Dobai Péter: Biography

Péter Dobai (Budapest, 12 August 1944 –)

Kossuth and Attila József Prize-winning poet, writer, screenwriter, dramaturg, and Artist of the Nation.

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Péter Dobai was born on 12 August 1944 in Budapest. He never met his German father, and was raised in Budapest by his maternal grandparents. At the age of six, his mother enrolled him in a boarding school.

In 1963 he graduated from Eötvös József High School in mathematics. His first poems were published in the school’s journal, which he also co-edited. After graduation, he worked for three years as a seaman on cruise ships, and finally qualified as a captain. Between 1965 and 1970, he earned degrees in Italian Language and Literature, Philosophy, and Linguistics from the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University. From 1969 until the mid-1970s, he took part in a wide range of activities in the creative community of the Balázs Béla Studio. He directed, acted, and was a screenwriter for various film projects.

Between 1970 and 1994 he worked as an assistant director at MAFILM (Hungarian Film Studios), and later as a dramaturg and scriptwriter.

He spent two years (1973–1975) in Cuba on a scholarship from the Hungarian Writers’ Association. He won several grants and study trips to Moscow, Riga, Leningrad, Stuttgart, Schwebisch-Hall, Oberhausen, Berlin, Weimar, Agrigento, Rome, Arles, and Avignon, among others.

He became a member of the Hungarian Writers’ Association in 1976 and was a member of the Writers’ Association’s Board of Directors from 1976 to 1988. In 1977 he was elected to the Hungarian PEN Club. In 1979 he joined the Hungarian Film and TV Artists Association. In 1988, he was a fellow of the Soros Foundation for one year. From 1991 to 1994 he was President of the Hungarian Screenwriters Guild. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) from 1992 to 2011, and a full member since 2011.

His wife, Dr. Mária Máté, is a paediatrician at Heim Pál Central Children’s Hospital and an amateur photographer, as well as co-editor and curator of Péter Dobai’s publications.

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Péter Dobai is an exceptionally versatile and prolific author; his poetry, prose, novels, essays, and film scripts serve as a signpost of his intellectual and philosophical approach to life. He was also greatly influenced by the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who, like him, practiced poetic, epic, and cinematic language „with the same force”.

His first collection of poems, Riding Out of an Autumn Fortress (Kilovaglás egy őszi erődből), was published in 1973. His next book of poetry, Modifications of a Face (Egy arc módosulásai), appeared in 1976 and is dominated by memories woven around a love affair. In his next poetry collection, The Pits of Eden (Az Éden vermei, 1985), he worked on the theme of first love, attempting to fulfil it lyrically.

According to Dobai, memory is a „weapon”, a „defence” against death. Without memories there are no timelines, „and we would be dead in our lives”. His book On the Back (Hanyatt, 1978), in its title, alludes to the favourite posture of Dobai’s protagonists, who look at photographs and paintings. It could be interpreted as an autobiographical puzzle. In fact, he is only interested in the present if he can use it as a pretext for moving into the past. Dobai consistently did this by using his imagination in his volumes Poems on a Mute Clavier (Versek egy elnémult klavírra, 2002), Easier Today, Farther Tomorrow (Ma könnyebb, holnap messzebb, 2003), and Cadet Barth, Summer Will Return I Give You My Word (Barth hadapród, becsületszavamra visszatér a nyár, (2005).

According to Péter Dobai, the genesis of memories comes from bidding farewell, and bidding farewell is also possible with the need for redemptive–memorial–preservation. He illustrated this in his volumes Memories in the Future Time (Emlékek jövőidőben, 2008) and Memory is Man (Emlék az ember, 2011) with a number of associative, descriptive, and narrative poems of memory enriched with photographic and cinematic narrative elements.

In his prose, Dobai also sets off an associative current of memory and reflection in a „force field” of photographs and frozen moments of life.

The protagonists of his first collection of short stories, Playing with Rooms (Játék a szobákkal, 1976), were generally self-contradictory, prodigal, intellectual men. Their nostalgic nature is akin to that of the factory worker in his film Archaic Torso (Archaikus torzó), who trained his physique by bodybuilding, which was at that time unprecedented, and enriched his thinking by reading classical philosophers, thereby going against the grain of the attitudes of everyday life as a so-called „socialist realist”. The self-portraiture of characters with their narrow lives, their longing for the past, their reckless experimentation with random sex acts, and the deepening of their own crisis, is most evident in the short story „Imago”.

The tragic nature of the heroes, who want to live in opposition to society and leave the community, is even more pronounced in The Chessboard with Two Figures (Sakktábla két figurával, 1978): Kubinyi, the architect hero of the short story „Roof” („Tető”), built his utopian city in his imagination, the gate of which he could only enter by falling into the abyss, and the malaise-stricken hero of the short story „Man” („Férfi”) walked naked out of the steam room of the Gellért Baths without realising it, while he was wondering how to free himself from his distressing marriage. The plots are cinematic, the realistic portrayal of the characters is completed by the mental play of monologues and self-explanations, alongside the pictorial descriptions and dialogues. The cycle My Home in the City (Hazám a városban), in which the author describes the public squares of Budapest that are most dear to him, turns entirely from this in both themes and style. The places are documented in a photographer’s manner, with image-centred descriptions and a wealth of contemporary historical information.

Using prosaic mirror images of personal memories, he edited the book 1964–Island (1964–Sziget, 1977), in which he used his own diaries to present the seas, ports, and Cuba as metaphors for freedom. He also recalled with nostalgia the locations of his former life as a sailor–philosopher–athlete, the beaches, harbours, and emotions of his past, and in particular his love, as depicted in Modifications of a Face.

Disillusioned men in malaise, who saw struggle as the only way to live, returned as the heroes of historical novels.

His first novel, The Bone Millers (Csontmolnárok, 1974), is a portrait of 19th-century émigré revolutionary intellectuals in Turkey, led by General Bem, a convert to Islam. He outlined the fall of the revolution from the memories, monologues, and conversations of the émigrés. The question of why the revolution and the struggle for freedom could not be continued applied not only to 1848–1849, but also to the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

In the great novel Wilderness (Vadon, 1982), set in 1859, Captain Kristóf Batiszy represents a new, special type of soldier, the guerrilla, the professional revolutionary turned freedom fighter.

As a screenwriter, he gained international fame by writing a film adaptation of Klaus Mann’s Mephisto for director István Szabó. Dobai was awarded the Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981, the same year the film won the Academy Award, and in 1982 Dobai was awarded the Cinema Narrativa prize in Agrigento. This led to further international co-production commissions, and the continuation of his work with István Szabó resulted in the films Colonel Redl (Redl ezredes, 1985) and Hanussen (1988).

His 1985 novel The Colonel of the Empire (A birodalom ezredese) was a summation of the author’s stylistic traits, writing techniques, mature lyricism, and view of history. The structure which imitates camera moves as it jumps from one scene to the next, the art nouveau phrases with martial, political, and aesthetic content, the „space therapy” which improves Colonel Alfred Redl’s well-being, the description of his favourite public spaces and churches, the sense of belonging, the function of reflections and masks, and the ars poetics of „things do not end by ceasing to happen” all became the driving forces of the novel. The basic plot was initially written by Dobai as a screenplay, and was later turned into the film Colonel Redl.

The Latin Breath (Latin lélegzet), published in 2010, is also a thematic volume, this time edited by Dobai, with poems related to Italy. His inspiration came from photographs of streets, squares, and monuments in Rome and Florence taken by his wife, Dr. Mária Máté. The poems, faithfully reflecting the „force field” of the photographs, reveal the ancient Italy behind the churches, basilicas, bell towers, domes, fountain squares, sculpted palace courtyards, and narrow alleys, the „ancient Rome that brings in, unites, and holds together the wonderful, radiant parts”.

In Belvedere (2014), a new and powerful motif is the reckoning with his childhood years spent in boarding school and the lack of a mother’s love, the confrontation with the awareness of being an orphan.

The title page of Dobai’s collected poems I Was to Live (Voltam élni, 2017) features a painting from one of the author’s favourite painters, Caspar David Friedrich, entitled On a Sailboat. It is perhaps an expression of the longing to return home after accomplishing the life goals and creative programmes he set for himself in his youth, but it could equally reflect a hope of continuing the journey.

The biography was written by László Borbély, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.