Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [3]
He writes in his diary:
I have always really been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else.
It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise that I had to do something. I began to write poetry. [...] For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying. I have nothing but disdain for those writers who also have something else to say: about social problems, the relationship between men and women, the struggle between races, etc., etc. It sickens my stomach to think of their narrow-mindedness. What superficial work they do, poor things, and how proud they are of it.
Kosztolányi is stoical, but oddly so, one might even say insincerely so. His is the stoicism of a young man. Kosztolányi's every reflex is that of a young man. (He grew old hard, found it hard to grow old, like a beautiful woman.) He believed in nothing except style. Yet he wasn't a man of principle. He is characterised at once by a love of life and a terror of life. He has no magic potions, he says, nothing helps–but why should one be disappointed because of this? He raises the questions of a man of today, but not the questions of a disillusioned man. We hear the dignity, at times the desire to show off, of a man in the shadow of death.
He sets to work on Skylark in the spring of 1923. Szabadka already belongs to another country, our mothers and fathers belong to another country, they are just in the process of learning Serbian; everything is alien, once again our own past is disappearing. Kosztolányi looks back at a world he knew well, where he knew his way around as if at home, but without nostalgia. He knows how the story ends; he sits there in his own nothingness.
The time of the novel is 1899, the eternal present moment, a Faustian moment: in miniature, in a provincial setting. Kosztolányi shows us the margins of a world whose centre we know from Musil. We are in the borderlands of Kakania.
Kosztolányi's character as a prose writer does not, however, stand close to that of Musil, rather to that of Chekhov. He shares that same helpless fascination for the banal and trivial, for a drama-of-being which can be unravelled from a remote gesture, a twitch of the mouth, a dismissive wave of the hand, from lamplight and ugliness. A spider's web over a mine.
Skylark's ugliness is not a symbol. This ugliness is the unnameable anxiety which we would dearly love to forget, to dispel, but it is not possible, it always comes back, is always with us, relentless, just like a daughter with her father. Skylark's hideousness, her soft puffiness, dullness, aggressive goodness is: us. It is our lives that are so stiff, so predictable, so impersonal, so Hungarian. Skylark is eternal. There's no deliverance. Our little bird always flies home.
Kosztolányi's prose is quiet and sharp. Today our books are noisier and perhaps more blurred.
—PÉTER ESTERHÁZY
1993
1. Subotica today belongs to Vojvodina, until 1990 an autonomous province of Serbia. It became part of the newly created state of Yugoslavia in 1918 at the end of the First World War. As a result of the postwar settlement (Treaty of Trianon, 1920), Hungary lost approximately two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population to the new successor states.
2. A term invented by Robert Musil to describe the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was coined from the abbreviation K. u. K. or K. K. (whence Kaka-nia), which stood for Kaiserlich und Königlich (imperial and royal) and was used in reference to all the monarchy's major institutions.
3. A selection of Géza Csáth's short stories is available in English. See Géza Csáth, Opium and other Stories, selected with a biographical note by Marianna D. Birnbaum, translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers