Dobos László: Biography

László Dobos (Királyhelmec, 28 October 1930 – Pozsonypüspöki, 25 July 2014)

Kossuth Prize-winning writer, editor, art critic, politician. He was a founding member of the Digital Literature Academy from 1998 until his death.

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Born in Királyhelmec on 28 October 1930 (now Kráľovský Chlmec, Slovakia). After finishing elementary and civil school in Királyhelmec, he was a student at the teacher training college in Sárospatak in 1945–1949. In 1950–1951 he taught in Királyhelmec. From 1951 to 1955 he was a student at the Pedagogical College in Bratislava, majoring in Hungarian Language and Literature, History and Civic Education. From 1955 to 1960 he worked as a teaching assistant at the Pedagogical College in Bratislava.

In 1956–1958, as secretary of the Hungarian section of the Slovak Writers’ Union, he played a decisive role in the establishment of the Irodalmi Szemle. From 1958 to 1968 he was editor-in-chief of the journal. In 1967–1968 he was one of the managers of the Tatran Publishing House. From 1 January 1969 to 28 April 1970, until his replacement, he was Minister without Portfolio of the Slovak Socialist Republic.

From August 1970 he was director of the Madách Book Publishing House, from 1972 head of its technical, fine arts and production departments, and again director from 1 January 1990. From 1989 he was honorary president of Csemadok (the cultural association of Hungarian workers in Czechoslovakia). From 1989 to 1991 he was co-president of the World Federation of Hungarians, from 1992 to 1996 vice-president representing the Carpathian Basin, and from 1996 to 2000 regional president.

From 2007 he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

He died following a long illness in Bratislava on 25 July 2014.

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He began his career writing textbooks on literary theory, but by the end of the 1950s he had become known as a critic and literary organiser. László Dobos played a major role in the emergence of Hungarian literature in Slovakia from schematism and provincialism in the 1960s. He organised the Irodalmi Szemle, directed it for a decade, and turned it into a high-quality, wide-ranging journal.

He renewed the realistic epic with reflexive elements in his epic poems. His first three novels, which form a trilogy, depict the history of Hungarian Slovakia in an ever-expanding space and time. The novels vividly portray the small Hungarian man in Slovakia, who, despite his circumstances, tried to remain honest in an often changing history, but who became a victim of foreign interests and was held accountable for the crimes of his enemies.

In his memoir, The Stars Were Far Away (Messze voltak a csillagok), he presents the trials and tribulations of the Hungarian common man in Czechoslovakia, forced to fight in the war, in the form of an interior monologue.

The Deprived (Földönfutók) is a portrayal of the period of discrimination against Hungarians in Czechoslovakia after World War II. It unfolds the life story of the ‘ostracised and humiliated’ in ballad-like blocks, a mosaic of film-like images. The fate of this nationality, as expressed in the novel’s title, is transformed into an Eastern European parable. The need to face up to the lessons of history is emphasised by the alternating juxtaposition of timelines and motivic editing. He also vividly depicts the cruel events of history, the agony and demoralising effects of vulnerability, but also describes the facts from a zoomed-out perspective. With its artistic authenticity and courage to raise issues, this novel was the first to draw attention to the fate of Hungarian national minorities.

The third book in the trilogy, In a Single Shirt (Egy szál ingben), is a synthesis novel covering the entire history of Hungarians in Slovakia. It attempts to survey the entire past and present of the Hungarian population in Slovakia in space and time. One of its planes shows, in an almost reportorial manner, the present-day man who has changed from villager to city dweller, from peasant to intellectual, trying to model the national life of the small people of Central and Eastern Europe. The other plane takes stock of the history of the Slovak Hungarians from 1918 to the 1950s through their consciousness and experiences. Thus, the past and present, village and town, peasant and intellectual life in Slovakia come face to face in the world of the novel. The writer, who plays the role of a medium in the novel, links myth and reportage, past and present, in an epic manner. He uses both the tools of the traditional grand epic as well as those of modern prose, which shift between time frames.

These novels are the attitude-forming, self-conscious reckonings of the Slovak Hungarians: they lead from the discussion of a fate unworthy of man to the denial of it, to the demand for the right to shape history.

Snowblanket (Hólepedő) is also a book of struggle, but what the trilogy examines in a historical framework is here presented in a present-day situation. In the struggle of the schoolteacher, a single woman, the process of spiritual and moral ascension and the creation of human dignity is charted. The book is characterised by a balance between the spiritual and the social. Its hero is driven by hopelessness into grave danger, and out of physical and psychological misery and self-destruction she rises by consciously creating an ‘inner landscape’.

In his novel In the Drift (Sodrásban), he presents the contradictory situation of Hungarian intellectuals in the 1950s Czechoslovakia, their naive faith and their stumbling through rapidly changing history, in a strongly autobiographical and self-ironic confessional presentation.

He collected his narratives in a book entitled With Your Permission (Engedelmével): despite their typical minority stigmas, his heroes offer lessons of universal validity. The volume of stories combine empathy and irony and is a complex but critical assessment of the new trials of Hungarian intellectuals in Slovakia.

A selection of his studies and critical and journalistic writings Book of Troubles (Gondok könyve) reflects his consistent work for the ‘literarization’ of Hungarian literature in Slovakia. His children’s novel, The Little Viking (A kis viking), was inspired by his granddaughter, who was born in Norway. The main problem addressed in this fairy tale is the double life and double displacement of a child born from a mixed marriage. It is the psychological consequence of two influences and cultural heritages from the parents.

After 1968, it wasn’t just László Dobos’ political action to safeguard the fate of the nationalities that took twenty years. Hungarians’ turn for the better in Slovakia was also delayed. It was this sense of lack, this forced time that prompted László Dobos to choose direct political action again in 1989. He felt that if the Hungarians in Slovakia missed the opportunity to take historic action, they would lose an opportunity they would never get back. He therefore returned to the political arena and became a member of the Slovak Parliament. As co-chairman and regional chairman of the World Federation of Hungarians, he worked to strengthen the Hungarian people’s sense of intellectual and spiritual belonging. Of his two professions, politics again came to the fore. He felt the need for immediate action. He therefore returned to politics, but even as a politician he remained a man of spirit. He attributed a great role in shaping the destiny of the Hungarian people in Slovakia to culture. He is convinced that Hungarian cultures beyond the borders can play an important role on the road from national disunity to a united nation. For half a century, László Dobos was an unswerving advocate of this endeavour as a writer, editor, politician and public figure.

From the early 1990s onwards, his time was occupied by politics, publishing and public life. He did not publish any new fiction, but did publish a volume of essays, The Creative Struggle (Teremtő küzdelem) and The Power of the Annual Rings (Évgyűrűk hatalma). As a literary fiction writer, he only came out with new editions of his earlier works.

The biography was written by András Görömbei, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.