Freedom never rests

Described as “the most significant voice in contemporary Hungarian literature”, László Darvasi (Törökszentmiklós, 17 October 1962) is a writer who portrays life. The great themes of love, death, forgiveness, ruin, sin, morality and perseverance continually reappear in his short stories, novels, essays and plays, not to mention his personal and inimitable children’s storybooks. Melancholic, rich in sentiment, with a vein of subtle humour, Darvasi creates a literary world that at times flows along the meandering riverbed of classical literature, while at others is similar to a crime thriller. It features twists and turns, and a constant search for answers to the fundamental questions of our existence, transporting the reader to ancient times or imaginary lands, all with the aid of his incomparably fertile literary imagination. His works are permeated by a reverence for history, boundless veneration for the written word and his unwavering conviction that the world can be portrayed through the tools of narrative and delicately intertwined poetic phrases. Just as in this interview, given exclusively for Slowear.

Why did you choose writing as a career?
LD: Naturally, I didn’t. When I was twenty, I saw what poetry can do: everything and nothing. It was a surprising discovery and I not only wanted to experience it, but also to be a creator or moulder of this secret process. This was followed by long and painstaking work writing poems, collections of poems and short stories. It then slowly became clear that I was a writer with a strong imagination and a multifaceted voice, who loved to do everything from poetry to drama, and from novels to short stories. I have this gift. After a few books, I defined myself as a writer, and now I live as one; I am a writer in every moment, observing each event of life as it becomes a sentence. I came close to dying once. The situation was particularly interesting, among other aspects. I knew that if I survived, I would write about it. Being a writer is both an imprisonment and freedom, a state in which I must be constantly on guard so that the role does not overshadow the task. I must not become an institution or a sacrament. I have to stay grounded. I’m like the goalkeeper or defender in a football team.

What is your most recent work? What are you working on now?
LD: I have a novel, The Legend of the Tearjerkers (translated in Italy with the title La leggenda dei giocolieri di lacrime, edizioni Il Saggiatore). I’ll be finishing the sequel to this book over the next week or two: three million characters, 1,400 pages. It’s something like Bertolucci’s Novecento, only it’s set in Hungary. Aristocracy, Judaism, Hungarians, legends and reality all together. Our great 20th-century traumas. The chariot of the tearjerkers that rolls through the twentieth century. Part of it is set in an Italian location, on the Isonzo, and a mosaic fish made by an imaginary potter, Regina Passegieta, floats through the pages. Three million characters. It sounds a lot. Obviously, the stakes are high: does a great narrative still serve any purpose?

One of the strongest elements in your books is the stark description of reality. Would you use this approach to describe the soul of Budapest?
LD: My stories are very gritty and written in a spirit of realism. But there is a broader magical or lyrically irrational element that runs through my prose. Let me give you two Italian examples. In The Legend of the Tearjerkers there is a hunchback man who builds the first prison for dwarves in 17th-century Venice. In my novel Taligás, Barbara Strozzi travels through the Hungarian wilderness as an unborn embryo and sings. It is around 1720 and Barbara travels with an anonymous man who is carrying books for a trial against witches. They are perhaps not very realistic events. I like it when a giraffe comes into the yard.

Yes, but Budapest?
LD: Budapest is a metropolis with many faces and many worlds: the Danube, its islands, its numerous inhabitants. Burzsuj, proletarian, bourgeois, nouveau riche, yuppies, university students, homeless, ruins, mountain, plain, museum, spa, factory, Jewish, Hungarian, Chinese, Gypsy, Ukrainian, Russian, festival orchestra. Antal Szerb, a Hungarian writer who everyone knows, once described Budapest to UFOs, to aliens; it’s a nice, humorous book. But I don’t say what Budapest is like. I’d ask you, rather, to show me something, anything, that is not in Budapest. Because everything can be found here. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it’s inexhaustibly and unexpectedly rich. And it was devastated in the 20th century. You should rediscover it. Since the time of Emperor Claudius, the Romans bathed here, they brought the limestone, which is still interesting to touch, they walked through the ramparts holding glasses of wine – there weren’t yet any cigars – to the other side, where the barbarians were scratching the ground, and where I come from. I come from the countryside; I know mud better than concrete.

Hungary was conquered over time by the Ottomans, the Protestant rulers, then the Habsburgs and, finally, the pro-Soviet governments up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. What national identity has emerged from all this?
LD: The Hungarian people are proud and courageous. They have the valiant stride of a hussar. It’s just that for a few hundred years they’ve always lost. And someone else has always been responsible for the defeat. In the great wars of the 20th century, the Hungarians somehow always found themselves on the wrong side. It wasn’t their fault. Hungarians have always been exploited, deceived and betrayed, yet they have always held their heads high. Now Brussels is sniffing out the situation. Putin is never mentioned by our government media. The national identity is a disjointed plastic doll with no history, built on frustrations and non-existent values, which tries to present itself as the belle of the ball. Creativity is drained by devious and costly demagoguery. After the regime change, we experienced better times. Now there is an incredible destruction of self-consciousness, which is democratically sanctioned. We have a leading figure in Eastern Europe who is a mixture of Silvio Berlusconi, John Kádár (President of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1956 to 1988, ed.) and Benito Mussolini. There is believed to have been a time in history when, in around 900 AD, merely a hair’s breadth kept the Po River and the present-day region of Tuscany, for example, from being occupied by Hungarian tribes. I think it would have been an interesting historical situation.

Another feeling that emerges strongly from your work is the concept of freedom. What does this word mean to you? What are its implications and how many aspects does it have?
LD: To be free means to have no rest. I have to work for every moment of freedom, I have to take responsibility for every moment, but in each moment, I possess the littleness of myself, which is still a lot, as we know. In this country, where the State is invading private life, where legislative powers and the institutions that exercise them can be bypassed and dismantled at any time, where any absurdity can become reality and where culture has become a weapon, freedom is a special experience. I notice that it’s very hard to stay calm. Rage, anger, boredom, all these things deplete freedom. We could say that irony is the aspirin of people suffering from a lack of freedom.

After travelling, what is the first thing you do when you return to Budapest?
LD: I take my laptop out of my backpack, put it on my desk and arrange my things, as I usually do. Keyboard, mouse, screen, whatever. I take out my notes. I turn on the computer. It works. Okay, good. But that’s also what I do the first time I enter an unfamiliar apartment on a trip. I can be everywhere and anywhere in a writing position. My pockets are full of pens and pencils. It’s all nonsense. I know. Maigret was asking for information about the man. Sherlock Holmes was interested in clues from which he could reconstruct the world. I’m always interested in what happens, or could happen. I always want to discover how and with what voice I can say it. When I arrive, when I leave, when I’m traveling, when I’m resting, what happens. What happens is not always perceptible. I look until I feel that I can see.

What is your favourite place? What most represents the real Budapest for you?
LD: From my desk I can see a small park. Dozens of trees. In the summertime they cover the balconies of the fourth floor in green waves. In winter, the branches scratch each other. For me, the desk is the best spot, overlooking this park and a dilapidated kindergarten. The Belváros-Lipótváros district, known as New Leopold. The Danube flows a hundred metres away and Margherita Island lies opposite. I run there a lot. Around and around. Where it started, where it will end, who knows. Seriously, it’s like writing.