Cseres Tibor: Biography

Tibor Cseres (Budapest, 1 April 1915 – Budapest, 23 May 1993)

Kossuth Prize winner, three-time Attila József Prize-winning prose writer and essayist. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy on 4 June 2020.

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He was born Tibor Portik in Budapest on 1 April 1915, but his hometown was Gyergyóremete, where his parents lived. This was where he spent the first six years of his life. His father, Peter Portik Cseres, was a woodcutter in Moldavia, then a bodyguard in Vienna until the death of Franz Joseph in 1916. At the end of World War I he joined the Szekler Division, which was formed at that time, and was taken prisoner by the Romanians in Brasov. From there he escaped to Hungary, where his wife, Tibor Cseres’ mother, Anna György, and their two sons could not follow him until 1922. Four years later Cseres’ mother was very ill and she returned to Gyergyóremete to die, accompanied only by her eldest son Tibor, aged 11 at the time.

He started his elementary schooling in Transylvania, then continued in Medgyesbodzás, graduated from the Kölcsey High School in Budapest, and during World War II obtained his degree in Economics at the Faculty of Economics of the Hungarian Royal Ferenc József University in Cluj, at the same time as he was completing his obligatory military service. He enlisted for the first time in 1938 and served for fifty-six months, with minor interruptions, mostly on the Ukrainian front.

In 1937 he published his first book of poems under the name Tibor Pálos, the socially charged Tájkép, elöl guggolva én (Landscape, with me crouching in front) which expressed the richness of the natural world in his motifs. His second volume, Zöld levél árnyéka (The Shadow of a Green Leaf), published in 1942, depicts military life in its own process. His war poems were published in various journals, most of them in the Cluj-based Termés (Yield). The poems mostly express fear and anxiety as the ‘deepest common feeling’ of the Hungarian army: death has no heroic character, nor can it, since the enemy has no name or nation. Critics condemn the poet’s failure to find a socially valid way to express his indignation and protest. He will also be criticised later as a prose writer for his attitude ‘not going beyond general humanism’ and ‘not being tied to specific political ideas’.

For a few years, especially in his publicist work, he was characterised by an attachment to the peasantry. In 1945–1946, he was the founding editor-in-chief of the newspaper Viharsarok, and in 1947 he became the press chief of Péter Veres, the Minister of Construction and Public Works. He worked briefly as a columnist for the Irodalmi Újság.

Now writing as Tibor Cseres, he published Ének a termelő-szövetkezetekről (Song on Producer Cooperatives – 1950), a work that clearly demonstrates his commitment to the peasantry. But he was still criticised for forgetting ‘revolutionary romanticism’ and for the ‘danger of outsider objectivity’. More than ten years’ worth of short stories and novels are subsequently considered ‘invalid’, accepted as dogmatic, laden with schematic abstractions and propositions, even though his first novel, Tűz Hódréten (Fire at Hódrét – 1950), can be seen as a bold experiment. On the one hand because he treats with irony the violent dissemination of the so-called language of the movement, the party jargon of ‘we discuss the problems’, ‘we make an impact’ and similar turns of phrase. And on the other hand because its plot ends with a trial by jury – the conviction of an innocent kulak. The same lawsuit is discussed from a legal philosophical perspective in the novel Játékosok és szeretők (Gamblers and Lovers – 1970). The essence of the Rákosi dictatorship’s procedural litigation practice is seen in Tűz Hódréten, in which the court’s task is ‘to determine the maximum probability of the legally discretionary factors and not to find out the absolute truth’. The narrator’s language is inadequate to inspire optimism.

Cseres considers Here-báró (Baron drone – 1956) to be his first novel worthy of the undertaking. In it he describes the adventures of a ‘Casanova of the Hungarian Great Plain’ in an anecdotal-playful manner alongside elements of the grotesque.

Like the rest of his career, the next phase is characterised by experimentation; not so much in terms of diversifying narrative styles and points of view, but rather in terms of expanding the thematic. Considered a ‘peasant writer’ at the time, Cseres paints a picture of the village on the road to socialism, rather than that of a stuffy world of superstition: Az utolsó bűbájos meg a tanítványa (The Last Magician and His Pupil – 1959), and he also takes a look at a particular slice of working-class life and the youth drawn to the galleries: Pesti háztetők (Budapest Rooftops – 1961). And what was an episode in the earlier novel, a discussion of the events and outcome of the war: Térdigérő tenger (Knee-deep Sea – 1954), becomes the basic element of the plot in the so-called ‘resistance trilogy’: Búcsú nélkül (Without a Farewell – 1964); Fenn az égen száll egy sas (An Eagle Flies Up In The Sky – 1964); Bizonytalan század (Wavering Combat Company – 1968).

Hideg napok (The Cold Days), the beginning of a new era, was published in 1964, at the same time as the outstanding investigative short stories of the period (e.g. Ferenc Sánta’s Twenty Hours, Endre Fejes’s Rust Cemetery), which had a huge impact. Along with the film version directed by András Kovács, the novel, which has risen to the ranks of classic works, was analysed in its time primarily on ideological-political grounds, from the point of view of the Hungarian role in the war and national responsibility, and later mainly on the basis of the ‘ethical level’ of observing the laws of human coexistence that are always valid, of following one’s conscience. According to Cseres, if Hideg napok is one side of a coin, the other is the Parázna szobrok (Lecherous Sculptures – 1979), censored for many years by publishers, which is also a ‘novel of the serving defenceless’. In form, it is a twin novel: at once a factual novel, an essay on the history of war and diplomacy, an essay on the crimes committed by the peoples of Central Europe against each other, on the history ‘forced upon us’, on the disaster of the battle at the River Don and the failure of the Torda border fights. His output from this period includes a village sociography disguised as a crime story or detective novel, Fekete rózsa (Black Rose – 1966), and two journalistic volumes: Hol a kódex? (Where is the codex? – 1971) and Elveszett és megőrzött képek (Lost and Preserved Images – 1978), comprised of confessions, essays, portraits, and travelogues, mostly from his articles in Élet és Irodalom, where Cseres worked from 1963 to 1976.

His oeuvre was completed in the 1980s with historical novels. Cseres intended Kossuth’s fictional memoirs, Én, Kossuth Lajos (I, Lajos Kossuth – 1981), which he wrote in his old age, to be a handbook for intellectuals, to take stock of his own fate and that of the nation. The central plot element of Foksányi szoros (Foksányi Pass – 1985), the organization of the Hungarian legion against the Russians in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, offers an opportunity to include real persons (Balázs Orbán, Ince Petrás) and to depict the tragic conflict in which the Szeklers and the Moldavian Csángos would have been forced to fight against each other. The ninety-year-old protagonist of Vízaknai csaták (Battles of Vízakna – 1988), the ‘double-bind’ hero of which ponders both Hungarian and Romanian interests and sees their common interest in the creation of Transylvanian autonomy alone, and who lives until the second Vienna decision, observes with sober objectivity the national and minority aspirations of almost a century, the struggles of Hungarians, Saxons and Romanians. In Őseink kertje, Erdély (The Garden of Our Ancestors, Transylvania – 1990), the consequences of the Trianon peace treaty are explored through the upheavals of a family, in which the narrator is guided through a series of forced changes in residence by the memories of the settlements. The key novel shows the fate of many Hungarian families of the time, but the work is unique in that it takes the reader through the detailed diary entries of Nóra Stürmer, a former fellow student at the university and, from 1944, Mrs. Tibor Cseres. The author makes this family's fate one of the most typical of all by detailing their historical and social circumstances.

His involvement in public life intensified in the 1980s. From December 1986 to November 1989, he was president of the Writers’ Union.

His last historical work, Vérbosszú Bácskában (Vendetta in Bácska – 1991), is the novelisation and epic setting of a ‘terrible collection of documents’ that chronicles the atrocities committed by Serbian partisans against Hungarians in Bácska in the autumn of 1944, in response to the atrocities of the ‘cold days’ in Novi Sad. The last two volumes were published in 1993, the year of the author’s death. The Kentaurok és kentaurnők (Centaurs and Lady Centaurs) ‘tragico-satire’ of the book could be seen as a genre play, if the key novel did not focus on the murder of a party man and member of the Central Committee who protested against the Hungarian army's ‘assistance’ to Czechoslovakia in 1968. The last book, Felhők fölött száll a sas (The Eagle Flies Over the Clouds), is a selection of writings on military themes, a recollection, a worthy summary, an unconscious farewell.

He ran out of time to organise his diary, which he had kept for many years, into a volume and to reinterpret it, confronting it with his equally rich correspondence. He left behind as a kind of task the authenticity of the documents of the period of his life that coincided with the slow change in the social system and the parallel transformation of the structure of culture and the role of literature.

The biography was written by Béla Márkus, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.