Déry Tibor: Biography

Tibor Déry (Budapest, 18 October 1894 – Budapest, 18 August 1977)

Kossuth Prize-winning writer, poet. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy in 2016.

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Born in Budapest on 18 October 1894 into an assimilated Jewish bourgeois family. His father, Károly Déry, (1843–1919) was a lawyer, his mother, Ernestin Rosenberg (1863–1958), was Austrian. He had one brother, György (1904–1944?), nicknamed Georgy, about whom it was later discovered that he was half-brother. Between the ages of five and nine, Déry spent time in foreign sanatoriums for tuberculosis of the bones. He finished his schooling in the capital, went to a commercial secondary school, and then studied languages for a year in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. On his return from there, in 1913, he became a clerk in his maternal uncle’s large timber company. His first published work, a short story entitled Lia, was published in 1917. In 1918, he organised a strike among the workers in the factory and was dismissed by his uncle, losing his military immunity and having to enlist. He was not sent to the front because of his leg injury, so he fulfilled his service with administrative work. He had been sympathetic to the anti-war, pacifist and left-wing movements since his days as a civil servant, and had been a socialist all his life.

Under the Hungarian Soviet Republic he joined the Communist Party and was elected a member of the Writers’ Committee, but did not engage in political work. His father committed suicide at the age of 76 after their house on Wesselényi Street was confiscated in the name of nationalization. Déry then left Budapest with his family. In 1920 he married Olga Pfeiffer, a civilian he had met during his military service, and together they emigrated. First they settled in Vienna. Déry published his first volumes there: The Two Sisters (A két nővér), The Two-Tone Cry (A kéthangú kiáltás), and Horse, Wheat, Man (Ló, búza, ember). In addition to his work in Hungarian newspapers and journals (mainly Nyugat), he also published poetry, short stories and essays in emigrant newspapers and periodicals and in the German-language Sturm. Later they moved to Feldafing, Bavaria, and then to Paris between 1924 and 1926. Here Déry supported himself with odd jobs (he became a stamp dealer for a long time) and published little. It was during his emigration that he established contacts with Hungarian and international avant-garde writers and movements. He left Paris because of gambling and other debts. In 1926, they spent six months in Perugia and then returned to Budapest.

From 1928 he had an affair with Frigyes Karinthy’s wife, Aranka Böhm. He divorced Olga Pfeiffer. From October 1931 until the end of 1932 he lived in Berlin, working as a photojournalist and columnist for newspapers, while being active in the communist movement. He went via Budapest to Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia, and from 1933 he lived again in Vienna, where he took part in the civil war of February 1934 on the side of the left-wing workers. The Austrian police investigated him and the illegal Communist Party cut off all contact with him. He returned home in August and went to Mallorca in the autumn. In the summer of 1935 he moved back to Budapest, now permanently. In 1937 he made a trip to Transylvania for several months. He made a living off translations of novels and occasional writings, often published under the names of others. He translated André Gide’s anti-Soviet book My Journey in the Soviet Union, for which he was sentenced to two months in prison at the end of 1938.

In 1941, he met the writer Paula Oravecz (1903–1990), a working-class woman, whom he married in 1946. After the German occupation, he did not go to the ghetto, but went into hiding with his mother. His brother never returned from Auschwitz. Many of his works, previously unpublished for political reasons, were published after the war. The most important of these is The Unfinished Sentence (A befejezetlen mondat). He rejoined the Communist Party in 1945 and remained a Communist Party supporter. The political leadership regarded him as a respected writer, but they often had major disputes and conflicts. In 1946 he spent a few weeks in Switzerland on a charity mission. In 1948, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize (shared with Milán Füst), the first of its kind at the time. He wrote a report on the Rajk trial, the notorious Soviet-style and Soviet-mandated show-trial of the period, but it was not published because it did not fully conform to the party narrative. His novel Reply (Felelet) was attacked in 1952 by József Révai himself, a leading cultural politician and ideologist of the era. He demanded that Déry rewrite the second volume of the novel, but Déry refused to do so and did not continue with the four-volume work. He drifted further and further away from the circles of official literature. From June 1953 he was a staunch supporter of Imre Nagy’s reforms, and after the fall of the prime minister they became close friends. In 1955, he was expelled from the party for a speech he made at the Petőfi Circle.

In 1954 he divorced Paula Oravecz. In 1955, he married the actress Mária Erzsébet Kunsági (Hullmann) whom he met in 1953.

He supported the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and was still a supporter of anti-Soviet protests and strikes even at the end of the year, for which he was arrested in 1957. The news that he was about to be sentenced to death after being found guilty in a show trial sparked an international protest and he was instead sentenced to nine years in prison. His mother died in 1958 while he was serving his sentence. It was in prison that he wrote his novel Mr A. G. in X (G. A. úr X.-ben). He was released on amnesty at the beginning of 1960 and was able to publish again from 1963. He considered himself a socialist, but he was neither a supporter of the system, nor did he wish to play any sort of opposition role. He did not speak out against the party-state, which allowed him to become a celebrated writer. As part of the canonisation process, a series of his life works was launched in 1971, but many of his writings were censored, and those relating to the Revolution of 1956 were deleted. The success of his works abroad enabled him to travel extensively in Europe. In 1965 he and his wife bought a house in Tamáshegy, a village near Balatonfüred, and spent most of their time there.

He died in Budapest on 18 August 1977, aged eighty-two.

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His literary career was influenced by both modernism and avant-garde trends. Not only poetically, but also in terms of the spaces of the literary establishment: in his first creative period, he was closely linked to the circle of the Nyugat journal, its authors and the intellectual powerhouse of the avant-garde. In his old age, he rejected his early works outright and did not include them in his oeuvre.

Her first short novel, Lia (1917), also mixes Art Nouveau and what might be called psychological realist techniques with interior monologues and alternating multi-directional narration. Déry submitted it to the novel competition of the Érdekes Újság; it won second prize, and Ernő Osvát took notice of it as a judge. After the newspaper that announced the competition refused to publish the work, Osvát published it in Nyugat. The prosecutor’s office launched a media crusade against the short story, accusing it of indecency. The fine was paid by Nyugat. After Lia, he wrote naturalistic short stories, sometimes with a sociographic slant; for example, The Two Sisters and Stolen Life (Ellopott élet). The novel Two-Tone Cry (1918), which depicts the schizophrenia of a soldier returning from the front, combines a realist approach with experimental prose-poetic techniques in a programmatic way, but the work is not without political didacticism.

In his work in the 1920s, notwithstanding his political views, avant-garde modes of text formation came to the fore, but Déry constantly strove for a poetics in his works that could best capture political and social problems through his formal experiments. During this decade, he almost exclusively wrote poetry and drama, rejecting symbolism and classical modernism, and can be associated with the avant-garde movements of first Expressionism and then Surrealism. An example of the latter is the drama The Giant Baby (Az óriáscsecsemő – 1926), which is still considered one of the most outstanding works of European surrealist theatre. His work, On the Road (Országúton) can also be considered a forerunner of surrealist novel poetics. And his collage text Running Amok (Az ámokfutó – 1922) is one of the earliest and most significant Hungarian Dadaist works.

In the 1930s, prose writing again came to the fore in his oeuvre, bringing the lyrical side of his writing to a definitive closure. At the same time, his works gradually moved away from the avant-garde poetics and toward classical modernist and realistic modes of text formation, but his political and agitational aims did not fade. The most significant works of this movement are the short story cycle Face to Face (Szemtől szembe – 1933) and the social novel The Unfinished Sentence, written between 1933–38 and published only in 1947. After the novel was completed, Déry did not write for seven years, and his only known works from the years of World War II are his pseudonymous pulp novels.

His post-war novels continue the realist processes of the complex poetics of The Unfinished Sentence. The novel Reply, planned as a four-volume set but abandoned after two parts, again sought to depict the stratification of pre-war society. Déry discontinued the work because of ideological attacks from official cultural policy. After his dramatic experiments in the late 1940s, in the 1950s he published a collection of sociographical works, On Homeland and People (Hazáról, emberekről – 1954), and a war memoir, Memories of the Underworld (Emlékek az alvilágból – 1954), but mainly short stories: The Birth of Simon Menyhért (Simon Menyhért születése), Behind the Brick Wall (A téglafal mögött), Niki: The Story of a Dog (Niki: Egy kutya története), Love (Szerelem), Merry Funeral (Vidám temetés), Reckoning (Számadás).

His novels of the 1960s are characterised by a philosophical orientation, a philosophical interest and a parabolic vision. His dystopian satirical novel of social criticism, Mr A. G. in X, was written in prison and published in 1964, and is considered one of the high points of his oeuvre. The Excommunicator (A kiközösítő – 1965) uses the allegorical devices of historical fiction to address similar political, social and moral issues, while Imaginary Reportage from an American Pop Festival (Képzelt riport egy amerikai pop-fesztiválról –1971) uses the devices of reportage and a dense set of motifs to inform its social criticism.

In his monumental autobiography No Judgement(Ítélet nincs – 1969), he not only remembers his colleagues and former close acquaintances, but also seeks to take stock of his entire life and literary oeuvre, while in fact, by dismantling all the traditional expectations of autobiography, he also posits the impossibility of clear-cut judgement and the genre of autobiography.

The official and general judgement of his work has never been free of politically actualising influences. However, the philological study of Déry’s oeuvre has now opened up the possibility of a much more nuanced picture than before.

The biography was written by Gergő Melhardt, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.