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So there is the problem of Krúdy’s Magyar language. There is the question of his place in the history of Hungarian literature. And the question of his place in European, and world, literature. Allow me to turn to what I think are the essentials of these questions before I return to the language problem.
More than sixty years after his death two considerations are indubitable. The first is that Krúdy was one of the greatest writers, if not the greatest writer of Magyar prose. The second — not unconnected with the first — is his unclassifiability.
The recognition of Krúdy’s importance within the ranks of the greatest Hungarian prose writers developed slowly, and perhaps erratically, but this recognition is no longer questionable. During his lifetime the extraordinary significance of his style and the quality of his talents were asserted only by a few of his greatest contemporary authors. Then during the last half- century as more and more of his books were reprinted, many scholarly and critical essays and monographs about Krúdy appeared. One main result of this is that we have now a rather clear view of the successive phases of his oeuvre. (Note that because of the staggering quantity of his writings there can never be a complete Collected Works of Krúdy; and that despite the most assiduous work of researchers a complete and precise bibliography of Krúdy’s published pieces will not be possible either.)
During his first phase, from approximately 1894 to 1911 (recall that his first published writings appeared when he was fourteen!) we can already detect without difficulty most of the elements of his extraordinary style and vision. At this time he may be still somewhat classifiable, because of the similarity of many of his themes (though with hardly any similarity in style) to those of the great Hungarian novelist Kálmán Mikszáth, of the previous generation. The second period began with the Sindbad books, in 1911–12. It may be said (though imprecisely) that it was then that Krúdy reached his full powers. What is more certain is that it was then, and then only, that he became a well-known writer among the considerable reading public in Budapest. This had something to do with the fact that most of his work now dealt with scenes and people in Budapest — but the significance of this must not be exaggerated. He wrote much more of old (nineteenth-century) Buda and Pest than of the modern Budapest of the 1910s; while the symbolic and impressionist qualities of his prose developed further and further.
The third “period,” 1918 to 1923, corresponded with the greatest tragedies of his country and nation as well as with lamentable upheavals in his personal life. Perhaps his greatest masterpieces — including the present Sunflower—were composed in these years. He now turned back from the present to the past, from Budapest to the provinces, to an older dreamlike country — which, however, must not be attributed to an escape into nostalgia. These books are suffused with what, perhaps surprisingly, Maupassant once wrote: that the aim of the “realistic novelist” (and Krúdy was anything but a “realistic novelist”) “is not to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events”—in Krúdy’s case, particularly of people. Krúdy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events, in dreamlike settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts. This Introduction is not the place to explain or illustrate this further; but perhaps readers of this book will recognize what this meant and still means.
The last eight years of his short life were his saddest years, interrupted twice by serious illnesses and leading directly to his premature death. There was no deterioration in his style; but there was less of a concordance of his themes and of his interests. Much of this was due to his personal constraints and difficulties. We may, however, detect yet another emerging element in the evolution of this extraordinary writer: his increasing interest in the past history of Hungary, perhaps propelled by his sense that the eye of a great novelist may see things that professional historians may have missed. In these often sketchlike reconstructions it is again and again evident that Krúdy is sui generis, and unique.
Indeed, one of the marks of Krúdy’s extraordinary position in the history of Hungarian literature (and if I may say so, in the history of Hungarian mentality) is the character of his unclassifiability. During the twentieth century there has come a break, a veritable chasm, in Hungarian literature, as well as in ideology and politics, between “populists” and “urbanists” (or between “nationalists” and “internationalists,” though none of these terms are quite accurate). Again this is not the place to analyze or even to describe this — often regrettable — phenomenon further, save to suggest that similar scissions exist in other nations too (e.g. between “Redskins” and “Palefaces” in America, or between “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” in Russia, etc.) Now it is not only that Krúdy does not belong into either of these categories. Nor is he a “hybrid,” writing about Budapest one day and about the old provinces on another morning. He is — not at all consciously, but characteristically and naturally — above them, without even thinking, for a moment, about their differences. That alone is a mark of his greatness. The unclassifiable character of his style, of his vision, of his very Hungarianness is more than the mark of an eccentric talent: the talent exists not because it is eccentric, and the eccentricity is remarkable not because it is talented. Like a Shakespeare or a Dante or a Goethe in their very different ways, Krúdy is a genius.
But then even a genius cannot be separated entirely from his place and time. Krúdy belongs to Hungary; and he belongs to the twentieth century. He is a modern writer — though there may be plenty of problems with that overused adjective. (The time may come when we, completely contrary to the still accepted idea, will recognize the works of French Impressionists not as breaking away from representational art but as its culmination.) The words “impressionism” or “symbolism” would have meant nothing to Gyula Krúdy. Nor was he a “subjectivist” writer. But within his capacity to see and to describe people (and places) beyond the constraints of mechanical time, to understand the confluences of dreaming and wakefulness, of consciousness and unconsciousness (not sub-consciousness!), of the ideal with the real (and not with the material!) we may detect elements of those recognitions that appear in the works of such different artists and thinkers and composers as Bergson, or Mallarmé, or Debussy and Ravel, or Proust (with whom he has been often compared, though the French prose writers closer to his style are Alain-Fournier and Valéry Larbaud), or even — perhaps — of Virginia Woolf (with whom otherwise he had nothing in common). Krúdy, in sum, is one of the greats of European literature of the twentieth century.
This brings me, in conclusion, to the last problem, which is that of the Magyar language — and, consequently, to the enormous difficulties of Krúdy’s translatability. “Everything suffers from a translation, except a bishop,” wrote Trollope in dear old Victorian England. Yes, and this is especially true of works from the Hungarian — but not only because of the already-mentioned uniqueness of the Magyar language, and the unrelatedness of the small Hungarian nation to the great linguistic families of Europe. Nor is the main problem — though problem it is — inherent in Krúdy’s prosody and vocabulary which are earthy and ethereal at the same time, sometimes within the same sentence. Krúdy is a deeply Hungarian writer. That quality has nothing to do with nationalism (the mistaken belief of many a populist), though it has much to do with the older, more traditional virtues of patriotism. His prose is poetic, and profoundly national, soaked with history, with images, associations, including not only words but rhythms recognizable only to Hungarians, and among them only to those whose imaginative antennae naturally vibrate not only with such words and their sounds but with what those descriptions historically — yes, historically — represent.