Csaplár Vilmos: Biography

Vilmos Csaplár (Újpest, 29 June 1947)

Attila József Prize-winning writer, screenwriter. A member of the Digital Literature Academy since 2020.

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Born in Újpest on 29 June 1947. His parents were Vilmos Csaplár (1916–1982) and Márta Izsip (1911–2001).

Vilmos Csaplár started his literary career in the 1970s as a prose writer and founding editor of the journal Jelenlét (the journal of the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University).

Csaplár’s early short stories mostly depicted the nihilism of youth. There is nothing to do, no one to do it for, and no reason to do it. A stripped-down world free of illusion. His first collection of short stories was published in 1971 under the title Lovagkor (The Age of Knighthood), and his first novel a year later, Két nap, amikor összevesztünk, vagyis a történetírás nehézségei (Two Days We Fought, or the Difficulties of Storytelling). In the foreword and ‘justification’ of this volume, the author invites us to play while showing his skills in irony: ‘I have so far only mentioned honesty in connection with writing. What I meant to say is that if I declare, whether I like it or not, that I cannot be a writer, then I must immediately add that my writing is intended for readers. I have read several otherwise great books in which the writer, God only knows why, tries to make the reader believe that the supposed author of the writings does not want to put his work into the hands of others, so that one almost wonders what a strange coincidence it is that these lines, scribbled down somewhere "in great secrecy", should appear in book form one after the other. Where do all these “trailblazers”, “finders”, “inheritors of manuscript” and so on come from?’

His early short stories attracted a lot of attention and he was considered one of the most interesting figures of his generation. He was an active participant in debates on these new voices of his generation, and his works also provoked controversy. In the name of his generation, he engaged in a somewhat disguised and ironic polemic with one of the leaders of cultural policy at the time, whom he addresses in his letter as Mr. Engineer. Mr. Engineer, who is preparing to go to Algeria with his family – ‘they have a lot to build there’, the writer notes – criticises the author and his generation: ‘Your heroes and those you model your heroes on, although they are young and should be proclaiming and exploring the possibility of the world continuing in a better direction, are, by their frustration and their slackness, the very precursors of the tragedy, the catastrophe that threatens our world’, as he wrote in his Válaszlevél egy Algériába utazó mérnöknek (Reply to an engineer travelling to Algeria).

Between 1976 and 1982 he worked as a journalist at the weekly magazine Új Tükör.

A special chapter on Vilmos Csaplár was published in 1980 in a volume of studies entitled Young Hungarian Prose Writers (1965–1978). The importance of his role is shown by the fact that, in addition to the essay on his works, Csaplár’s own keynote paper, A hősök falnak támaszkodnak és legyintenek (The Heroes Lean Against The Wall And Wave Their Hand) also appeared in this volume.

In the early 1980s Csaplár worked with film director Gábor Bódy and co-wrote Bódy’s 1980 film Psyché. Bódy’s cult film A kutya éji dala (The Dog’s Night Song – 1983) was also inspired by Csaplár’s short story Szociográfia (Sociography). When it comes to what captured him about this short story, Bódy says: ‘The secrets of everyday life, the subtle perception of the hidden streams that channel the surface of society, so it’s not the subject so much as it’s the way Csaplár rectifies the literary, clichéd image of the Hungarian village.’ This ‘rectification’, the ‘rectification’ of history, accompanies Csaplár throughout his career.

In 1986 he published his first historical novel, Egy látkép története (The Story of a Panorama), which tells the story of generations through the interconnection of the seemingly unrelated inner images of their heroes.

In the second half of the 1980s, around the time of the regime change, Csaplár turned to sociographic representation. In Pénzt, de sokat! (Money, And Lots of It! – 1987) is a novel about the shrewd careerist, the entrepreneur, the Hungarian self-made man of the last years of the Kádár regime (the novel was also made into a TV movie). Kurva vagyok (I’m a Whore – 1989) is a different kind of career story, in which the narrator says: ‘I have nothing to regret, although I did some dirty things.’ And in Zsidó vagyok Magyarországon (I Am a Jew in Hungary – 1990), the author portrays a young man of Jewish descent whose parents became Communists when Jews were persecuted but who do not identify themselves as Jews because they are not religious.

Csaplár didn’t just explore the workings of society in his docu-novels; he also actively participated in public affairs. He was spokesman for the Democratic Charter in 1993–94, and later became president of the Szépírók Társasága (Society of Hungarian Authors) from 2003 to 2012.

He has three children, Flóra (1982), Ignác (1991) and Júlia (2004).

In the 1990s, in the years following the regime change, Csaplár, always ready to reinvent himself, published the essay collections: Magyarország, te dög (Hungary, You Bastard – 1991); A demokrácia álarc az ördög ábrázatán (Democracy Is a Mask On The Face of The Devil – 1992); Az isten (The God – 1995), short story collections: Én (Me – 1996), Vassal a testben (1997; the title of this volume, literally “with iron in my body”, is a play on words, a paraphrase of an expression meaning “take it easy”, and it also refers to a tree growing into an iron fence that symbolizes the writer’s relationship with the realities of the 1990s Hungary), and short novels set ‘in the space of the universe’: Vágy a róka vére után (Longing for Fox’s Blood – 1997), Momi lába(Momi’s Leg – 1993), Gyermekkor, földi körülmények között (Childhood in Earthly Circumstances – 1994). It is not clear whether final volume of this period, Semmit, örökké (Nothing, Forever – 2000), is a book of poetry or a short story collection.

In 2001, his novel Igazságos Kádár János (János Kádár the Just) was published. The title refers to the great King Matthias of Hungary who earned the epithet ‘just’ due to his good deeds. However, as the author said upon the publication of the novel, ‘This book tells the adventures of the first secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party […] it is not about comparing János Kádár to King Matthias, but I caress him with a tale and tear him apart’. The novel treats nostalgic longing for the Kádár era with irony and sarcasm. The image of the good leader, depicting the communist dictator as a lovable ‘everyday man’, impresses only those who like to put on the safety goggles of self-deception. Csaplár uses irony to portray an era that hardened those who lived (and in some cases survived) in the Kádár era into inert and immobile individuals.

In 2003, he published his third historical novel, Vadregény (Wild Novel), set in the reform era (broadly the first half of the 19th century), mainly in a castle near Bratislava. The characters are based on real people of the period: an English engineer accused of espionage, an English travel writer, and the Hungarian chemist, János Irinyi, the inventor of safety match.

Csaplár’s next novel, Hitler lánya (Hitler’s Daughter), was published in 2009 and won the most prestigious non-government founded literary award, the Aegon Prize, the following year. Of Csaplár’s best-known work, literary critic Anna Gács wrote: ‘In Hitler’s Daughter, from the first page to the last, we witness the workings of a vast anecdotal machine. By anecdotal, I mean not only that someone is telling a story all the time, but that this machine transforms everything it finds – legend as well as history books and authentic sources – into anecdote, giving all the characters an existence that is both real and unreal.’ Fictional storytelling, superb story weaving, fairy-tale-like short stories cycles. Irony and playing with irony.

Hitler’s Daughter stands out among the historical novels that have become popular again in recent Hungarian literature by boldly inserting events and facts into the known and supposedly real facts of history that completely contradict our already somewhat consolidated historical knowledge. The very title of the novel stops the reader in his tracks, prompts questions, suggests some joke or the uncovering of strange, secret stories, as the question immediately arises: who could Hitler's hidden daughter have been? Csaplár writes masterly uchronia, weaving a tale into the real threads of history.

While Hitler’s Daughter revisits the historical cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century, the next novel, Edd meg a barátodat! (Eat Your Friend – 2013), unravels the absurdities, tragedies and grotesqueness of the second half of the twentieth century. It depicts the lawlessness of socialism, be it deportation or informing for the government. Eat Your Friend is in some ways a sequel to Hitler’s Daughter.

The radicalism of Eat Your Friend in the depiction of the body, be it the toilet humour of the stories or the human body as edible flesh, shocked readers of the book. One critic called the novel a history book of the posterior.

‘The damage is perhaps most striking in the private sphere, to the extent that the consequences of historical events reach down to the processes of the posterior. It is the history book of the posterior, one might say with some exaggeration, where the history of the female genital organ(s) and various discharges models backwards and forwards the history-driven fate of the actors with whom these processes occur.’

Vilmos Csaplár has published two volumes since these two novels: With or Without God. Reflections on Reflective Evolution (Istennel, vagy nélküle. Gondolatnapló a reflektív evolúcióról), a collection of essays on our finitude and the uncertainty of our culture's survival, in 2016; and a collection of short stories, entitled Leona és Leó (Leona and Leo) in 2017.

In 2017, on his 70th birthday, the author was greeted by one of his critics, István Margócsy: ‘The real interest of Csaplár’s figure, his stature and writing, I think, lies in his elegance: he who, even in the avant-garde environment and conventions of the seventies, always expressed his appearance, his opinions, his reasoning and his emotions with a disciplined elegance, who was always able to keep his passionate imagination in check with an almost dryly defined matter-of-factness, who, in every gesture, was able to keep the attack or threat of lyricism away from himself and his works, who created (and continues to create) with a confidence that remains to this day, with elegance and superiority, a world in which wildness (also) reigns supreme.’

His friend István Kerékgyártó celebrated his 75th birthday with these words: ‘Somehow his brain works differently, he walks on a different wheel than the one we are used to. He perceives connections, hidden causes and motivations that at first surprise his listeners, but then he realises that from this new perspective he also better understands his own problems. It is obviously from this ability that his collections of essays on history derive. He looks at history, people and contexts in a different way.’

His peculiar relationship with history, his constant playing with it, his distorting or improving the facts, his correcting them with fictions, is perhaps a result of his desire to rewrite all this horror that is going on around us with more or less pleasant interruptions. Or so that, tamed by play, the harshest tragedies of fate become less painful.