Balázs József: Biography

József Balázs (Vitka, 19 March 1944 – Budapest, 13 October 1997)

Two-time József Attila Prize-winning writer and playwright. Elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy on 4 June 2020.

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Born into a farming family on 19 March 1944 in Vitka. He graduated from the Esze Tamás High School in Mátészalka in 1962. He moved to Budapest to live with his cousins, making a living as a labourer and unskilled worker. In his free time he frequented the theatre and read a lot. He wanted to be a film director, but was not accepted to the College of Theatre and Film. In 1964 he became a student in the Faculty of Arts at Eötvös Loránd University.

In 1966 he met his future wife, linguist Katalin Fodor. During his university studies, he was a member of the amateur film club of the University Stage, making amateur films and writing film reviews. He repeatedly applied to the College of Theatre and Film without success. In 1969, as a student at the Eötvös College, he graduated as a teacher of Hungarian history. Later that year he married Katalin Fodor.

After graduation, he found employment at the university. In the early 1970s, he joined the industrial journal Magyar Papír (Hungarian Paper) where he wrote reports and published literary commentary and serial fiction.

At the Magyar Papír, his writer colleagues working as journalists encouraged him to turn his screenplays into novels. In 1973, he completed his first novel, Koportos. He struggled with finding a publisher for a long time. Literary history remembers the manuscript as being largely ignored by publishers and literary journals because of its ‘unpretentiousness’ and the quality of the paper and typescript. Another typical editorial ‘objection’ concerns the ethnicity of the protagonist – many people, even those who have never read the work, consider the portrayal of the trials of Mihály Balog, a widower of Gypsy origin, too big a task for an emerging writer.

He wrote his doctoral thesis on the 1960s films of Michelangelo Antonioni and defended it in 1974. He was also completing the manuscript of the novel Hungarians (Magyarok) at the same time.

He eventually sent Koportos to the editors of the literary journal Forrás, and in the 1975/1 issue of the magazine, the editorial staff published an introduction to an excerpt from the novel entitled We Are Inaugurating a Writer, which described the text as the first significant work of an exceptional talent. The publication opened the doors of the literary establishment to him.

In 1975, Magvető published Hungarians, which is still considered József Balázs’ most successful work. Koportos was published by Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó in 1976. In the same year, his novel Bálint Fábián’s Encounter with God (Fábián Bálint találkozása Istennel) was published. He became a central figure of literary life and came to be considered one of the most important Hungarian writers. His works have been read, taught and translated into several languages (Bulgarian, Finnish, Polish, German, Swedish, Slovak, Turkish).

From 1976 onward he worked as a dramaturg for a film company, wrote numerous screenplays (The Two of Them [Ők ketten], Heartache [Szívzűr]) and published (Glass Bells [Üvegharangok], Smuggler with a Harpsichord [Csempész csembalóval]). From that year until 1979, he was a member of the editorial board of Mozgó Világ. In 1977, his novel The Innocent (Az ártatlan) was published. It was the first time he was awarded the Attila József Prize, and a year later he was awarded the Mihály Váci Prize.

In 1978, Koportos was published again. The second edition of Hungarians was published as part of Magvető’s From Idea to Film book series, which also included the screenplay adaptation by Zoltán Fábri and the shooting diary of József Balázs. In the same year, his novel Lovers and Loves (Szeretők és szerelmesek) was published.

József Balázs’ popularity was greatly enhanced by the film adaptations of his novels: Hungarians in 1978 (directed by Zoltán Fábri), Koportos in 1979 (directed by Lívia Gyarmathy), and Bálint Fábián’s Encounter with God (directed by Zoltán Fábri). The second edition of the latter novel was published at the same time the film was released. The adaptations of the novels are important works in Hungarian film history, and were also highly successful at international film festivals (Hungarians was nominated for an Academy Award in 1979 and won the Golden Peacock Award in New Delhi in 1980).

József Balázs travelled to New Delhi in 1981, where his adaptation of Bálint Fábián... won an award (Gábor Koncz, the film’s lead actor, was awarded the Silver Peacock Award for Best Actor). His work in the film industry and his deteriorating health made it increasingly difficult for him to work. In August 1981 his daughter was born. On 26 October 1982, he was hospitalised with a life-threatening condition. He needed medical assistance from this point until his death.

In 1983, his collection of short stories The Lost Tank (Az eltévedt tank), in which he collected the short stories he’d written since the 1970s, was published.

His career as a playwright began in the first half of the 1980s. In 1983, his historical play Advent at Bátor (A bátori advent) premiered. The play was later recorded for television. His Wanderers of the Sands (A homok vándorai) was also staged there in 1985. In 1987, he was again awarded the Attila József Prize for his work as a playwright.

Despite his successes in the theatre, he was excluded from literary life in the second half of the 1980s. His health also made it difficult for him to write, and he was unable to attend literary events.

His short story The Woman (Az asszony) was published in 1994 and a year later László Erdélyi and Dezső Zsigmond directed a film based on it. Their work was awarded a certificate of appreciation by the Ecumenical Jury at the 1996 Mannheim Film Festival.

In 1996 he was awarded the Béla Balázs Prize.

He died on 13 October 1997 at the age of fifty-three.

His novel Christ of Torcello (A torcellói Krisztus) was posthumously published in 2005.

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Koportos, Hungarians, Bálint Fábián’s Encounter with God

His first works were referred to as an ‘unorthodox trilogy’, partially due to proximity of the volumes’ publication to one another. All the more so because Koportos, with its main character Mihály Balog, a gypsy who belongs to the community of ‘black train commuters’ and is mourning his wife, is markedly different from Hungarians and Bálint Fábián…, when can also be defined as historical novels.

Moreover, Hungarians, set during the World War II, and Bálint Fábián..., set in the years following World War I, can be interpreted as part of a loosely chronologically-structured cycle of family novels based on the history of the Fábián family and their experiences during the world wars. Notable is the film-shooting diary in the second edition of Hungarians, in which József Balázs identifies the Fábián branch with his own family in a way that also influences later readings of the work. The author’s statements also reveal that, in the early 1940s, his parents took up seasonal agricultural work in Germany in order to make ends meet and to avoid being drafted into the military. So while Hungarians can be read as their story, Bálint Fábián... is a mystical novel about the collapse of the eponymous father figure, who is wracked with guilt for the self-defence murder he committed in World War I.

The language, the narrative devices and the portrayal of the relationship between the characters and their surroundings all make it reasonable to read the three novels as a loosely connected, ‘unorthodox’ trilogy. The works are built up from short, concise, terse sentences, with a tone reminiscent of the unadornedness of screenplays and film novellas. Their plots are linked to a specific region. József Balázs portrays the characters in a state of crisis, but he focuses on dramaturgy and tension rather than characterisation. His peasant and laborer characters are sensitive to the metaphysical context of their existence; they struggle with the difficulty of articulation, but still engage in a dialogue about existence. He typically works with omnipotent narrators who seem to overhear the characters’ thoughts: the characters’ inner, introspective and self-contained speech is distinguished from the narrators’ utterances with quotation marks.

These three texts have become part of the Hungarian literary canon, and their reception has determined the possible interpretations of the writer’s oeuvre to this day.

The Innocent

In the spring of 1944, during one of the most anachronistic operations of World War II, three thousand Hungarian soldiers were sent to Poland. Outdated equipment, improvised troop movements and ill-considered orders meant that the Hussar Regiment, fighting on the German side, was depleted without engaging in combat. In The Innocent, this tragic story unfolds through the eyes of János Batár, a young officer’s driver: the fate of the protagonist becomes a parable of the futility of war. In this ambitious historical novel, the military manoeuvres are presented with disciplined, meticulous dramaturgy and detail. By slowly depicting the dramatic sequence of events, the author creates a special mechanism of action, as the calm – one might even call it sedate – plotline contrasts sharply with the intense and incomprehensible devastation experienced by the soldiers.

Lovers and Loves

Balázs’s next novel depicts the rise and fall of József Kalenda, a first-generation skilled laborer. Owing to his skills, his employers offer Kalenda a chance to break out, but he is unable to adapt to the new circumstances. The novel vividly portrays the protagonist’s inability to speak and brings his experience of alienation to life in a remarkable way: he is astonished to find that, despite his rural origins, he does not recognise the species of the trees in the small town of H. where he is on a work assignment. This novel is considered an attempt at a renewal by the writer.

The Lost Tank

József Balázs’s only collection of short stories shows significantly different linguistic features compared to the style of his novels. The language is more eloquent, the emphasis shifts from situations to description, from dramaturgy to anecdotal storytelling. These short stories do not deal with complex metaphysical questions, but simply show the political climate of the 1950s in Hungary and the vulnerability of the citizens that lived there at the time.

At the centre of the first group of short stories is an adolescent boy named Neviczky. Through his experiences, we learn about everyday life in a village on the banks of the Szamos river in the 1950s, including the fear of being forced to surrender, and the subversive influence of rock music and dance. The stories in the second cycle are linked by the figure of Henrik Hamala, a middle-aged painter and semi-intellectual who spends his time in pubs and bars in 1970s Budapest. He sets out to create great works, but uses his creativity to produce endless monologues attempting a philosophical interpretation of Elvis Presley’s death.

Texts written for the stage

The Advent of Bátor was written at the request of a theater. It is set in the 18th-century Hungarian countryside and tells the story of János Krucsay, a landlord who beheads his wife, Borbála, who he suspects of infidelity. József Balázs also set the plot of The Wanderers of the Sand in the same region. The drama is set in October 1944, and the author, as in the novel The Innocent, examines how the characters, who have risen through the ranks of the military and the various levels of politics, cope with inhumanity. These dramas are also inextricably linked to earlier prose works in their choice of historical themes.

The Christ of Torcello

Organically related only to Hungarians, this posthumously published work can be seen as the concluding part of the novel cycle that follows the story of the Fábián family. The writer could not revise the text due to illness. The quiet reception of the posthumous novel reveals that the discourse on the writer’s work is based on remembrance and paying tribute, which do not provide enough inspiration for a professional re-examination of his oeuvre.

The biography was written by Tibor Juhász, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.