detail and information, and its original discourses on language, logic, and cognitive processes go beyond the approaches familiar in Europe.
Szentkuthy began the publication of the Breviary of St Orpheus in 1939 in parts. In it St Orpheus, the symbol of human intellect “wandering freely in the secret realm of reality”, was to describe an awareness of the entire human experience; it was to be a Catalogus Rerum. After Footnotes to Casanova, Black Renaissance, Escorial, Europa Minor, Cynthia, and Confession and Puppet-Show, all published between 1939 and 1942, he was forced to abandon his project for 30 years. He and others were anathema to intellectuals of Lukács’ kind, persecutors of the free “wanderings of the human spirit”. Szentkuthy survived the lean years by translating English classics, including Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and many others. His masterpiece in this genre was Ulysses (1974) a sore point to Lukács who frequently apologised for disliking Joyce, claiming that he read Ulysses only in German. Szentkuthy also produced conventional novels on major creative artists – Haydn, Goethe, Dürer, and Mozart (Divertimento, the best).
Latterly, he received official prizes. Recognition, however, first came to him from abroad. He resumed the Breviary, ending with The Bloody Ass (1984). Most works have now been reissued, confirming his youth ful claim to originality more than half a century ago: “There is not a single book or even a single line in the whole world which would have even approximately contained my truth.”
Szentkuthy died as he lived with a touch of unreality. On his last day, after lunch, his
wife Dollyka read to him from Vitae Sanctorum. After he dozed. He was, as usual, burning a candle by his bedside – on this day in memory of his sister-in-law. When his secretary arrived, the candle was burning for him.
Lóránt Czigány