Gyula Krudy - Life is a Dream

Originally published in 1931, and newly translated into English by John Batki, Life is a Dream collects ten short stories written by Gyula Krúdy in Hungary during the Twenties. The earliest in Penguin’s Central European Classics series, Krúdy’s warm, humanistic miniatures chronicle the attempts of peasants, proletarians and the petit bourgeois to escape poverty in the deeply militaristic society that succeeded the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The chaotic politics of inter-war Hungary seldom enter Krúdy’s world. The Empire, which collapsed after Austria-Hungary’s Great War defeat in 1918, is mentioned just once, whilst Béla Kun’s short-lived Soviet Republic and its displacement by Admiral Miklós Horthy’s authoritarian regime a year later never feature. These pieces often seem nostalgic for a simpler, calmer age, but his satires of Hungarian class conventions deftly appeal for a more democratic future.

In form, Krúdy’s stories are simple: neither German Expressionism nor Russian Futurism, the main Modernist movements in the nations surrounding Hungary, clearly influence his prose. Stylistically, he leans towards magic realism, with the sublime found in local taverns – specifically in their food and drink, and the manners in which they are served.

The opening story, Last Cigar at the Grey Arabian, did not feature in the first edition, added to the volume when it was reissued in 1957. Last Cigar and its companion piece, The Journalist and Death, tell two sides of a story in which a Colonel arrives incognito at a tavern to spy on a journalist who has insulted him in print, ahead of a duel which he feels certain to win. It immediately betrays Krúdy’s obsession with food – how it is prepared and eaten, and how these rituals indicate social class – with the narrator quietly mocking the Colonel’s anticipation that his journalist will be so impoverished that he eats ‘his evening meal of crackling with his fingers, from a paper bag, the salt kept in a vest pocket’.

Last Cigar efficiently establishes Krúdy’s distinctive narrative voice, maintained consistently throughout Life is a Dream. He quickly sets his audience against the Colonel, explicitly undercutting his ham-fisted attempts to infiltrate civilian space by mocking the military man’s ignorance of local conventions. But Krúdy skilfully prevents strong identification with the barman, János, making it clear that János is ‘not a writer of short stories who anticipates the thoughts inside a Colonel’s head’, inviting the adoption of the narrator’s world view rather than that of any of his characters.

Krúdy slowly builds tension until the Colonel, struggling to determine if the well-dressed young man at the bar is his target, draws an opulent Havana cigar. Then the resolution: fast and brutal. Then the story is told again, this time following the journalist, who, we are told, dreams of prizing Hungarian literature from aristocratic control. After Last Cigar, the reader already knows how the journalist’s duel with the Colonel finishes, Krúdy ensuring that we remained concerned with the democratic future of Magyar writing.

In The Waiter’s Nightmare, Krúdy shifts effortlessly between the hazy, often intoxicated reality of Budapest’s downtrodden and the somewhat banal dreams of a frustrated waiter. A patron who insists on eating every dish on the menu, absurdly telling the waiter that ‘a duck, even if it is a drake, should always be considered feminine … For only a woman can pitter and patter … in puddles as comfortably as a duck’, explicates another of Krúdy’s main concerns – the absurdity of post-Empire gender roles.

These are explored further in The Landlady, or the Bewitched Guests, which again uses food preparation to show how deeply conservative ideas of what work should be undertaken by men and women were embedded in Hungary. Aranka, the wife of the innkeeper, has internalised the aristocratic scorn for females and femininity, making an unexpected, and thoroughly reactionary, romantic choice as Krúdy effects a typically light-feeling yet deeply painful conclusion.

Krúdy’s posthumous critical revival in his homeland owed much to Sándor Márai’s Szindbad Comes Home, a fictionalised account of Krúdy’s final day, published in 1940. The Undead showcases Krúdy’s Szindbad cycle, which began with The Adventures of Szindbad, first published in 1911. It demonstrates Krúdy’s preoccupation with death, presenting it mainly as a ruse to escape the trials of life. As with many of Krúdy’s stories, such as the Romantic-feeling Apostle of Heavenly Scents, the final twist is heavily ironic, wittily exploiting the prior uncertainty around whether or not Szindbad been conscious through the ordeals inflicted upon his body.

Betty, Nursemaid of the Editorial Office feels the most nostalgic story in the collection. Once more, Krúdy uses a bohemian author as his protagonist, whose reverence for Hungary’s revolutionary national poet Sándor Petőfi is made clear. Writer and editor Sortiment’s philosophy, apparently formed in the taverns (where else?) is that ‘only what we eat is truly ours’. The stark, sudden end he meets prepares us for The Green Ace, a novella which pitches teetotallers against revellers, a conflict launched by the suicides of two down-and-outs.

Here in particular, Krúdy’s women sensitively transcend the virgin/whore binary: indeed, it is men in Krúdy’s world who appear dualistic, broadly divided into fighters and drinkers. In The Green Ace, the women are bored with the men, finding amusement primarily in subverting their stereotypes and stretching their social boundaries.

The brief concluding stories, One Glass of Borovichka and Its Consequences and The Ejected Patron reaffirm that Krúdy is firmly on the side of the drunken, studying how alcohol complicates everyday relationships with unmasked affection. The Ejected Patron closes with a delightfully non-judgemental moment of optimism, as Mr Draggle gets to live the high life without being held to account. Here, as throughout, there is such joy in every anti-authoritarian gesture, no matter how small, or bitter-sweet its consequences, that Krúdy’s demand for sympathy with the donwtrodden becomes impossible to resist: the most ordinary lives become otherworldly dreams.