Csiki László: Biography

László Csiki (Sfântu Gheorghe, 5 October 1944 – Budapest, 2 October 2008)

Attila József Prize-winning poet, writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary translator. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy on 4 June 2020.

In a 1998 interview, László Csiki described himself in these terms: ‘I am a Transylvanian writer wherever I live. Hungarian and Transylvanian. I couldn't be anything else.’ His words should be understood only as an indication of his humanity (his birth, upbringing, fundamental experience of existence and destiny), and certainly not as an acceptance of Transylvanian-Hungarian literature as an independent and separate entity.

Despite his precise self-definition, to which he consistently adhered and which he realised throughout his oeuvre, he in many respects remained a writer of dilemmas in the Hungarian literary canon. At least this is the conclusion we can draw, because despite the numerous reviews and critiques praising his works and his generally accepted and appreciated literary presence, there have been no essays interpreting, positioning or summarising his career and oeuvre.

The beginning of his career, when he always but not exclusively wrote about Transylvania, is considered controversial. In contrast to his contemporaries – the generation that published their first works in the 1960s, whose first volumes were characterised by folk inspiration, folklorisation, pathos and emotional identification with the fate of minorities and traditional values – László Csiki turned to the avant-garde and the intellectual poetic tradition. The tone of his poetry is defined by the absurd and the grotesque, and his vision of the world by an ironic and stoic outlook.

His first volume of selected short stories, Kirakat (Shop Window, 1981), is almost abstract in space, there’s a perceptible environmental neutrality, the short stories plumb the psychological depths of the individual and the interconnectedness of human relationships in an intricate play with time. Csiki draws on the aesthetic experience of modern contemporary world literature and maintains his contemplative stance with stoic serenity.

His 1988 novel, Titkos fegyverek (Secret Weapons), is a ‘thoroughly realistic’ book set in Romania, and recognisably so down to the smallest detail. Because the Hungarian prose of the 1980s dethroned the omnipotence of story and reality-referentiality, Csiki, with the experience of his pre-narrative schools, somewhat confronted with the mainstream, but also confronted with the expectations of reality-referencing, created a kind of proportionality in his first novel, which was followed by three other novels, A céda nyúl (The Lascivious Rabbit) and Adam Adam in 1990, and Ajakír (Lip Ointment) in 2008, which were similar in style, composition and vision, and which built on each other in time.

His turn to Transylvanian reality was an absolute shock to his readers. For him, this turn was never a question, but rather the realization of an expectation he had of himself. In Adalék (Additive, 1992), a collection of essays, feuilletons and diary entries, he was just reconsidering the questions of identity of the Hungarians in Transylvania and their relationship to the Hungarian nation as a whole. However, he was more cautious in his choice of themes for his fiction.

It was also very late in his life that he could freely and effectively write about the forty years he lived in Transylvania. To do so, he needed a sense of detachment, as he said in an interview.

What is the experience of these forty years, and what is the Transylvanian myth that he wanted to deconstruct for Hungarian and Transylvanian readers? ‘Transylvanian consciousness has for a long time been a minority consciousness. And being a minority – no matter how much we praise it as self-preservation or self-justification – is humiliating and undignified. Always and everywhere. Moreover, it is a drain on human energies: proving equality (even to ourselves) drains excess energy. […] However, the fate of the Hungarians in Transylvania is not decided on a theoretical level. To entrust people’s lives and destinies to their moral strength, their capacity, their consciousness, is more than illusion: it is terrible, life-threatening demagogy. […] It's impossible to have snooty fictional heroes straddling the painted mountains of poetry, while the readers themselves are modelled on real life people who are sick and tormented by insecurity’ – wrote Csiki in response to the inquiry of the literary journal Korunk in 1991. He adds emphatically, in his essay The Right to Anger and Patience, that ‘We have always lived in a neighbourly community with the Romanian people, and our future existence without this is unthinkable.’

The forty years of his experience with ‘the reality there, the real problems, rather than myths and often overpainted sceneries’, from the 1950s to the changes of 1989, are most consistently told by the author in his novels. The first point of ‘reality’ is that the Hungarians of Transylvania live in Romania. This is why it is just as problematic to apply the adjective ‘Transylvanian’ to the novels as it is to omit it, because their point of interpretation differs fundamentally from the Hungarian prose of Transylvania and Romania in general; this is the real novelty of the writer’s approach, that he does not look at Romania from the perspective of Transylvania and Szeklerland, but interprets Romania and sees Transylvania from the perspective of Romania. The protagonist narrator – a self-narrator in all the novels that deal with this theme, the first three of which contain strong autobiographical elements – does not live in Romania primarily as a minority Hungarian either, although in each novel he has to confront his minority situation, but the novels themselves are not complaints about the fate of minorities, but rather attempts to understand and make sense of the confused and confusing system which, by the very nature of dictatorship, cripples and shatters the viable structure of society, the freedom of the individual and the identity of the personality.

Secret Weapons and The Lascivious Rabbit are books of literary memory. The setting of the former is Bucharest in the 1950s, a time of village disintegration, of contradictory forced industrialization and forced urbanization. In a Romanian environment, in complete isolation from the Hungarian community, the narrator, a Hungarian boy, lives in the capital with his relatives, in unclear and opaque relations. The relatives and family members are strange, eccentric people, the only thing they have in common is that they are all shipwrecked, each struggling with their hidden memories, and longing to return to a mythical homeland – the village, the mountains – that the boy finds increasingly difficult to recognize from the narratives.

The Lascivious Rabbit, according to its ironic subtitle, is a socialist and realist story, a meeting of the Kafkaesque grotesque and the Orwellian anti-utopian. The novel is a condensed account of the soul-crushing, wiretapped, tightly controlled years, the years before the writer’s resettlement. As an intellectual, the protagonist who ekes out a living from odd jobs is given a gift of a rabbit, to whom, as his absurd local case officer, he faithfully reports every twist and turn of his life. From The Lascivious Rabbit, Csiki’s prose aesthetic changes and is significantly renewed: while retaining realism, it moves towards parabolic and intellectual prose – it focuses on the examination of the workings of dictatorship, of psychological terror, creating a kind of meta-literary language in which local horror can be told, understood and thus conveyed, and affirming that the system of relations created by dictatorial power, which is spreading through all levels of the social structure, is the first obstacle to human freedom and self-identity.

In the more closely related novels, Adam Adam and Lip Ointment, the narrator chooses a non-Hungarian name and identity; in the former case to conceal his identity, because as a lone assassin he cannot be held accountable by his national community, and in Lip Ointment he returns as a French agent to carry out his deed with lipstick, which he does not do because the revolution sweeps the dictator away. It is only in the second half of the novel that it is compellingly revealed – when confronted by the secret police – that he was born in an otherwise unnamed country, to an unnamed nationality. Both novels start out as realist, almost microrealist novels of life in Romania – in the former, the protagonist paints the pine trees green to welcome the mad dictator, in Lip Ointment he describes the desolation and bleakness of Bucharest. The protagonist of Adam Adam wants to perform a kind of absurd Raskolnikovian act: sacrificing his adopted daughter to destroy the tyrant in order to upset the world order.

This strange symbiosis, even with its compositional flaws, is at the heart of Lip Ointment, a novel that is monumental in more than just its scope. On one level of the novel, the writer narrates the crippling, astonishingly boring and bizarre reality, the horror and abnormal manifestations of everyday life under the Romanian dictatorship, but at least as much weight is given to the dilemma of whether the individual can escape the grip of dictatorship, whether there can be valid action in a totalitarian regime, whether morality can live a separate life from good and evil, whether the role of victim and executioner is clear.

Even in his last novels, László Csiki explicitly rejected the Transylvanian myth, but not his attachment to Transylvania. Here, as in his essays and poems, he affirmed this attachment. At the end of Adam Adam, the protagonist, admitting the failure of the assassination and with it the failure of his private life, collapses in his sickbed and realizes that there is only salvation in the common: ‘And the absence and unavailability of them all made me understand at last that my estrangement from them was a betrayal even if it was done for them, for their sake, in their name, even in their service, as I intended and in fact. You can abandon a whole community, even by quitting it.’

László Csiki said in a late interview that he considers himself primarily a prose writer. perhaps because his greatest literary success came with his novel; the first edition of Secret Weapons sold out quickly, critics took notice, and its success may have confirmed his prose-writing self. Or maybe because he was already working on Lip Ointment, a novel he could consider the crown jewel of his oeuvre and a kind of literary testament, and even with the creative doubt, he could be sure that he could tell the story of life and fate in Romania, of the life and death of the people, in a valid and original prose style.

In the case of László Csiki, it is also worth talking about a dual creative self, though with the restriction that in his case this duality covers a very wide radius. Somewhat like this: while in his poetry he expressed the inner world of the contemplative soul, the flashes of the moment, playing with formlessness and form, in his prose he increasingly shifts towards a sensual and intellectual interpretation of Romanian reality. In addition to his poems of self-definition, self-interpretation and redefinition of tradition, in the 1990s he wrote a series of poems in which the ironic position of the individual as a spectator beautifully merges with the ethos of the assumption of Transylvanian spirituality; for instance, in the sociographically precise reminiscences of the Hinta (Swing) cycle, or in the bitter lyric poems in which he laments the irredeemability, the statelessness in the two homelands, the loss of destiny in straightforward language.

As a poet, prose writer, playwright and essayist, László Csiki always wanted to write about Transylvania – and he did always write about Transylvania with ‘pained sobriety’, uncompromising in both moral and aesthetic terms. Not always to the letter, but from the beginning for the sake of its spirit, for its survival, and by redefining the nature of Hungarians living in Transylvania and Romania, he created a unique, incomparable, intellectual and highly significant oeuvre, oriented towards the meta-language of world literature.

The biography was written by Györgyi Pécsi, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.